Confucious Says...

There are times in one's life when you sit back and wonder how you got to where you are; sometimes it seems as if the road was a slowly-travelled one, with twists and turns, and other times it seems as if it was just a straight ride down hill, taking very little time and making you hold on with both hands.

I'm not sure which of those got me where I am: probably a combination of both. But just when I thought things couldn't get more ... interesting, they did.

My therapist has been pushing the diagnosis of bipolar disorder on me with disturbing frequency; I was aware of this right from the beginning, as comorbid diagnoses are common. However he said that I was exhibiting "cyclothemic bipolar", which is just a mild form of the disorder, and I thought, hey, I can deal with that. I was already taking medication to control depression and impulse control for the Borderline Personality Disorder, and the medications would cross over into the Bipolar Disorder. Ok, no problem. I don't LIKE the label, but if he wants to write that on his little yellow chart, we'll just go ahead and let him, since my insurance company will pay for therapy for Bipolar Disorder but NOT BPD therapy. This strikes me as ludicrous since therapy has proven helpful for BPD at a much higher percentage rate than it does for Bipolar Disorder, which is generally a chemically treated disorder.

Well, it turns out, the therapist was right~~and wrong. I am bipolar, but not cyclothemic. I've spent the past six weeks fighting tooth and nail to pull myself out of a depressive cycle that continues to suck me down in ways that I never dreamed possible. How can one's outlook continue to look so bleak when you have EXACTLY the same things you had six months ago? Have you heard those cheesy commercials where they say, "depression hurts"? It does. Damn, it does. I ache inside, and outside. My muscles have become knotted to an extent that my massage therapist has not experienced before. I keep going, she keeps working, and just keeps saying, "this is something I have not seen....". My chiropractor keeps working and looks at me with pity in his face. I hate pity. I know he cares. He pats my shoulder and tells me to come back when I need to. He does what he can but the long and the short of it is that no one seems to be able to do anything that makes a significant difference, and I just don't know WHY.

My therapist says that I'm not even in the bottom zone yet. The bottom zone, or "black" zone, is suicidal, when all thoughts of life and finding it worthy, are finished. I'm currently in the "brown" zone. Whoopy. What I don't get...is why.

WHY? I don't want to be like this. I don't want to feel the clenching fear of abandonment; I don't want to feel the tightening of depression in my guts; I don't want to feel the knotting of muscles in the base of my skull as the headaches come, day after day. I don't want to sit in my room for hours on end, loathe to come out and speak....because I don't know when it will end.

I thought this was as bad as it would get. But I was wrong; this weekend it got worse. The joy of medications has smacked me in the head in a way that is just so terribly, horrifically ironic:

It's taking my ability to speak coherently. The side effects sheet lists this as "general cognitive impairment", which usually means you cannot think of the correct word to use in a certain sentence.
For example, last night as I sat and cried, I was telling my husband how this could affect me, as I was getting ready to coach an all-star team of young men, and mentioned that my ability to speak clearly and concisely was important, as it would be the first thing that started to form their initial ________ of me. I wanted to portray a certain ________. For the life of me, as I sat and stared him in the face, I could NOT come up with the word, "image". Simple word ... but it was just not there. And this happens several times on a daily basis. But it got WORSE. By GOD, it got WORSE.

Rather than just not being able to find the words I wanted, suddenly, the WRONG words were coming out! I would think something, and when I went to say it, something absolutely different was coming out. "We're having nachos for dinner; do you think that's a good clearance"? WTF? I don't know how many times that happened this weekend. But for someone like me, who's spent her entire life with COMMUNICATION of the LANGUAGE as her greatest pride, this is truly, truly, a devastating blow.

And it continues: shortly before I completely lost my mind and freaked out, the words started coming out jumbled up. "That's what I think" comes out as "Think what I that". I've had enough.

So in typical BPD/bipolar fashion, I lost control, jumped up, ran out of the room, upstairs, slammed the bedroom door and stood in a corner for a while trying not to hyperventilate, and making deals with God. I spent the next 30 minutes after that sitting on the lid of the toilet, talking to my husband, who, bless his heart, desperately wants to help me, but is as helpless as I am.

In our family, we pride ourselves on our ability to communicate using the spoken word. Even BIG words. I've lost that. No big ones anymore. Just read this post, and the previous ones as a testament to that. It takes me back to a time that's equally as painful: my mother's illness and death.

