#medmanagement

[manicpixieirl]

november 2, 2023

The day I had my first seizure was the scariest day of my life. I don’t even remember it. I remember waking up in a hospital bed in Greenwich, Connecticut. The sheets were scratchy and I had an IV, heart monitor, and leftover wires stuck to my head from the EEG they performed while I was in a mini-coma.

I slept for two days, I was in the hospital for five. They didn’t let me shower, I forgot how to read. I made a nurse cry when I threw a copy of a book I could not read at the wall of my hospital room and begged for her to let me take a shower. I could feel her empathy radiate towards me when she picked up the book I had just thrown and set it at the end of my bed. She was crying for me when she had to deny my fifth request for a shower -

I was so desperate to be clean of this event, I even told her I would shower with the door open and she could pop in to make sure I didn’t suffer any more mysterious convulsions. Her name was Sarah, and I could tell she felt for me when she had to tell me no, I could not wash myself clean of this. I never could.

I did not remember the battle, the seizure itself, but I had the scars - most of them on my chest, a result derived from the moment I stopped breathing altogether and the EMTs had to do that thing where they rub two shock-ya-back-to-life-thingies together and yell “CLEAR!”

That’s the scariest part of it, not remembering. Not remembering the migraine I had for two days leading up to my seizure, not remembering grabbing lunch with a friend the week before, not remembering saying goodbye to my family when they moved to Texas a month earlier. A month of memories, ash. I lost a lot, mostly memories and people. My partner at the time, who found me asphyxiating on my own vomit mid-event, broke up with me a few weeks later.

“I just… didn’t sign up to date someone who has all of this going on.”

Okay, fair. I did have a lot going on, but I am a person, and people typically have a lot going on. Especially people who had recently flatlined twice in Greenwich Fucking Connecticut. All I had to hold onto when I was in the hospital was him, and hold onto him I did. Probably a little too tightly.

While I was in my mini-coma, he was responsible for filling out my intake forms. He knew I was bipolar, yet when the form required him to check yes or no as to whether or not the patient suffers from a mental-illness, he chose to check no. I guess the town was too small and the stigma too large.

I didn’t find out that seizures and bipolar disorder were related until I had dinner with my ex-almost-girlfriend (don’t ask, that’s for another day) about a month later.

“Okay but how do you know it had to do with my bipolar disorder?”

“Quincy, I work for the state psych-ward. When we admit patients with bipolar disorder, we don’t ask them if they’ve ever had a seizure, we ask them when their last seizure was.”

Yes, chef.

I spent months thinking that my body could betray me at any moment, that I could just fall over and seize and die with no rhyme or reason. All of this because someone checked no on an intake form when they should have checked yes.

Thanks, asshole.

It knocked the breath out of me to feel someone’s shame surrounding my mood disorder, so in that moment, I promised I would never deny it myself.

So here it is; 2020 I had a life-threatening seizure that was triggered by a manic-high. As a result, I will be on anticonvulsants for the rest of my life. I have a whole lot of this going on, but it’s who I am. To deny my illness is to deny myself, and I will not move through life in denial, but in radical acceptance of who I am.

My pill container is full. Two blue pills a day, one yellow, one white, one orange and two chewy adult-vitamins; I like tasting fruit-medley in the morning when I sit with a cocktail of medications in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. It’s been three and a half years since my last seizure, my meds are working, and I have a partner who will not hesitate to check yes on an intake form if and when I have another epileptic event (it’s inevitable). I am sitting here with a thankful heart, hoping that both Sarah The Nurse and my ex-almost-girlfriend are doing well.

I haven’t had a seizure since my first, but it was bad enough to warrant my being mediated for epilepsy for the rest of my life. Every few years, I have to up my dosage and make sure they keep working the way they are supposed to. Every time I up the dosage, I experience a pretty dramatic shift in my mood. I become paranoid, irritable, and reactive. This is the first time I have upped my anticonvulsants since I sought out a separate prescription to help with my mania, and it sucks. Sometimes, I just have to admit - this shit sucks.

I started this blog to document my success story with Abilify, but I feel like as soon as I started to adjust to that, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Then, when I was just starting to get used to my ADHD meds, I was asked to readjust to a new anticonvulsant dosage. I feel like the entire time I have been blogging, I have simultaneously been adjusting - but maybe that’s just life, having a whole lot of this going on, but adjusting anyways. Maybe this isn’t a blog about med-changes after all,

maybe it’s just a blog about me.

[manicpixieirl]

october 19, 2023

One thing that most writers can agree on is that sometimes, writing hurts. Especially if you are a writer who finds yourself navigating mental illness.

Writing opens up wounds that I wish didn’t exist, and for the past month or so, I have felt so full of wounds that I couldn’t bear to open any old ones. Sometimes it’s important to take a break, especially when my definition of art also means pain. No matter how cathartic revisiting and writing about a tough moment might be, sometimes I just can’t.

