RealMental

I won’t mince words initially.  The psychiatrist I have been seeing since late 1998 is part of my past.  She helped me I first started to see her, she understood things no one else seemed to.  She could peg me when I sometimes said only a few things or struggled with words.  The medication she gave me seemed to work.  Sure, she was always late.  LATE.  1, 2, 3 or more hours late.  At  first I didn’t care, I mean I was not at work and had more free time.  I would bring a book or magazines and settle in for a little “me” time.  As time went on it became more irritating, disrespectful.  She briefly referred me to another Psychiatrist to treat my eating disorder (binge eating disorder).  Now this Psychiatrist almost proved herself initially helpful.  We talked about me and some new things I discovered that helped me deal with things.  After a few months she started to break appropriate doctor/patient boundaries.  She asked me to volunteer with her eating disorder education program, which was initially ok and even enjoyable.  The lines became blurry.  She called me at home a lot.  She hosting candle selling parties and invited me (seriously).  I was becoming more and more involved in the volunteer work and when I has appointments we never talked about me and my issues. Eventually I quit her, and realized that is was a horrible relationship.

I went back to making-me-wait-doctor.  At least I trusted her.  Fast forward, same shit different pile.  I saw waiting-doctor about 2 weeks ago what I think will be our final meeting.  We were talking, and all of a sudden she started flipping through my file, from late 1998 until now.  Quickly flipping.  She started muttering about “history of migraines” (no longer), and a history of “brittle” hypertension (wrong, it was high, then treated and just before I saw here, I was taken off said medication), and said “you know, your short term memory has never been very good (me: barooo?), “I think I will send you for a MRI of your head”. AN MRI OF MY HEAD.  She suspected that all these things she described were indicative of me having TIAs (Transient Ischemic Attacks) “ http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/tia/tia.htm a transient stroke that lasts only a few minutes.” What the of the to the fuck?  I laughed!  I said, I sometimes struggle for words, but when she sees me at my PSYCHIATRIST appointment, I am not taking an IQ test.  You don’t know me personally, but “TIAs manifested by major symptoms such as dense paralysis or severe language disorder” and “Drooling, imbalance, decreased alertness, difficulty swallowing”, “Confusion, headache, seizure”.  SERIOUSLY?  I knew instantly she was way off base.  She said she has ALWAYS thought my short term memory was bad.  I know, since I am crazy, this may sound weird, but I seriously though she was bat shit crazy.

Longer story shorter.  I found a new psychotherapist for talk therapy and she found me a new Psychiatrist to take care of my meds, but not all my crazy talking/listening.  I did this all within 2 weeks and I RULE.  I interviewed two talk therapists/psychologists and I can’t decide, but I will next week.  I feel positive about all of these changes for the first time in a long long long time.  I think I just picked the short straw when I was assigned Psychiatrists.  Twice.  I think I was partially concerned that if I told the tales of my two mental health providers, my DOCTORS, people would think I was even crazier and not believe me.    I still know I have a list of things to fix in my messed up noggin, but having new support makes me feel awesome

I’ve been so anxious at work, so depressed at home, that I haven’t had time to think through what I’ve been going through beyond, “gotta get outta here” and “gotta try something different with the meds.” Both are right, but I’ve been feeling like I’ve been living in tunnel vision for weeks.

I had a brief talk with my immediate boss about the crazy and abusive behavior of the big boss, which has been the cause of my sleepless nights and anxious, teary days, and when posed the either/or of “should I take a leave, or just quit?” he was strongly in the leave camp, but added, “I have enough bad karma to be mad at you if you left. You have to decide what’s healthy, what you can put up with.” So that was a bit of a relief, because other things aside, I’d hate to never speak with him again if I left.

I also had some “progress” on the headache/dizziness/depression front, in that I had a head CT (negative) and a long talk with my lovely shrink about my past month & a half. She thinks it’s a metabolic reaction of the lamictal with the increased effexor. Since I’d had occasional migraines on the lamictal before this recent dose increase, she thinks I need to come off it. I’m not happy about that– because within four days of starting the lamictal last June, when I was in the depths of despair, it had kicked in, and literally was a lifesaver. I hate to let go of something to which I owe so much gratitude, sanity, creativity, and joy. But at the same time, it’s not working anymore. The headaches and dizziness are getting worse, not better, and I can’t tolerate them and try to work, or figure out what to do about work, at the same time. So we talked about other options, and she wants me to consider lithium or Depakote.

