Tag Archives: Mental Disorders

Thought of the Week: We Apologize for the Inconvenience in my Head

I’m sitting here right now, doing my best to cope with my head’s decision to have a total breakdown. I assure you, it’s not a pleasant experience. I apologize if this is disjointed or nonsensical.

Downstairs, my wife is making General Tzo’s Chicken. She’s doing her best to cope with me. I assure you, it’s not a pleasant experience. It took me three hours to manage to cut up the broccoli.

I don’t know if I’d call it a panic attack; I certainly feel somewhat panicky. Overwhelmed; all the little things are too much. I don’t mean little things like cleaning the house. I mean little things like Lego figure heads, the scrap of paper on the floor, the itch in my left tear duct, the vaguely numb sensation of too much acetaminophen. The leaves on the trees that don’t line up, the hole in my underwear, the fact that the window I’m typing in on my computer isn’t perfectly centered in the screen. These are the little things that are all too much.

I end up on my hands and knees, rocking back and forward incessantly like a crazy person.

Wait…am I a crazy person?

It’s a rare lucid moment that’s allowing me to write this. Maybe it’s therapeutic. I missed my therapy appointment on Friday – I forgot about it. I haven’t called The Lovely J (to borrow a phrase) to apologize or reschedule. I don’t know if I can. I feel worse every second that goes by, and it’s stopping me from actually doing anything about it.

I don’t want to clean the kitchen tonight.

I don’t want to have Movie Night with Little Satis tonight, but don’t tell him – he’d be devastated. I think I’m going to have to force through it.

I think I must be crazy.

There’s too much recycling.

I have a friend who used to have panic attacks. She said it felt like she couldn’t breathe. I don’t feel like that. I feel like I can’t exist. I feel like I’m exploding, from the gut out. I had a crazy notion chopping the broccoli to ram the knife right into my stomach. There was a crazy flash of relief at the thought, but I didn’t do it, obviously.

I was playing Plants vs. Zombies…it was helping to still the storm, until I got to a level I can’t beat. Now that’s worse. Why doesn’t anyone make games that are just simply easy, all the way through? Wish Heroin Hero was a real game.

Maybe an episode of South Park will clear the crazies.

I feel an incessant, burning desire to work on something related to the The Redemption of Erâth, but there’s no way I’m in a state of mind to do anything about it. I tried another cover design, but I deleted it before I was halfway done. It sucked.

I’m so desperate for a cover design and I have no idea where to go for it.

I’m listening to Kamelot on Pandora. It’s fast, and kind of matches the spinning in my head.

This has helped. I apologize for the rambling, and I’ll be back next week with something more sensible.

Thank you.

I’m sorry.

Thank you.

~

Featured image from http://www.chesapeakehealthylifestyles.com/?p=1316.

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Thought of the Week: Diagnosed Bipolar…

…and pissed about it.

So goes the tagline of one of my favorite bloggers, lifeonaxis1. As of last Tuesday, it turns out she and I have something in common.

Such was the offhand remark my psychiatrist made when I went to see him about having stopped my medication. “Well, we’ve been giving you these four different medications for a couple of years now, the results have been so-so, you’re having withdrawal symptoms and oh, by the way, you’re bipolar.”

Thanks, doc.

The funny thing is, I don’t feel bipolar. I actually feel pretty level most of the time – anywhere from just plain ordinary to mopey and depressed, but never hyper. Never gone through manic periods, never had wild mood fluctuations, never felt like I was in charge of the world. For me there’s just depressed and more depressed.

At least that’s what I thought, until I looked back at the past few days and weeks. Since going off my medications entirely, I’ve written five chapters of my book. That’s 28,000 words in less than four weeks. I’ve written nearly every lunchtime at work, nearly every night before bed.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, since going back on my meds my mood has stabilized immensely:

Wild mood swings…

Wild mood swings…

See that point about two weeks ago? Yeah – that’s when I started the meds again. It just so happens that one of the medications (actually several, I think) is used to treat bipolar disorder. It was the last one I stopped taking, and the first one I started again. It suddenly feels like a paper bag being popped – out exploded all this nervousness and anxiety and manic obsessive behavior that I didn’t even know existed. And now, I’m trying to cram it all back into a new bag.

