02-10-2017, 06:35 PM
Hi!
Okay. Right out the gate, I'm gonna apologize- I have, over the course of my lifetime, become aware that I can be, er, somewhat verbose. I'm kind of socially awkward and I can get excited when I have information to contribute and I want to make *sure* that's I get my point across effectively... so I have the tendency to ramble. Please feel free to just tell me, "shut up, nerd," and I will do my best to repackage whatever information I have in a more streamlined/less annoying way.
...This particular post, however, might be a little bit packed with information, because I spent about 24 hours straight lurking and checking out welcome threads and I saw a bunch of stuff I thought was neat, so you're basically my captive, or something.
OKAY. SO. When I was four years old, my parents traded off sleeping in shifts, because by that point, I was only sleeping about five hours a night, at most. Then, when I was in 4th grade, I started sleepwalking- my mom says she thinks it's because I had a really horrible teacher that year. THAT was when s*** really started to get f****d up. (Um, also, i curse a lot? And I'm not really used to censoring myself, but I'm not sure if that is frowned upon here or not, so until I am sure that my language will not offend.) I have not been able to achieve anywhere close to a healthy sleep cycle since, without medication. I have, at some point in my life, been prescribed every single medication approved for sleep by the FDA, as well as many off-label- again, prescribed. The only one that I found any sort of success with at all was Ambien, and when I started taking it both the drug and I were very young. I am under the assumption that they didn't know much about it yet, because I have a hard time believing that you would be able to walk into a pediatrician's office with a ten-year-old and walk out with a thirty day supply of zolpidem- and ZERO counseling on possible dependency. I think that might have messed me up BAD- to my knowledge, I have not been able to achieve any sort of restful sleep cycle without medication since. It's kind of weird, though. Other people talk about insomnia like it's so miserable, and awful, and they feel like s**t all the time, but for me it's like my body just doesn't know it's supposed to be tired. It IS, obviously, but I will often go 5 or 6 days with no sleep and start to show signs of extreme sleep deprivation physically before I ever feel sleepy in the slightest.
Also, when I was 12, I met my psychiatrist, and he diagnosed me pretty quickly with depression. So we tried LOTS of different therapists, lots of different pharmaceuticals- ultimately, we settled on Wellbutrin, and Seroquil in the evenings (which, blessedly, helps me stay asleep longer, since the zolpidem has gotten to the point where I will fall asleep and only be able to stay asleep for three hours or so, but with Seroquil I tend to not be able to wake up the next morning, so it's six to one and half dozen to the other).
When I was a teenager, I started seeing a pain management doctor for back pain that we couldn't diagnose- but there was an incidental finding of an Arnold Chiari malformation, and one month when I went in my doctor was out sick and the guy who was subbing for him happened to be a neurosurgeon. He told me that he had heard of people with what seemed like phantom back pain be relieved by an elective brain surgery to correct the malformation, which- while I won't say /botched/, exactly- went very very poorly for me.
After a few years of consideration (and, to be quite frank, a six month period in which my psychiatric symptoms became so bad that I did not go outside a single time- it got so bad that my parents convinced my psychiatrist, head of psych for a major hospital in our area, to make /house calls/), I decided that I no longer wanted to be under the constraint of needing narcotic pain medication (at the time, Vicodin and then Percocet), which I had been taking roughly four years. I was twenty.
Instead of the anticipated one week hospital stay and one month home recovery, I wound up spending 14 days in the ICU and six weeks in the hospital, and seven months recuperating before I was well enough to actually continue to live my life. But the surgery had done nothing whatsoever to help the back pain that led me to narcotics in the first place- and it took what was a regular headache that occurred every six to eight weeks and put my pain at about an eight- which would pretty much mean an entire day laid in a dark, cool room, achieving nothing but converting O2 to CO2- to a DAILY headache that, on good days, hovers just above a six. Seemingly at random, it can ramp up to an eight (if God is really mad at me that month, a nine), and I pretty much just have to buckle down and grit through it- I take Fioricet for the extra bad ones, and sometimes it can stave it off, but only if I catch it in time. And, due to years of opiate dependency due to pain (and one extremely ill-advised 17 months spent on Suboxone as a pain management tool), my tolerance became extremely high. To be honest, I require so much medication to get through the day, it really bums me out to think about, and it certainly makes other people extremely nervous. I seem to require high doses of everything, actually- but I am also not at all small, standing at 5'9" weighing in around 230- and I have been on everything I take for a long-a** time now. But, contrary to what my medicine cabinet would seem to indicate, I am still very young. And, truthfully, that is more of a bummer than anything else- because I truly suffer every single day. I do not feel like I am living at all, simply marking time for the next 60 years. God, that sounds awful.