I’m frightened of both. Lithium, because my father had a girlfriend who was manic-depressive, on lithium, and still not controlled. I know I’m a different case, and that it’s the gold standard for a reason, but that past experience continues to taint me. At the same time, though? The weight gain effects of Depakote terrify me. I’m a former bulimic, have a huge comfort-eating problem, and a massive oral fixation to boot. No pen cap is safe around me. I will always have issues with my weight, even though I’ve been pretty ok the last 10 years. At the same time, though, my mother and my aunt, who if you saw us all together in a photo, you would automatically know we’re related? Both over 250 lbs. And that’s without Depakote. I’m terrified of what would happen, even with trying my best.

Also, a really whiny, self-indulgent part of me does not want to give up my nightly glass of wine. Alchohol is a lot more contraindicated with these two drugs than with the lamictal, and I just don’t want to give my wine up. But if I have to, I have to. I actually defended a doctor years ago in a case where a bipolar on lithium ended up with tardive dyskinesia, a parkinson’s like neurological deterioration, because she was an alcoholic and continued drinking all the years she took the lithium. She was pretty much wheelchair-bound by the time the case made it to trial.

And the last part? I am terrified about what will happen to my mood during the taper down. I have a lot of work scheduled in the next month– I don’t want to hand it off, because these are my personal clients, not the firm’s, and at this point, I sort of feel like they’re all that I’ve got. But at the same time, it’s going to suck, to put it mildly, decreasing the lamictal to zero, then starting the lithium. (She doesn’t want to do a “close taper,” because there isn’t a lot of research on it since lamictal is still new in the bipolar formulary.) My husband asked me if I was going to take the end of the lamictal taper off, and it tells you how tunnel-visioned I am that it simply didn’t occur to me to reschedule stuff that week, rather than hand it off. It’s true that “I will be out that week for medical reasons, and need to reschedule.” No one else needs to know more.

It’s all too much, or almost too much, but it’s got to be done anyway, and I am scared shitless. I just hope that in response to all the resumes I am sending out, I don’t get a crucial interview on what might turn out to be a dream job, the week I’m off my mood stabilizer, and starting another. That would be a little too interesting.

I have a psychological disorder with symptoms of anxiety, depression, and a touch of paranoia. Do I know distinctly what I have? No, I do not. Three psychiatrists gave me three different diagnoses – paranoid schizophrenia, manic depression, and schizoid affective disorder – and so I lost faith in the solidity of labels.

So, I have a disordered brain for which I take a particular pill, which I will call Fabulon. I love Fabulon. It has done wonders for me. Last January it dug me out of a particularly nasty spell of anxiety that had me hiding under blankets on the couch for a week and spiking fevers every time I even thought about leaving the apartment, and since then, it has managed to keep me pretty even keel without any nasty side effects. Every other drug I have tried has dried out my mouth, turned my pee green, made me too nervous, made me too tired, given me migraines, caused sexual dysfunction, and generally has not alleviated my poor self of the burden of The Crazy. Fabulon does, though, and I love it.

Of course, my love of Fabulon comes from its effects once I have already adjusted to a new dosage and am on the sanity straightaway. Starting a new dosage is a strange, dreamy journey in which nothing seems to stick to me. Time fritters away from me, seeming both long and short, while I float in a permanent present. I lose track of the quantity of things, so it is easy to drink too much, completely overestimate how much money I have, and talk so loudly to the Palinode that his head hurts.

I am now in the midst of my third such trip. I experienced this at my first 10 mg dose, and then again at 20 mg, and now again at 30 mg, so it is familiar territory for me at this point, but it has not stopped me from behaving a little dottier than usual.

On Saturday afternoon, the Palinode explained to me something that he was going to do. What? I said. He went over it again. I have no idea what you are talking about, I said. He looked at me like I must be kidding him, and I could tell that whatever he had been talking about was not difficult to comprehend. That thing you are talking about? I said. You just go ahead with whatever it is, because I can’t understand a thing you’re saying. I still do not know what he was talking about. My brain recalls him sounding like the adults in animated Peanuts cartoons: wah wah wah wah wah, like a muffled trumpet.

On Sunday morning, I looked high and low for my purse and became convinced that I had lost it at the pub the night before. It wasn’t in the car we rode home in, it had not been turned in to the pub staff, and it was nowhere to be found in our apartment. I looked in the closet, behind the furniture, and even under the bathroom sink. Just when I was sure that my favourite bag of all time was lost forever, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my night table, and there it was jammed tightly in between balls of yarn, some bandaids, and an old cat toy. It was obvious that I had used some force to wedge it in there, but I have no recollection of doing so.