I took a much-needed break and I think I am ready to revisit those old wounds, explore them, and stitch them back together - maybe they’ll heal entirely, maybe they’ll leave scars,

but scars are just stories on skin.

When I first went to visit my psychiatrist, he prescribed me Abilify to address my bipolar symptoms. I mentioned earlier that it’s been helping with my manic episodes, I wish I could say the same for depressive episodes. They seem to be a little more frequent, and it’s hard to differentiate what is situational and what is chemical.

I have experienced two profound losses in the past two months; I lost a former student to a tragic car accident, I lost my family dog to cancer. And it hurts. Writing about it hurts. But I am here and I am feeling and I am so lucky to be feeling in this world when so many people are numb.

I have been focusing more on the art of feeling than the art of writing; setting the joint down when I am experiencing an intense emotion, taking the time to work through panic attacks rather than smoke them away.

As I write this, I am on my way home from a week-long vacation and it’s the longest I’ve gone without smoking in about six months. I feel great, and although I experienced a day of very intense emotion on my final day, I navigated it sober. I learned how to let people into my pain, I finally realized that I don't have to do it alone. Wounds aren’t meant to be bandaged in singularity, we are meant to heal with our communities- not in numb isolation.

I’ve been focusing more on my emotional recovery, especially navigating a healthy relationship with substances, more than I have been focusing on writing. It was important to take a break and focus on bringing myself back into balance. Given my diagnosis, I will likely take many breaks, my survival as an artist and a human depends on it.

As I write this, I have been sober from my drug of choice, alcohol, for five days, five months, and five days. 555 in numerology means change. I have changed and I am ready to make another. Although I haven’t completely quit smoking weed, I have noticed that the moments where I would pick up the lighter are the same moments that I would pick up the bottle. The only difference is that instead of blacking out and being a literal menace to society, I am either eating or sleeping. Either way, I am numb and not experiencing life. I am not quite sure whether or not I want to quit, but I do know that I want to quit using it as an escape. This week has shown me that feeling is worth it, that I’m not only able to feel, I am able to feel and survive the intensity of it.

I spent twenty-six years terrified of my own emotional reactions to my feelings. I remember openly weeping in an Applebees when I was fourteen, unable to still my sobs over strawberry lemonade because I had done something to let my parents down. I remember screaming at my mom when I was in seventh grade, I don’t remember what about but I do remember that she was pregnant and I wouldn’t stop screaming until I lost my voice. All I can remember about my childhood is being happy or sad, intensely, and never both at the same time. I was teeter- tottering on one side or the other. Always. I feel so much empathy for my parents, it couldn’t have been easy to raise an undiagnosed, emotional-tornado.

I had my first drink when I was fourteen, I was also fourteen the first time I smoked. I remember feeling normal when I drank. Less heightened, less myself. So whenever I felt scared of myself and had access to alcohol, a blunt, or even an excess of food, I would use it as a way to disconnect from myself. And here I am, twenty-seven, and I feel like I don’t know myself at all now that the impulsivity and emotional reactions have lulled into manageable feelings.

I may not know this new version of myself yet, but I sure am excited to put in the work to meet myself exactly where I am. I don’t think “here” is such a terrible place to be.

[manicpixieirl]

october 15, 2023

I haven’t written in a few weeks, I think it’s because I’m afraid of what will come up if I open myself up to it. I’ve been good about consistently posting up until now. Part of my pause was purely ego, I didn’t know if something was worth writing if I wasn’t posting it. I didn’t write, I’ve been afraid to admit that I don’t think I’ve been taking as good of care of myself as I know I could be. I don’t say this in judgment, I say it in observation of myself- I know I could be doing better. I’ve been wondering what the point is.

I track my moods every day, on a scale of negative two to positive two. Negative two: “I really do not want to exist right now.” Positive two: “Nothing can fucking stand in my way.” I journal about the feelings associated with each number I give myself, lately my journal has been full of negative-one reflections. I was hoping that when I started this blog, it would reflect my progress. I was equating meditation with progression. This was intended to be a reflection of how well I was doing, instead it is a reflection of how hard this is. I wish I had positive news to share, it’s discouraging to share that this is a LOT harder than I thought it would be.

If anything, I owe myself honesty and consistency. I owe it to myself to admit that med-management isn’t perfect and being bipolar is fucking hard. I just need to say it; this is hard. I feel like there was a part of me that thought that taking meds would cure it, take away the negative-one days altogether, but after a few weeks of depression, isolation, and reflection, I don’t think that’s the point at all.

I think the point is to be aware of the days and to acknowledge that they will pass. The point is that I am eventually going to feel my feelings whether I like it or not, so I might as well write. I think the point is awareness.