She developed ALS~Lou Gerhig's Disease~in around 1987. She was a bright and animated woman with a gift for speech, and a writer. One of the first things to go was her ability to conduct interviews, as her speech became slurred when her tongue started to paralyze. That ended her writing career. From there, I shared her ride through the debilitating illness that eventually took her speech entirely, then her general muscle strength, and ability to swallow, walk, and breathe. A wretchedly unpleasant death.

So that's my weekend. And here I thought the clouds were finally lifting....I really did.

Sunrise, Sunset....

Oh why, oh why do we have days when we awaken before the crack of dawn with the inability to get back to sleep?

Why do our brains suddenly switch on as our asses hit the cold plastic of a toilet seat?

This is how my morning started, and I'm not impressed. At 4:23am my eyes snapped open and my mind went into high gear and that was that. I could not, for the life of me, get back to sleep. Of course, this is a Catch-22 Situation, as the harder you try to sleep, the worse it becomes, as you obsess about the fact that you're NOT sleeping and become more and more wakeful; NO, don't think about that, it's too stressful, you won't get back to sleep! Try thinking of something soothing! Holidays...yes, vacations, restful vacations ... where to go ... too expensive ... finances ... gotta cut back ... Oooo .... stress ... back to square one! Keanu Reeves ... smiling ... this is nice ... relaxing ... oh he's coming to my door ... this is better ... snuggle down ... oops, husband is home ... DAMN! Ok, I wasn't really thinking about Keanu Reeves because I think my husband is really hot, but you get the picture.

The worst part of all this is that it's now 7:23 and I'm wrecked. What the hell am I supposed to do now? I've checked all my online groups; read the newspaper; posted here; what am I supposed to do? I'm TIRED, dammit! And....still in the midst of an emotional rollercoaster that's been flinging me around since Christmas (lithium here we come ... blah).

Today is the 19th birthday of the young lady staying with us. I could get up and bake her a cake if I wasn't hell-bent on killing her.....

With Engineering-Like Precision.....

My husband rocks.

I feel sorry for all the women in the world who are never going to experience just how much he rocks (which is all of you), because if you ever tried, I'd scratch your eyes out.

Despite a horrid couple of weeks, the one thing that never changes is the absolutely furniture-shaking, warranty-voiding, back-ruining, fan-FUCKING-tastic mattress gymnastics that take place four times a week or so....

And to you I say: NEENER NEENER NEENER!

Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone??

So I didn't do so well coming back with a perky post yesterday; I got busy organizing Christmas decorations into different rubbermaid tubs, according to room and "tree". Next year it should be MUCH easier! But that's not what this is about. And yes, it's late. Leave me alone.

I've given birth to an 18-year-old girl. She is the same one I wrote about in my second post and her life has gone to hell in a hand basket over the past few months and she has no where to live. Her parents have disowned her-and me, being me, couldn't bear the idea of her being out on the street. I let it go down to the last week...7 days...of her trying to find somewhere else to go, but...I think I always knew it was going to end up like this.

She couldn't stand being so far away from her family; she hated the state and the school she was in. She was miserable. She couldn't stay. She NEEDED to come home and be with her family, who is in crisis. Except her family is the root of the problems: an alcoholic, drug-addicted, abusing dickhead, a live-in psychotic witch of a step-monster and a passal of kids....all struggling to make it appear as if this is a normally functioning family.

This is not a normally functioning family. That became abundantly clear the night he decided my ever-so-passive 17-old-son was some sort of threat to his family, and in a drunken rage, decided to kill him...and raced out into the street screaming that he was going to beat him to death. The 18-year-old-girl yelled for my son to get in the car so she could get them away...and after the father beat the hell out of the car, they did. Long story short, the cops were called, believed the father over the kids AND us (we were sober, THEY were not...figure that out)...and the girl, the very next day, was on her way to college. And the family fell apart, the parents split up amid accusations of abuse and the other kids were more or less farmed out to people who would get them to school on time. And the 18 YO....well, she worked hard, finished an entire freshman year in one semester, did it with all A's and one B, and said, "I MUST come back and fix my family". Poor misguided thing.

But her family will have nothing to do with her. She's been disowned. Her father has told her he will have nothing to do with her and she may not contact her sister or brothers. She has no home. She had no where to go and I couldn't let her live in the gutter...so she's with me. She sees her grandmother and cousins occasionally, but for now she's with me. And yes, she's still dating my son and yes, it's driving me nuts because she treats him as if they're married and she's nagging the hell out of him and SOMEONE PLEASE SHOOT ME.