Um, okay, on a brighter, less deeply personal note, I love to read and write and I am /wildly/ passionate about television. (Films, take 'em or leave 'em. But tv? I am legitimately advising you not to get me started talking about the NBC show Community unless you are prepared to talk for HOURS and hear lots of jokes repeated and discuss characters, plots, and episodes in depth. Seriously. You will get annoyed with me.) I tend to get attached to lighthearted but witty comedies- preferably in half-hour blocks. For a while, I LIVED for NBC Thursday nights, because they had the dream team of Parks & Recreation, The Office, and Community.
I've wanted to work in television since I was a little kid, and late last year I got an unexpected offer to work full-time as a Production Assistant (which I will probably just refer to as 'PA', because I'm lazy af) on a sitcom of a major broadcast network for the rest of the season. I was going to be an employee of production's, but it was understood that I was to be responsible for taking care of anything the aging, B-list, British lead actress wanted. She had a reputation of being "difficult", as stars often do when they are facing the downhill slope of their career and trying to scramble backwards, and she had begun to make pretty much everyone on set miserable with her constant demands and horrible tempers when she didn't get what she was unreasonably requesting. They approached her with the idea of hiring someone to take care of her needs, and she agreed that it sounded wonderful. They hired me, I flew from my home penis-shaped state out to LA, and immediately fell absolutely in love with being on set.
Apparently, the actress in question objected to the fact that she had not been more intimately consulted in whom they hired for my job- when, truthfully, I was the only person they could find that was willing, since I was desperate to break into the industry. She wasn't pleased, and right after lunch on my very first day, she fired me. For being attentive to her needs. Her stand-in, with whom she's worked for years, assured me that it was NOT a commentary on me, or the job I had done, or anything at all about me; she was simply making a statement to production to make it clear that she was unhappy and they needed to acknowledge that she was in charge.
So... yep. My Hollywood career lasted a record seven hours.
Okay, I feel like that's enough to get the ball rolling. See what I meant, with the rambling?
Okay. Right out the gate, I'm gonna apologize- I have, over the course of my lifetime, become aware that I can be, er, somewhat verbose. I'm kind of socially awkward and I can get excited when I have information to contribute and I want to make *sure* that's I get my point across effectively... so I have the tendency to ramble. Please feel free to just tell me, "shut up, nerd," and I will do my best to repackage whatever information I have in a more streamlined/less annoying way.
...This particular post, however, might be a little bit packed with information, because I spent about 24 hours straight lurking and checking out welcome threads and I saw a bunch of stuff I thought was neat, so you're basically my captive, or something.
OKAY. SO. When I was four years old, my parents traded off sleeping in shifts, because by that point, I was only sleeping about five hours a night, at most. Then, when I was in 4th grade, I started sleepwalking- my mom says she thinks it's because I had a really horrible teacher that year. THAT was when s*** really started to get f****d up. (Um, also, i curse a lot? And I'm not really used to censoring myself, but I'm not sure if that is frowned upon here or not, so until I am sure that my language will not offend.) I have not been able to achieve anywhere close to a healthy sleep cycle since, without medication. I have, at some point in my life, been prescribed every single medication approved for sleep by the FDA, as well as many off-label- again, prescribed. The only one that I found any sort of success with at all was Ambien, and when I started taking it both the drug and I were very young. I am under the assumption that they didn't know much about it yet, because I have a hard time believing that you would be able to walk into a pediatrician's office with a ten-year-old and walk out with a thirty day supply of zolpidem- and ZERO counseling on possible dependency. I think that might have messed me up BAD- to my knowledge, I have not been able to achieve any sort of restful sleep cycle without medication since. It's kind of weird, though. Other people talk about insomnia like it's so miserable, and awful, and they feel like s**t all the time, but for me it's like my body just doesn't know it's supposed to be tired. It IS, obviously, but I will often go 5 or 6 days with no sleep and start to show signs of extreme sleep deprivation physically before I ever feel sleepy in the slightest.
Also, when I was 12, I met my psychiatrist, and he diagnosed me pretty quickly with depression. So we tried LOTS of different therapists, lots of different pharmaceuticals- ultimately, we settled on Wellbutrin, and Seroquil in the evenings (which, blessedly, helps me stay asleep longer, since the zolpidem has gotten to the point where I will fall asleep and only be able to stay asleep for three hours or so, but with Seroquil I tend to not be able to wake up the next morning, so it's six to one and half dozen to the other).
