Terrible evening

My husband got in very late from work. I know that he is cat sitting for a friend and it's very probable that he spent time with the cats. After all there are newborn kittens to be admired. He didn't feel like cooking when he got in and as I'd had a visitor for most of the afternoon, done a stack of laundry, and other various housework tasks I didn't feel like cooking either. There is also the problem that due to stress/depression or whatever I have been completely off my food (I lost 14 lb in about 10 days). Anyway, my husband decides that he wants to go to the Thai restaurant close to where we live, but I'm prevaricating about it, at which point my husband realised that the thought of leaving the building is making me panicky. So he drags me out to the restaurant and as we are sitting at the table he's reaching over to hold my hand and I'm staring down at the plate and fighting the urge to bolt out of the place. It's the quickest restaurant meal I've ever had and the worst experience, though I have to stress that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the restaurant, it's service or the food. The ordeal was purely the one going on inside my head - a fight between the rational notion that there is nothing that is going to harm me and the instinctive feeling that I needed to be somewhere safer.

Thoughts

I was reading through Totally Shattered when I noticed this piece. I'd read it before but it didn't click at the time.

My point is that if you choose to do something then nobody else is to blame for your choices and the consequences of your choices. She chose to become involved with a married man, so she cannot hold me responsible for her pain now that he has chosen to go back to his wife. It was her choice, and it is her choice to read my blog.

and further on

What goes through your head as a mistress to believe that anything good can come out of an affair? Do you try and justify your behaviour by creating a belief system that supports the affair eg "She treated him horribly" or "She was a lunatic" or "She was into character assassination".

I'm having to put up with a silly teenager who is blaming me for "wrecking her life" because she chose to become involved with a man who, as well as being married, was almost old enough to be her father. She is blaming me because the man she chose decided that his marriage was worth something. She is the one who is calling me the scum of the earth and saying that I was responsible for the affair for "treating my husband like shit". She was the one pressuring him to leave me and when it all went wrong had no clue as to why she couldn't have her own way. It makes me wonder what kind of delusions she had that could even put these ideas into her head.

Blog Patrol

I am a teesy bit cheesed off with Blogpatrol at the moment. My hit counter has been zeroed, or to be more accurate, it's lost a hell of a lot of hits. I am aware that this is caused by a power outage that took down their servers and it is the sudden loss of power that has caused some areas of the database to be corrupted. I understand that they cannot control the power company's supply, but have these guys never heard of battery backup systems. Every place I've ever worked at that had critical data on a server had that server attached to a UPS so that they had time to go through shut down procedures and not lose data. In fact most of them had an automated system, that as soon as the UPS kicked in would log out and shutdown systems removing the need for human intervention. But no, the hits that I've accumulated over a four year period have vanished, gone, vamoosed, and I am not a happy bunny.

An achievement

When we first moved to our new palatial apartment we made the error of signing up with BT. We knew that we didn't want their broadband service because (a) they are expensive (b) they cap the amount you can download each month (c) they are notoriously crap. When signing up (over the telephone) I did tell the salesdroid that we were looking for a different broadband supplier and even mentioned that it was likely to be Bulldog (who are a LLU supplier), but salesdriod assured me that this was fine and that I needed to have my BT account set up before I could proceed with Bulldog anyway. Everything seemed to be in order, so I gave all the usual account details so that BT could take the setup payment direct from my bank account and everything in the garden was rosy.

Then we signed the stuff for Bulldog whose sales staff said that we didn't need to open the account with BT because they would have done all that for us as part of our start up agreement and that if we'd told that to the BT salesdroid then they (BT) had mis-sold the service. (Cue silent fuming with steam coming out of my ears).

Meanwhile I get a bill from BT for £38.50. Okay so we had their service for a total of three days, but I had agreed to the service, even if their salesdroid had mis-sold it to me, but that's okay because the direct debit is set up and they can take the money directly from my account. Wrong! A few days later I get the red letter. I telephone BT and ask what the problem is. I am told that the direct debit hadn't been set up. I get the person to hold whilst I log into my account (the joys of internet banking) only to find that there in black and white (well it's actually a rather calming blue and white, but I digress) is the direct debit set up on my account. I recite this information to BT person who then says that my bank declined the direct debit as there were no funds, I look at my online statement. There is over £3000 in the account, transferred from the savings account for buying new furniture and the like, plus there is a £500 overdraft facility. There is no evidence that the direct debit has been collected, keeping BT person on the land line I use my mobile phone to call my bank, who confirm that they have not had a request from BT to collect a payment. Again I tell the BT person, who by now is getting very anxious, having been found out to be telling porkies. They will look into the situation and call me back.