Last night, the Palinode put me in charge of ordering in some asian food for supper. I remember feeling quite confused in between consulting the menu in the yellow pages and talking to the lady on the telephone. I even had her read my order back to me, because something just seemed terribly off with what I was doing. I could not figure out what might be wrong, so I just went with it and hoped for the best. When the food arrived, I was stunned. I had ordered twice as much food as we ever order to the tune of $56. FIFTY-SIX DOLLARS OF ASIAN FOOD FOR TWO PEOPLE. It was ridiculous. By the end of the week, we will be so sick of noodles and bean sauces that baked potatoes are going to look pretty terrific.

The past two times that I have had to deal with a Fabulon dosage change, the more major effects lasted about a week, so I only have to contend with another three days of this brainless wonderment at the world’s turning. Until then, I plan on doing nothing more difficult than watching the world go by while I chug coffee to maintain wakefulness and work at remembering that one thing at a time that I can manage to hold in my head.

Of course, now that I have mentioned that I am supposed to remember one thing, I have lost it. Hopefully, it was not something important like having to pee or feed our cats. I guess I will find out soon enough if my chair suddenly becomes too warm or the cats are dragging their spindly bodies across the floor when I get home.

Wish me luck with the whole not wandering out into traffic thing.

(Originally posted at Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

Raise your hand if you’re struggling to function right now.

I feel like I cannot go to work or see people out in public. Over the last several days, every time I think of work or meetings that I have to go to, a burning sensation crawls up through my neck and behind my ears. Shortly after, the nausea starts. It is happening now just writing about it.

If I read for too long, the informations swarms behind my face, and I feel that I will drown in the too-muchness of it all. I turn to television, but it only seems to speak of heartbreak and violence with the occasional laugh track to tell us when the heartbreak or violence is funny. Food does not fill the holes it once did, and so I find myself craving hybrid foods that do not exist: fudge brownies that are like chocolate ice cream but do not hurt my teeth, donuts that are more like vegetarian spring rolls but still sweet, baklava that is more like mango chutney.

I like the things that I do outside of the house. There is no reason to be made so ill at the thought of them, but here I am, burning and nauseous. The same thing started happening to me late last January. I stayed at home for a week from work, battling my body’s stress signals just to make it to the bathroom. Since then, I take a medication at a low dose, and it worked well until I had a total laparoscopic hysterectomy in early July. It has proved less and less effective as time goes on, and now I feel that I am almost back where I started in January.

This week, I am going to make an appointment with my doctor to discuss an increase in my medication. Until early last week, when asked how I was, my reply was the usual Fine, and yourself?. Only a week later, it hurts to be asked that question. It makes me reflect on myself, which I sincerely do not want to do right now. I want to sleep or watch television. I do not want to know how I am feeling. It only complicates what would otherwise be a perfectly good flatline.

This is the reality of my illness that I have avoided confronting. Medications are not always perfect. I am not always perfect. If a treatment does seem perfect at first, that does not mean that it will always be perfect. This is the nature of life and change, but I do not want to fit this illness into human reality like that. I want it to be a tidy package, like a chair or a stop sign. I want it to be one unchangeable thing that I can rearrange when necessary.

I prefer to look at myself through a false lens, one that sees me as someone recovering, but it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that that is not the case. I am not recovering. This thing, this illness, is a part of my life, and going back to my doctor to alter the dose of my medication is a big step for me in admitting this to myself. I usually throw up my hands and run away when treatment does not succeed the way I had hoped. By staying the course, I am saying Yes to something to which I do not want to say yes.

I do not want to say yes, and yet I must do it.

There should be a place
where all the undesireds are winnowed out,
and we are pared down to our best essentials,
like naked babies before their first poop,
wholes before they fall to their first chaos.

I do not want to say yes.

(Originally published at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

The third time i tried to kill myself was just three months ago.

It was my most serious attempt. The one that almost took. The one where i had the most to lose.

I had been depressed for two years. Medicated for one. The year leading up to my suicide attempt was the hardest of my life. My marriage was falling apart. My children were growing in amazing, independent ways. Needing me less. Yet, needing me enough that they still occupied all my time. But, i could see the future. The hopelessness of it. Just being a mother. I had given up everything to have children.

I was young when i started having them. I had a promising career that i walked away from to be a stay at home mom. And suddenly. Suddenly i wasn’t young anymore. I was an unemployable mother with an out of date education and no work experience.

The year was a downward spiral of wrong medications, abuse of sedatives and over-consumption of alcohol. Self-medicating. Seperating from my pain and my family.

In january i was hospitalized from an accidental overdose on clonazepam. I spent five days on the psychiatric ward. Locked in. Humbled. Humiliated.

I came home and began seeing a psychiatrist and his team. Changed my medication. Put on a brave face. Lying my way through therapy and family. Assuring everyone that i was okay. Just fine. Great even.

But, i wasn’t. I was more lost than ever. I wanted out. Out of my marriage. Out of my life. Out of the heart crushing pain.