When I was a teenager, I started seeing a pain management doctor for back pain that we couldn't diagnose- but there was an incidental finding of an Arnold Chiari malformation, and one month when I went in my doctor was out sick and the guy who was subbing for him happened to be a neurosurgeon. He told me that he had heard of people with what seemed like phantom back pain be relieved by an elective brain surgery to correct the malformation, which- while I won't say /botched/, exactly- went very very poorly for me.
After a few years of consideration (and, to be quite frank, a six month period in which my psychiatric symptoms became so bad that I did not go outside a single time- it got so bad that my parents convinced my psychiatrist, head of psych for a major hospital in our area, to make /house calls/), I decided that I no longer wanted to be under the constraint of needing narcotic pain medication (at the time, Vicodin and then Percocet), which I had been taking roughly four years. I was twenty.
Instead of the anticipated one week hospital stay and one month home recovery, I wound up spending 14 days in the ICU and six weeks in the hospital, and seven months recuperating before I was well enough to actually continue to live my life. But the surgery had done nothing whatsoever to help the back pain that led me to narcotics in the first place- and it took what was a regular headache that occurred every six to eight weeks and put my pain at about an eight- which would pretty much mean an entire day laid in a dark, cool room, achieving nothing but converting O2 to CO2- to a DAILY headache that, on good days, hovers just above a six. Seemingly at random, it can ramp up to an eight (if God is really mad at me that month, a nine), and I pretty much just have to buckle down and grit through it- I take Fioricet for the extra bad ones, and sometimes it can stave it off, but only if I catch it in time. And, due to years of opiate dependency due to pain (and one extremely ill-advised 17 months spent on Suboxone as a pain management tool), my tolerance became extremely high. To be honest, I require so much medication to get through the day, it really bums me out to think about, and it certainly makes other people extremely nervous. I seem to require high doses of everything, actually- but I am also not at all small, standing at 5'9" weighing in around 230- and I have been on everything I take for a long-a** time now. But, contrary to what my medicine cabinet would seem to indicate, I am still very young. And, truthfully, that is more of a bummer than anything else- because I truly suffer every single day. I do not feel like I am living at all, simply marking time for the next 60 years. God, that sounds awful.
Um, okay, on a brighter, less deeply personal note, I love to read and write and I am /wildly/ passionate about television. (Films, take 'em or leave 'em. But tv? I am legitimately advising you not to get me started talking about the NBC show Community unless you are prepared to talk for HOURS and hear lots of jokes repeated and discuss characters, plots, and episodes in depth. Seriously. You will get annoyed with me.) I tend to get attached to lighthearted but witty comedies- preferably in half-hour blocks. For a while, I LIVED for NBC Thursday nights, because they had the dream team of Parks & Recreation, The Office, and Community.
I've wanted to work in television since I was a little kid, and late last year I got an unexpected offer to work full-time as a Production Assistant (which I will probably just refer to as 'PA', because I'm lazy af) on a sitcom of a major broadcast network for the rest of the season. I was going to be an employee of production's, but it was understood that I was to be responsible for taking care of anything the aging, B-list, British lead actress wanted. She had a reputation of being "difficult", as stars often do when they are facing the downhill slope of their career and trying to scramble backwards, and she had begun to make pretty much everyone on set miserable with her constant demands and horrible tempers when she didn't get what she was unreasonably requesting. They approached her with the idea of hiring someone to take care of her needs, and she agreed that it sounded wonderful. They hired me, I flew from my home penis-shaped state out to LA, and immediately fell absolutely in love with being on set.
Apparently, the actress in question objected to the fact that she had not been more intimately consulted in whom they hired for my job- when, truthfully, I was the only person they could find that was willing, since I was desperate to break into the industry. She wasn't pleased, and right after lunch on my very first day, she fired me. For being attentive to her needs. Her stand-in, with whom she's worked for years, assured me that it was NOT a commentary on me, or the job I had done, or anything at all about me; she was simply making a statement to production to make it clear that she was unhappy and they needed to acknowledge that she was in charge.
So... yep. My Hollywood career lasted a record seven hours.
Okay, I feel like that's enough to get the ball rolling. See what I meant, with the rambling?
I know the email address I have attached to this account doesn't look like it (I'm assuming you can see that?) but I just used a random name for the forum registration. I emailed you on my actual account.