I am thankful for this awareness, it will guide me to my next day. No matter where my mood falls on the scale, I can handle it, I can write about it, I can share it. That is the whole point.

[manicpixieirl]

september 17, 2023

I was a teacher for four years before I decided to switch careers. The empathy of it all was too much for me.

If you really want to know how much some children go through, teach middle school in a small town. I’ve been called away from weekend bar-be-ques because a student of mine overdosed. I’ve lost sleep over the families who cannot afford heat during a Maine winter, so they risk heating their home with space heaters; the families who wonder how they will pay their electric bill and where their next meal will come from.

I had to quit teaching because of that; because of the empathy and grief I felt for children who were not permanent fixtures in my life, but passersby. It began to suffocate me. I was pouring into children that did not belong to me, I was pouring into everything except for myself. I was twenty-five when I quit.

After I quit teaching, I thought I was finished feeling too much for people- I thought I was feeling just the right amount, but no one tells you how much your body feels when an old student dies.

In Education 101, my professor warned my class about becoming too involved in a student’s life. What they didn’t tell me is that throughout the course of my career, whether I retire as a teacher or quit after four years, I would have a student die. And no one taught me how to navigate this specific grief, the grief of losing someone I haven’t seen in a year, yet I know I felt love for them and that they looked up to me.

No one told me how I would feel when I remembered that I still have the craft they made for me in eighth grade art class in 2019, but now they are dead and their art feels dead in my hands when I hold it.

Now they’re gone, and I’m a wreck but I don’t know if I have the right to be, because I haven’t seen them in a year.

I lost my first student to a tragic car accident last weekend. There is nothing insightful about this post, I have no wisdom to offer - just grief. Immense, indescribable grief for a person who I know had a mark to leave on this world bigger than the tire tracks on route two, the vehicle braking too hard in their last seconds.

I am having a hard time driving, I think about the life lost every time that I have gotten behind the wheel since I heard she died…

.. Since I heard she died.

I heard she died.

She died.

The empathy of this all is too much.

[manicpixieirl]

august 15, 2023

Today was a hard day. It didn’t start out that way, but it ended up veering off course, deviating from the plan.

Now that I’m at the day’s tail end, I can see that it was just a hard day, not very, very hard. I think I made it a little harder than it needed to be.

I had a plan, I had a plan, I had a plan. Life had another plan.

This morning, I ran over a rock, popped my back-right tire on my way out of town, and have essentially been crying since 9:30 in the morning. As I type this, it’s 8pm and I’ve finally settled down.

The aforementioned tire is not a metaphorical tire on the car of life- I deadass popped a tire on my ‘09 accord and it sent me into a spiral that has had me looking for reasons to cry all day long.

All day my brain has felt like a toilet bowl and my thoughts kept circling the drain of this shit morning -

Why me?

Why now?

Of course this would happen.

How could I have avoided that?

While I was busy beating myself up, my mom was in the other room, trying to help me come up with solutions when she could have been enjoying her vacation.

My mom, dad, and youngest brother came to visit for the week and I should have been happy to get a few more hours in with them while we waited on AAA. Instead, I was in the kitchen, beating myself up and feeling useless.

I kept telling her I was sorry for crying and freaking out, that I didn’t know what was wrong or why I was so upset. I had handled so many car breakdowns on my own before this.

How am I 27 and crying to mommy over a flat tire? Why am I upset about needing to spend money I know I have? Why am I giving a rock - a fucking rock (a thing that neither lives nor breathes) - this type of control over my day?

That’s because it wasn’t about the tire. It wasn’t about the rock.

I had felt a depressive low creeping in the night before; I went to bed at 8:30, that’s how I can normally predict the downshift in my mood from balanced to depressed.

I was so tired, then I woke up tired, and then I hit a rock.

I could feel this small deviation from my expectations of the day making me sink even lower, further within myself and away from the person who was trying to help me. I’m sorry, mom.

I kept telling myself I was

Stupid.

Stupid.

Stupid.

I’m so stupid.

When I should have been saying

Sad.

Sad.

Sad.

I’m so sad.

It’s hard to write right now, I want to be in bed, I want to be asleep, but I also owe it to myself to write about my day rather than forget it. I owe it to the people who are reading this blog. This is what a low day looks like; confusing stupid for sad.

How can I learn from it? I don’t know if I can. I think there will always be days where I feel stupid when I am really just sad. That’s a part of being me, being able to look back at my day and say “Man, I think that blown-out tire was harder to handle today because I am feeling low.”

Tomorrow is a new day, and I might pop another tire, and it might make me sad, but it’s okay to be sad.

I can’t just say, “that was hard, I was low,” and move on.

Instead I’ll say,

“That was hard,

I was low,

I forgive myself for being sad, sad, so sad,

and thank you mom for finding solutions when I couldn’t see past my tears.”