A week passes and I've not had a call back, however I do get a letter from BT's solicitor threatening legal action if I don't pay the amount owing. Now I'm feeling stroppy. I check all the online details of my account. No evidence that BT have tried to take a payment, but the direct debit is still there. I call my bank and they confirm that there is nothing in their records to say that BT have even tried to take a payment and also that there is no reason why a request for payment would be refused. I'm very pleased about this because I occasionally like to have a good strop.

So I write back to their solicitors as follows:

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your letter of 26^th January 2006, the contents of which I note with interest.
It seems to me that your client due to the incompetence that has made them famous, has involved you to extract an amount of money that they have not by their own wits been able to take directly themselves.

Given that despite being told my name AND my spelling it out, the person on the help desk was unable to enter this correctly on a keyboard. I take this as an indication that your client employs imbeciles to man their call centres, especially after I telephoned to correct this error and yet, as evidenced from your letter, they are still incapable of following simple instructions.

However, your letter relates to an unpaid amount and this is where their inabilities really set in, for whilst it seems, your client was able to set up a direct debit (as you will see quite clearly on the enclosed print from my internet banking site) they do not seem to have been able to get their collective brains to work long enough to collect the amount directly from the account as instructed. Still one shouldn't mock the afflicted as it's not very p.c.

Please do consider taking this to the Sheriff Court, I am sure that they get very little light relief during their working day and this case would no doubt relieve the monotony. Or on the other hand you could instruct you client to use the direct debit mandate that they have, and which they should have used in the first instant. I do sympathise with you that your only client's inability to complete their own business functions has resulted in your wasted time.

Yours faithfully

Solicitor duly wrote back saying that they would take no further action but would "pass my comments" back to their client i.e. BT.

This has now trundled on up to their elevated complaints section and still BT cannot take a payment from my account. The money is there. I'm willing for them to take it but I will not go out of my way to make the payment by any other means because that will only encourage them to be lazy about their business practices and to be honest their business practices are pretty crap to start with.

So on to today. I get three letters from a debt collection company. One is the you haven't paid this bill and we have been instructed to collect it, the second is the you've ignored us and we could take you to court if you don't pay us and the third is the despite previous correspondeance you have ignored us so we have prepared papers to take you to court. I try to telephone the company but you just get the usual "all our operators are busy" stuff, so I think sod this lets go back to the problem. I call BT, the woman I speak to is very polite and business like. I tell her about the three letters and she is shocked. She says that she can see the history of this on the account notes and she is sorry that this has gone on so long, would I mind holding whilst she consults with her supervisor. I'm on hold for what seems like an hour (hold music does that to you) and she comes back to me. She will contact the debt collection agency to get the file back, she will arrange for the whole amount to the credited to my bill so that I have nothing to pay. I almost fell over at that. I said I don;t mind paying the £38.50, it was billed to me I owe it and if only BT could call on my bank to take the money I'd be please to see it go as it's one less thing for me to worry about. But no the girl is adamant. The bill will be credited as compensation for all the stress and anguish that this has caused me.

A result!

Confusion

I closed my Livejournal (LJ) account, and I have copied most of the LJ entries here. That means that there is a bit of duplication of entries. As of now this is my only personal blog and Cross Stitcher's Diary will cover all the craft related stuff. My pictures are all on my Flickr account

Comments

Today has been very up and down. First thing today I was really depressed to the point that I didn't want to get out of bed, but the postman knocking on the door to deliver a parcel forced me up. I called into work to say that I wouldn't be in and told one of my colleagues what had happened on Sunday/Monday. It seems that news has spread somewhat which makes it a rather difficult situation because on the one hand I don't want my state of mind to be a source of gossip around the workplace, but on the other hand people at least know that something is wrong and if I burst into random tears they will know they are not responsible. I had to go into work to hand in the spare set of office keys but was fortunate to run into the girl who is covering for me whilst she was queueing to get her lunch so I didn't need to go into the office. Went to the cafe at John Lewis to wait for hubby so we could go to the councelling session. At some point during that session (I had my phone on silent mode) I got a call from someone at the Royal Ed. to give me an appointment with a shrink, which was pretty fast work as I only saw my GP yesterday and he said that there was quite a waiting list.