I began having an affair.

Seeking refuge in the arms of someone totally distant from my life. No part of it. It made life a little easier. For awhile. I fooled myself in to thinking that this was okay. This was an answer. This was a lie.

Hating myself. Hating everybody.

In july i found myself alone at the house for the night. I felt desperately sad. An intense loneliness that bore down on me with a pain that was so fierce my heart raced and my head pounded and my heart felt like it was breaking.

Without any pre-meditation. Without a thought for my children. I googled the perfect, deathly mix of the drugs i had on hand. I took all i had to, plus a few for good measure. I made some phone calls, twittered what i was doing. Said my goodbyes to the sky. Turned up the music and passed out on my balcony. Half in, half out of the house.

By nyjlm

Have you ever been getting over an illness and suddenly realized just how very sick you were? Over the past few weeks, as I’ve been climbing out of a black hole I fell into, I realized that I fell into it almost a year ago. I realized that I was just going through the motions on many days and simply getting by.

Since last fall I’ve felt that my paxil had stopped working for me. My psychiatrist increased the dose (I think that was in December) and then again in the spring. Sometime in early fall my daughter’s dance teacher asked us not to change in the bathroom and to use the changing room, so that others could access the bathroom. We’d been using the bathroom since she was halfway taking her clothing off to use the toilet so I had figured that it was just quicker. The teacher’s request was totally reasonable, but I nearly burst into tears and had an awful, stung sensation in my core. I think it is related to the first grade incident I talked about the other day. Ordinarily, with the help of therapy and my medication, I’ve been able to shake off this feeling and go on with life. I noticed that I still felt stung and shamed the next day. I continued to feel unwell mentally as both my sister and sister-in-law talked about moving further away from where I live. My wonderful therapist helped a lot, but often I would wonder how on earth she could tell me I was doing so well when I felt so awful. I was so tired of feeling bad, and wondered if the only way to stop it was to end my life.

Sometime this spring my therapist said that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and most likely have since I was a young child (like four or five years old). I’ve been in therapy on and off since college. I’ve been taking paxil for a number of years now, but that was the first time anyone ever mentioned GAD. I’ve always known I was tense, high strung, and a worrywort. But this, this was such a relief! Things started making sense, although it has still been a long journey.

At the end of the school year I would climb into bed and practice “benign neglect” of my children. Except I don’t think it was completely benign. I don’t believe in always entertaining my kids, but when I look back at those last six weeks of school I really didn’t interact with them much. My husband put them to sleep most of the time. I did no crafts with them, didn’t read with them. I don’t mean that I was completely isolated from them. We had snuggles of course, and I did a lot of things with them over the summer. However I really did take to bed as much as possible. And in order to avoid the things that were upsetting me, I spent huge amounts of time on the internet.

Despite feeling so trapped by the anxiety, I did do a lot this summer; I’m amazed looking back. I volunteered at one of my kids’ summer camps, I took the lactation exam, attended a conference where I had a lot of responsibilities to fulfill. And finally, I saw the psychiatrist again. Since I’ve been able to look at my symptoms under the lens of anxiety (and not depression, which is what I’d always thought was my primary problem), I described to her the physical symptoms that dog me–intense butterflies in my stomach, an anxious feeling in my chest, tingling in my arms. She peered at me from over the top of her glasses and said ” You are having Way Too Many physical symptoms and medicine can help with that. I’m going to increase your prescription again. Most people would have been on this dose two years ago.” I felt so relieved to hear this–I can’t think of a time when I haven’t experienced these symptoms more days than not! I sat in the car after the appointment, and told my husband, crying tears of relief.

I’ve been on the increased dose for a few weeks now. About two weeks ago I could tell that it was helping, because I did some things that I haven’t been able to do for the past six months–I cleaned the bathrooms. I’ve attacked clutter in the family and living rooms (clutter is a huge trigger for me). My heart races far less. When I am feeling anxious, one or two deep breaths, along with reminding myself that everything is ok, calms me down.

I keep finding myself thinking about the past year, and shaking my head. I don’t know how it got so awful. Even though I knew what to do to help myself, it was nearly impossible to do those things (get a good night’s sleep, eat well, exercise). It astonishes me that it has taken nearly a year to feel like myself again. (There are small voices whispering in my ear that others have suffered far worse years, and I feel like erasing everything I’ve written here. I’m going to resist that though.)

It is such a relief to have energy, to realize that small steps in removing clutter or doing dishes or working on projects *does* do some good. I am sure I will have bad days sprinkled among the good ones, but I’m so glad to be living more fully again, and I’m excited to dream some dreams and go after them.

Originally posted here.