And what has this got to do with the dog?

She's ruining my dog. For 16 hours a day, she talks baby talk to my dog. There's no discipline, and it's constant. You cannot believe it. Do you know how much an 18 YO girl can talk? A LOT. She does it NON STOP. Babytalk...and just his name....over and over and over....

"I wuv you...I wuv you.....Bwuno....Bwuno...(then higher pitched)....BWWUNOOO..." and it goes on all day.

Later on, as he's jumping on her, she comments that he's much better behaved when WE'RE around and she can't figure that out as SHE tells him to get down when he's jumping all over HER!

Well, yes, but it consists of, "Get DOWN, Bwuno, you can't jump on me, that's a NO for you, now stay down and don't get my shirt dirty".

Shall we discuss how much of that, in the babykins voice, "Bwuno" really understood? He understood, "The Nice Girl is talking to me again!"

She's also taught him to "shake hands". Ok, he doesn't really shake hands, he just paws at you while you pet him. Now lets discuss if this pleases anyone else in the family besides HER. NO! NO NO NO! My husband keeps threatening to tie soup cans to his ankles.....

She needs a job and she's smart as a whip. Anyone have any openings??? Anyone? ANYTHING???

Happy Freakin' SOMETHING

Today has to be a happy post; I don't know what it's going to be yet, so I'm not posting til I damned well have one.


So I'm going downstairs to eat cereal, then I'm going to get coffee, and if I haven't found something happy to write about, I'll damned well make something up!

What It's Really Like....Sometimes

So this stupid-ass illness is beating me up.

I've spent the past ten days fighting it, tooth and nail. Sat with my hands knotted in my hair in a corner of the sofa; rocked in a chair in my room with my eyes closed, panting; I sat on the bed and immersed myself in as much reading as I could, simply to escape my mind. I stood in church, shifting from one foot to the other, desperately willing myself not to scream out loud, begging God to deliver me from the grip of hell this disease has taken on my mind. I looked out windows at the sky and clouds and forced my breathing to slow, concentrating on NOT hyperventilating. I took anti-emetics to get rid of the nausea and still I know that if someone, something touches me, I'll explode and fly off in so many thousands of pieces. I dug my nails into my arms to stop myself from lashing out at the person closest to me because HE DOESN'T DESERVE IT, and I can't allow it to happen.

I stood in the shower and lost track of what was water, and what were tears. I used lorazepam as a last-ditch effort to stop the mania that was rolling over me in fucking WAVE AFTER FUCKING WAVE and still it kept on.....like nothing I've experienced in nearly a year.

And I did not explode. I did not lash out. Oh gawd, it would have been so easy......to simply kick and swear and curse at the man who loves and helps me, but I cannot because he's my link to sanity and the joy in life when the mania's at bay. He's what stands between my life being worth something and my life being worth nothing at all. And he helped me...we have this "thing" we do that helps, that I'm not willing to share just yet, but it helped, and I'm calmer now, for a while. Hopefully it will last longer than a day.

So I kept it in--or rather, under control; under control because that's what I HAVE to do. I'm an ADULT and I fight this stupid illness as rationally as I can. I try desperately not to let it take over my husband and my family and I beg him to understand and not be hurt when he's done his best to help me and at the end of it all....it's still there....the illness is just still there.....an ugly, wicked, persistent scar that simply won't go away.

Addendum to "And Your Little Dog Too"

It's important to note that after this rant, I went back to the forum and closed the thread in as civilized a manner as possible; shortly after that, I received a note from the Forum Administrator, telling me that she felt I had handled the situation well and that she did indeed feel that there had been significant progress on my part over the past while.

Unfortunately or fortunately for me, validation has always been an important part of my make-up, so having her tell me this made a huge difference in how I perceived the entire communication.
Now I'm HAPPY again (this is so sad)!

And Your Little Dog Too

You know what I hate about support groups?

They suck you in. They suck you in with guidelines and rules and
sticky notes and administrators and moderators.

They give long, drawn out, detailed posts of what IS and IS NOT
acceptable. They will list LINK after LINK of all these ways to
improve your mental health, like ten forms of twisted thinking, rules
of engagement, five steps, the four agreements, etc. So you read. You
read and read and read. And people post ad nauseum. And you read their
posts and you think, "These people are FEKKED". But so am I. So you
keep reading.

