Blue Frog Kitties Front
Blue Frog Kitties Back
I just finished my blue frog kitty project for my friend who likes blue and frogs. I hope she likes this! :) I used the frog fabric on the back of both the big kitty and the baby kitty this time. :) Click any of the pics to enlarge. :)
Frog Kitty in Process
This is my current kitty project that I’m working on tonight. It is for a friend who likes blue and frogs. Amazingly enough I was able to find fabric with blue frogs on it!!! Yippee! I hope she likes it! :)
The Teeth Kitty
Front of the Cat Fairy Kitty
Back of the Cat Fairy Kitty
Panda Kitty
Funky Shoe Kitty
I’m pretty sure the people I have made these kitties for don’t read my blog, so I’m going to post the pics of new kitties I have made! The first one I just finished today for a wonderful young woman who just completed dental hygienist school. I’ve known her since she was born actually! I found the cute teeth fabric on spoonflower. I think they are just adorable with their pink cheeks! hehe. The second cat I made for my aunt’s friend. It is different on the back, because the back doesn’t have fuzzy fabric, but instead the flying cat fairy fabric. The last two I made especially for a friend who lives far away. The shoes reminded me of his new sneakers that I saw on facebook, and I know he likes pandas, so I wanted to do a panda cat for him. :) Click any of the pictures for a larger view. :)
Hey Everyone! Hello Kitty Junkie has a discount code for the Hello Kitty Pop phone at her page! Please check out her site and get 20% off until August 31, 2012. You can plug the Hello Kitty POP phone into most wireless devices. It is supercute too! GO HERE FOR THE CODE! You can always check out the Hello Kitty POP Phone at this link. (P.S. the 20% off promo code is NUKTY2012, but please check out Hello Kitty Junkie’s site).
Hey Everybody! I’m really excited about this new show on TNT called “Perception.” http://www.tntdrama.com/series/perception/
It stars Eric McCormack (of Will & Grace fame) as a university professor, author and crime solver who is also living with schizophrenia! I’m always skeptical of depictions of people with mental illness on TV and in movies, because they usually make them out to be psychopathic killers or something. I’ve watched the first two episodes of the show so far, and I think they do an excellent job of making the character seem like a regular human being! It is so fantastic! They use the hallucinations as kind of a dramatic device and employ some other Beautiful Mind-esque devices to try to make it like the viewer can see what the character is seeing. Some commenters have argued that it doesn’t show the horrific aspects of schizophrenia enough, but I personally like that they are showing him to be a regular person, and an intelligent one at that! I like that they show him holding down a job, interacting with people socially, and using the help of other people to reality test. I’m excited to see how the character and the show develop and I hope it gets picked up for another season! Please check it out if you get a chance! Again, it is on TNT Monday nights. Here is the TNT link: http://www.tntdrama.com/series/perception/
I’m taking a Women’s Studies course at school and we are looking at the topic of Motherhood. This week we are discussing motherhood and disabilities, and I came across this wonderful video series that is made by a student about a mother who has schizophrenia and how it has impacted her life and the life of her daughter. I think he did a really good job! The video is divided into four parts and I hope you watch all four parts! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx6j_Tyb8Uo&feature=share&list=PL81E9C419F7641FD8
Pink kitties in the works!
Right now I’m working on these pink kitties. I’m making the eyes with felt instead of buttons, because it is for a baby. I’m hoping that babies don’t eat the other stuff on the kitty! lol I’m sewing the stuff on pretty tightly, but babies can be strangely strong! The fat fairy on the pocket is my own design! :)
I first wrote about taking my Haldol injections back in 2007 in https://kristinbell.org/2007/07/23/the-haldol-injections/.
I wanted to report that yes, I’m still getting the Haldol injections now once every three weeks. Haldol is an antipsychotic medication used to treat psychosis like that found in schizophrenia. I have schizophrenia and started getting the Haldol injections back in late 2000…I guess it was November or December of 2000. The Haldol injections combined with all the other meds I take have been a miracle for me.
So far (knock on wood) I haven’t had many side-effects from the medication. I haven’t yet developed tardive dyskinesia. I hope that I don’t.
I had to start getting the Haldol injections, because I couldn’t take my medications as prescribed. It sounds like a simple enough task, but my illness got in the way of me adhering to my medication regiment, and I’d wind up going off my meds and going crazy. I’ve had a good run with the Haldol. I haven’t been hospitalized since starting it, and if you know anything about people with mental illness, that is quite a feat! :) Without the injection form of the medication I’m pretty sure I’d still be bouncing in and out of insanity and in and out of hospitals.