I need to put a filter on my work email but to be honest I've not felt like looking at it and I really need to pull myself together to get back to the office as I really need to get the financial year end sorted, plus there is a huge stack of stuff that I have been too lazy to file that needs checking through as much of it can now be dumped into the confidential waste bags.

Finally, I've had a couple of comments on my stitching blog and I'm touched that people have taken the time to give support to a complete stranger. To the anonymous poster you are right in thinking that my close call with death hasn't made me look at life more positively. If anything when I woke up on Monday I had an overwhelming feeling of regret and disappointment that this was one more thing that I was a failure at. And to Bunny, I think it would have been easier to take had he run of with another man instead if a girl who was slimmer, prettier and 23 years younger than me.

Anyway I am once again going to try to pull myself together enough to get into work tomorrow.

Can't go on like this...

My life is a complete mess. Everybody tells me that I have won the battle in that my husband is staying with me but I still have huge doubts about that. Each time he tells me something I remember him looking straight into my eyes and lying about the situation with him and Charlotte the Harlot. And it gets worse in that our alleged circle of friends all seem to want to give HER support, so we will now have to create a whole new social circle for ourselves, which in a place like Edinburgh is not too easy as most of the social groups have huge overlaps. As we both have good jobs here in Edinburgh we don't want to have to move but if it becomes necessary we will do, if only to get away from the lying, scheming bitch who is responsible for the situation. Anyway I've deleted my LJ account (I effectively did that a while back but had to keep reinstating it to do admin functions on a community I ran but I've killed the community too now) so I now have no contact with my old social circle at all. The Harlot can have them and she can wreck their lives just like she's wrecked mine.

Bugger

Well that was interesting - not. I took a handful of my amitriptyline tablets (about 10-12 50mg tablets) last night in the hope that I wouldn't wake up this morning, which as I'm typing this obviously failed. The first that my husband knew was when I could hardly walk this morning, so he called the ambulance service. Paramedics were nice and kind and said that given the time I'd taken the pills that I was past the worst but they did say that as I had very low blood oxygen levels, combined with the state I was in when they arrived that I must have stopped breathing at some point during the night and that, depending on the view point I was either very lucky or very unlucky!

A ride by ambulance to the new Royal Infirmary later and I'm admitted to the A&E department, where I spent most of the day. A whole battery of tests were done, including an ECG (apparently amitriptyline can cause heart failure), and a couple of psychiatric nurses came around to make an assessment, and they agreed that I'm depressed and need anti-depressants, and that I should try to carry on as normally as possible, but that I should get some support from the Community Psychiatric Nurse. To that end I've got an appointment at the Royal Edinburgh next Wednesday.

Of course, my husband, decided that he should be the keeper of pills so I have to find where he has hidden them. It's really upsetting - I mean I want to die, no question about that, but everyone around me thinks this is a bad idea. However they have no clue as to how bad I feel and they are all just playing lip service with various pleasantries. Why can't people accept that I want to die and let me get on with it.

I can't even drink with friends now

Yesterday started out quite well. I recently bought an Elizabeth David cookbook and decided to make a lasagna, from scratch (including the pasta). It turned out really well and as we had a friend for our late lunch it went down a treat. Another friend came around with her daughter, who very kindly brought some cake. So after our guests had left we decided to go to the pub as usual.

This was the start of the trouble in that Charlotte was there. One of the friends told us that they didn't want to be in the middle of "this car crash waiting to happen" so went off with the others to the other end of the bar. At this point fine they have distanced themselves from both sides equally. However, everytime they went out to smoke (its illegal to smoke in bars in Scotland) Charlotte joined them so it seemed clear that it was me who was being singled out as the undesirable element, which given that my husband had had an affair with Charlotte, means that I'm the victim, yet for some reason I'm the one who is being treated as the guilty party, so I now know that I'm persona non grata whilst she has the run of the place. Given Charlotte's manipulative ways it doesn't surprise me that she's made managed to make herself out as the hurt party, but she has completely wrecked my life. So now I'm locked into a situation that I have no control over. My husband constantly defends the slut who tried to wreck our marriage yet when she throws lies and crap at me he won't defend me, yet he says that it's me he loves and that he wants to make our marriage work. I don't know where I stand.