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it; I’m not sure if it even changes anything. For years (decades, almost) I’ve been desperate to have a diagnosis, a sign of something, of “this is what’s wrong with you”. And now I have one, I feel very let down; it’s as if what’s wrong with me is something mundane and ordinary – something anyone ought to be able to deal with. Perhaps it was the way the doc said it; perhaps it’s how I took it. Either way, it doesn’t change the deep down feeling I have that what’s truly wrong with me is that I just can’t cope with life like other people can. That I’m just bad at being a person.

But then, isn’t that kind of what bipolar disorder does to you?

Disclaimer: you’re not a bad person, lifeonaxis1. Just me.

Featured image from http://s686.photobucket.com/user/mnemophobiax/media/Gifs/Wallpaper/bipolar.jpg.html.

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Thought of the Week: Don’t Stop the Meds

All right, confession time: about four weeks ago I stopped taking my medications.

I didn’t actually intend to – it just sort of happened. It was all very complicated and messy, to be honest with you; a while back I got too much of one prescription, which meant I still had some when it came time to renew the other ones, and suddenly I wasn’t able to keep track of which ones were current, which ones needed refilling and which ones had no refills left. I got scared of going to the pharmacist to find out, and worse, I had to cancel my psychiatrist appointment, and with the mess of drugs I never got the courage to pick up the phone and make another appointment.

Eventually the meds ran out, and I just stopped taking them. I suppose I have to admit that there was also a part of me that wondered if they were actually having an effect anyway. And for a while, there was really little effect.

Then I got sick, and it everything got screwy. I can’t honestly say whether not being on the meds contributed to it, but I came down with a fever, and it didn’t break for seven days. I had to call out of work, I felt completely delirious, I spent all day in bed alternating between shivering chills and drenching sweats. I suppose I’m lucky that I didn’t get a gastrointestinal bug and actually could stay in bed all day, but it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. I would wake up and be completely unaware of what time it was, or even what day it was. I would dream that I was late for work, and believe it when I woke up. I felt like I was permanently eating metal (does anyone else get that weird feeling in their mouth when they have a fever?).

Eventually it started to fade, and I was able to watch TV or go for a walk. It wasn’t another week fully before I was feeling myself again. Except, I wasn’t myself, because by then, the effects of going cold turkey on my medications were starting to kick in.

Believe me when I say it was the weirdest feeling I’ve ever had. The heat that had begun during my fever didn’t abate, and I would drip sweat sitting around in my underwear with the air conditioning on. I don’t think I started shaking (or rather, it didn’t get any worse – I was already shaking from the meds in the first place), but I know that my mood and temper went suddenly out of whack. I got angry at the weirdest things. I don’t mean things that wouldn’t normally upset me, but things that wouldn’t normally upset anyone. I remember freaking out driving down a road because the branches of the trees on either side of the street weren’t the same height.

And with all of this came a sudden drop in mood, a depression that I of course didn’t recognize. I stopped writing; I stopped caring. It was a classic return to form for me, and it was a place I hadn’t been in for a long time. It was a place I hadn’t really wanted to return to, and mainly because once I’m there, I don’t want to leave. Depression is an addiction for me, and something I need to stay away from, for my own good.

In the end, it all came out that I wasn’t taking my medication again, and with help I was able to go to the pharmacist and find out that I did, in fact, have renewals for almost all of my prescriptions. I got them; I got back on the drugs. And the result?

I’ve written three chapters of The Redemption of Erâth, Book Two: Exile in less than two weeks, something that is quite a feat for me (I’m a comparatively slow writer). I noticed a bounce in my step the other day (I kid you not – I was highly embarrassed). And things aren’t bothering my anymore.

And well, really that’s it. I went off the meds, suffered the consequences, and went back on them. I suppose if anything, it proved to me that I really do need them. I still don’t know if I need all of them, but at this point I’m not willing to risk the consequences again.

So lesson learned: don’t stop taking the meds.

~

Featured image taken from http://www.petinsurance.com/healthzone/education/pet-poisons-and-toxins/toxic-meds-for-pets.aspx.

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