Some of the people are more fekked up than even YOU are...so you keep
reading. And you get all these fabulous answers from the moderators
and administrators who will guide them through their hardships hour
after hour after hour, even though some of these people are either a)
completely dense, or b) certifiably insane.

So after you've been there a while, you start answering questions,
too. You get all cocky from listening and think, hey, I can help! And
you answer, too! And you start feeling better about yourself and your
chest puffs out and you think, DAMN! I might just be GETTING somewhere
with this incrediby SCREWED UP disease that's FUCKING THE LIFEBLOOD
outta me. And you allow yourself to hope. **Take note here: mistake #1**

So you go out on a limb and think you might be ready to ask them to
help you with some of the serious issues you have regarding your own
life. So you go ahead and post.**Take note here: mistake #2** And low
and behold, some really interesting things happen. First off, the
venerable administrators and moderators that were so visible in
helping the idjits simply disappear. No answers for you! And the
answers I get relate less to the questions at hand, and more to do
with a desecration of my personality, which apparently is found sadly
lacking and is summed up as "a jerk". But me, never being one to give
up easily, goes back again, and posts yet again.....another long,
well-thought-out post, **mistake #3**, hoping that people will see
that they've seen something wrong, and that they're missing the big
picture and that I need some answers....

But it doesn't happen.

And I'm left sitting here, in the "SUPPORT FORUM" where I've been
labelled a jerk for one of my bpd behaviours which I've admitted to
because I'm working in order to change it. And not one of the
moderators nor Administrators has stepped in to make a statement.

Which leads me to think...

That the eleven years that my ex husband spent telling me I was shit
under his heal...was probably right.

God Bless Support Forums.

I'm Baaaackkkk

Yup it's been a while, and I have some excuses but they only extend up until two weeks ago. As of the first of the year, I have no excuse for not being here other than procrastination.

Today's entry, at least this one right here, is gonna be a short one because I'm in HELL. H-E-DOUBLE HOCKEY STICKS.

I've awakened every day for the past ten days or so with a headache. Today is the worst so far. Aside from being painful, it's exhausting, and defeating. Eventually you just wanna give up, but...give up what? Blah.

Here's why:

I've been on a medication for 20 years. I used to take high amounts of it, but over time it has been reduced. It's no longer serving any function for me and I take a different medication in it's place that is more effective and has less side effects. The problem? This drug has wrapped itself around my nerve center and coming off it is brutal. For a long time I was on a dose that was low enough not to "do" anything for me, except stop me from getting sick from withdrawl. But now I'm trying to get rid of it entirely. Oh Dear Gawd.

So every other night, I don't take it. And every day I wake up with a headache...but every OTHER day I am nauseated. I'm anxious. Stress builds within me until it feels as if my head is going to explode. You know what an overfilled balloon is like when it finally goes? Well, that's what it's going to be like with me! One of these days....and I shake beyond belief. I actually use myself for entertainment. When I start shaking this badly, I simply serve peas for dinner, then watch myself attempt to eat them with a fork.......

I'm sick.

This post is for every person who thinks that "drugs" are the answer. Sometimes they are. I take a bunch...but let me tell you, explore other options; make sure there are no other ways of dealing with your problem before you have to take a drug that's going to screw you up the way this one has screwed me up.

The name of this vicious, vile, abhorrent drug: Elavil. Generic name? Amitriptyline. When you take it, it's a piece of cake, at least it was for me. Gave me a dry mouth and caused weight gain, but all in all was a pretty benign drug used to control migraine. But coming off this bastard is a whole different ball game. At one point I was taking 150 mg nightly. I was a zombie. For the past three years, I have been taking 50 mg, and have gradually reduced it to 10 mg in an effort to get off it. TEN FREAKIN' MILLIGRAMS and it's MAKING ME SICK to get off. This is just...nuts.

Why did I choose to write about this today? Because I don't know what to do. There's nothing to fix it, short of staying on it for the rest of my life, and I hate taking pills. Getting rid of one is always a bonus. I just needed to vent, and I have so many other things waiting in the wings to vent about but shit, here I sit, head pounding, hands shaking, crying my freakin' head off, writing about TEN MILLIGRAMS OF ELAVIL.