Haldol is a powerful medication, and not one that people enjoy taking. It can cause a lot of sedation, but in the right dose with the right brain it is a miracle drug. It doesn’t work for everyone, and I probably wouldn’t extoll the virtues of it if I was taking the oral form of the medication. With the injection form of the medication I am able to take less of the medication while still getting the benefits of it. I believe that there are also short-acting Haldol injections for acutely psychotic patients, but I am getting the long-acting injections which metabolize over a number of weeks.
I know that a lot of people, including people with schizophrenia and other brain diseases, are afraid of getting injections of medication. If you are paranoid and psychotic, like I was when I first got the injection, it is terrifying to get the injections. I actually believed that the doctors were giving me a lethal injection to kill me when I got my first dose. It turns out that it was the best thing that ever happened to me, not the worst. Now there are other medications that come in injection forms too. Meds like Risperdal and others. If Haldol doesn’t work for someone then maybe one of the other injectables will work. At any rate, I think it is worth giving them a try. It may take awhile to get used to the meds and to get the correct dosing, but it is worth it in the end.
This is my latest cat project. I’m working on two superhero cats for two different little boys. I’ve finished one of the big cats and two baby cats, but I still need to make the capes for the baby cats. Update: I finished one baby cat cape! Adding pic now. :) I got the supercute superhero fabric from Hawthorne Threads. (Here is a link to the Superhero Fabric) They have some of the best fabric around in my opinion, but I am also glad that the Joann Fabrics near my house has a big selection of fleece! :) If you click the pics you can see an enlarged view. :)
Baby superhero cat with cape (front view)
Baby superhero cat (back view)
Superhero Cats!
Superhero Cats in Production!
I thought I’d do a little mental health update, since it has been quite some time since I’ve blogged about my overall mental health. As some of you dear readers may know, I have schizophrenia. I first had issues with it when I was about 15. My first hospitalization was when I was 16. Towards the end of 2000 I got mostly stabilized with my Haldol injections and Zoloft. I haven’t been in the hospital since then! Yay! Quite a long run I’ve had and I hope it continues! For quite some time I had problems getting things done, being motivated and feeling down…that sort of thing, even though I was mostly fine. I think it was last year that I started taking Abilify and it has made a HUGE difference! I’m still taking Zoloft, Buspar, Haldol and some non-psychiatric meds in addition to the Abilify, but the addition of the Abilify was great. I’m doing really pretty well these days. Sometimes I have anxiety, although I think it might generally be related to performance issues with school. I also tried taking Topamax to help with weight loss, but I thought it might be making me stupid and giving me more anxiety, so I quit taking it. I think overall, the Topamax was not helping. It seemed like I was becoming less motivated and more sad with it. I also had that bad anxiety day that I wrote about recently.
So, I think I was just hoping for a magic weightloss bullet with the Topamax. It didn’t work. Boo. I have lost about 90-100 pounds though which is good, but I still need to be less sedentary. I’m also a believer in fat acceptance, but of course it is hard to say that I never want to try to lose weight. I would be an even bigger believer in fat acceptance if I wasn’t actually fat I think!!! hahaha. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it is kind of true. I can accept the hell out of everyone’s fatness, but my own! lol.
Anyway, enough about fatness for now. What I want to say is that I’m doing well on the whole. My sleep patterns have improved with my sleep apnea machine, and while I’m not sleeping on any kind of normal schedule yet, I’m getting sleep every day and mostly at the same time! I still tend to be somewhat paranoid, but I’ve found that opening up with people over the years on the internet has really helped me to realize that I don’t need to be afraid of everyone in the world. I still have some delusional thoughts that blow through my brain now and then, but I consider them to be more of a slight annoyance than a big deal right now. But seriously, it is because of the medicine. If I wasn’t taking my meds, and doing so faithfully, I would be in and out of hospitals and massively psychotic. Some people don’t believe me, because I “seem so normal,” but I have to wonder what THAT means anyway? And, I don’t know, it seems like I should be insulted when people say that to me, but I’m not sure why I find it so insulting! I don’t necessarily want to be abnormal, even though I pretty much am, but I think it just bothers me that people attach a kind of value judgement to the term “normal” as if “normal” is superior. It is definitely easier to live in the world if you are “normal,” but it isn’t the only way to be in the world, that’s for sure. Normal is just such a peculiar word, no?
So, I’m doing fine. Some anxiety here and there, some weird thoughts here and there…a depressed mood now and then, but mostly just good. Which is nice. Thank you meds and thank you lucky stars! So, that’s my update after living with schizophrenia for 24 years. Wow! 24 years! Man am I getting old!!! LOL.
kristinbell.org 