It's so depressing that I really do not want to live any more but my husband seems to think that killing myself is not a good option. I just wish that the people who have so clearly decided that this whore is the one to be supported would get out of my life and let me do what I want, instead of insisting that I live so that they can pile more shame and humiliation onto me. So I had about 10 of my anti-depressant tables left and I've now managed to take them all without giving any indication to my husband that I've taken them. When I start to feel sleepy I'll go to bed as normal and hopefully I'll never wake up, but I can't guarantee that because I can't find anything that gives an indication as to what is a lethal dose of amitriptyline.

The past few days have been very fraught in one way and another. The girl my husband was having an affair with is still holding me responsible for the situation and although she is now accepting some responsibility it's only 1/3. I don't understand her reasoning in this but it's a start. The way that she is manipulating things around to make out that she is the victim of all this would be laughable if it wasn't so painful. In fact, it was her reply to my husband challenging her version that sent me off on another wave of depression. I ended up taking my current dose of 150 mg Amitriptyline plus 5mg of Diazepam and waiting for the inevitable drowsiness to set in. Whilst waiting, I ran a bath but tried to keep everything as normal as possible (I hoped). I should point out at this stage that as I'm asthmatic if I'm having a bout of insomnia I can't use barbiturates, because they depress respiratory function so I'm usually prescribed 25mg of Amitriptyline as a sleeping pill, but now that the dose has been increased to it's anti-depressant levels it's giving me 6 times the dose I need to sleep so, when they knock me out, it's difficult to rouse me.

So as soon as I was feeling sleepy enough, I posted the following message to my LJ account,

So long, Farewell. Auf Weidersehn, Goodbye..
Jul. 10th, 2006 | 09:21 pm
I'm sick of this situation with a little slut by the name of Charlotte H----- doing her best to blame HER actions on me. Listen you little whore get back down to Leith Docks were you belong - I think your arse is worth about a fiver a fuck.

As for me I can't cope with this. I've taken my amytriptiline and the valium based stuff the doctor gave me and I'm now feeling sleepy - time to lock myself into my bathroom and climb into that nice bath I've run. AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT CHARLOTTE.

As for the rest of you, it's been nice knowing you.

I then logged out of everything, and climbed into the bath reclining to the point that it's only my back and stomach muscles tensing that is keeping my head above water. I went slightly under a couple of times as I was starting to doze, but the water coming up my nose woke me for a bit and then I'd start to dose again. As my husband has closed his LJ account I thought it would take a while for any message to get to him, however, I didn't take into consideration the various people who actually look at my LJ. So a friend in Jersey, who didn't have our phone numbers, called a mutual friend, who in turn tried to call my husband but couldn't get through because he's had to change his mobile number to stop the bitch's text messages, so in the end had to call my mobile instead to alert him. My husband used a screwdriver to unlock the bathroom door from the outside and grabbed me, keeping my head above water until he could get the bath drained.

Now comes the big question. Did I really want to kill myself? I have to say that the answer is yes. I'm in a situation that I can't cope with. I have the girl who has followed my husband all the way to Edinburgh trying to make me feel like a visitor in my own home, coming around to my work and disrupting the place, insinuating herself into my circle of friends and trying to use them to gain sympathy when her plan to wreck my marriage and my life went wrong. At the moment it's like every single cell in my body is an open wound and is hypersensitive and I want to find a way to make the pain stop. Yes, my husband had an affair but when push came to shove he decided to stay with me, but at what price to my sanity. If he's late home from work I'm wondering if he's gone to see her, I'm wondering what plans he is making behind my back, who else he might be seeing, and all the while it seems as though I'm the one who is being portrayed as the bad guy. I get the feeling that people are avoiding me like I'm some sort of plague carrier, and it has all become really too much for me to bear.

I know that this post is a bit of a ramble but I'm currently not really thinking straight, I'm not so much living as going through the motions. I'm sorry so many people were alarmed, but to be honest I really didn't think anyone would care. Maybe that's true or maybe it's just my perception, but the honest truth is that at the time I locked the bathroom door I really didn't want or expect to leave the room alive