[manicpixieirl]

august 7, 2023

I met my partner before we were ready for each other. Our lives weaved in and out of each other's for six years before we would get to know each other well enough for each of us to decide to be the other's person.

Sometimes God knows what we need when we don’t. The Universe also knows we need time to grow into ourselves before we can access what is destined for us. Lord knows, I needed tons of time (six years, approximately). I needed time to level out, and I needed a gut-punch (or three) before I would grow to love myself enough to let someone else love me.

The first time I met Kyle I was nineteen, living out of state and visiting my family for Christmas. In regards to where I was at in terms of my mental illness, I was an undiagnosed, drunken, mess simultaneously numbing and destroying everything in my path.

I met him on a weeknight during Christmas break of 2015. Not many people were drinking but I was already drunk, and in a very serious relationship with a guy from back home. A friend who is no longer a friend walked into his house with me. I would eventually move down the street from that house, into my first studio apartment, after running away from the relationship I was in, almost three years later.

I was drunk and lonely at some random frat house on a random Tuesday night and I had no idea that the love of my life was upstairs playing video games, completely oblivious to the fact that the love of his life, drunk off her ass, had just walked in the door. Neither of us knew what we would grow to mean to each other, and on that night he was just a boy and I was out of my mind.

I quit drinking a little over five years ago, when I totaled my car after tripling the legal limit and side-swiping a cop car in the process. I’m not ashamed of it, I’m better for it now. I wouldn’t be sober without that event, it helped me to put down the bottle and pick myself up for a change. I would mark wandering into a random frat house on a Tuesday night, drunk off my ass, as the second best thing that happened to me. It gave me a starting point, an embarrassing, yet beautiful narrative of how Kyle and I met, and how long it took us to meet again and understand why we needed to.

In my drunken daze, I had become bored with whatever was going on downstairs and wanted to sleep. I found Kyle in his room playing video games, his room was so clean. A frat boy who cleans his room? Yippee.

I will be very honest when I say I do not remember what happened next. It’s been told to me several times and none of this is a firsthand account of events, more like a collection of every vantage point people saw me from on a night where I couldn’t see myself.

Unfortunately, nights where I could not see myself were common. I think that’s why I blacked out so much, drank to the point of no return, because deep down I knew I could never outrun what existed within, I could only color over the memories with whatever was in the nearest keg. Why bother dealing with yourself when you can just make her go away?

I blacked out the first night I met Kyle. I don’t have the beauty of knowing how I first felt when I saw him. If I knew that six years later he would be mine and eight years he still would be, would I have drank any less than that night? No. Because I was not ready for him.

I don’t remember meeting Kyle and that is reason enough to hate alcohol. But I do remember meeting him the second time, and the third, and I remember how it felt when he kissed me for the first time after driving all night in a snowstorm, so I’ll take what I do remember and leave what I don’t.

Kyle, I know you’re reading this. I am sorry I don’t remember meeting you, but I remember every way you’ve made me feel since. I remember every laugh and tear and I remember how frustrated I was the first time you taught me how to play Rummy and wouldn’t let me win. I remember meeting your parents for the first time and driving home on Christmas. I remember so much of you that you will be with me forever. And that is enough.

I stumbled into Kyle’s room, slurred “Caaaan I watch-ch youuu play-ye video gamezzz?”

“Sure,” he was, and still is, too nice to say no sometimes.

I layed on his bed and passed out. He called his girlfriend to let her know that some random teenager crawled into his bed and had fallen asleep. He promised her that nothing sketchy was going on, some girl from out of state just showed up and before he knew it, she was napping in his bed.

Kyle must have always been the most loyal, loving and trustworthy dude, because his girlfriend believed him; it was a nonissue. They both let me sleep and asked my friend who is no longer my friend to drive me home. I threw up spaghetti in her car on the way home.

I was not ready for him. He could not handle me; I had to learn how to handle myself.

We’d both undergo love, loss, heartache and regrowth before I could sleep in his bed without being an invasive species that just crawled in from Kentucky.

I wasn’t ready for Kyle the second time I met him, or the third, but by the fourth time our paths crossed, it felt less like falling in love and more like falling into something that has always been waiting for me.

I just had to take the time to get, and practice, being better first.

Sometimes what we need already exists in the periphery of our own world. We just have to put down the bottle (whatever our bottles might contain) and open our eyes. Allow the possibility of growth to bring you closer to the person that took care of you when you just wanted a place to sleep, on a dark Tuesday night.

[manicpixieirl]

august 1, 2023

Today I am angry.

Today was a beautiful day. I went to the beach, I swam with my friends and I let the waves rock and cradle me. Today was the perfect day and this evening has been less than. I am letting the anger of the past few minutes bleed into the rest of my day; contaminating it like red ink on a perfect essay; undoing the good like a loose thread on my favorite sweater.

I don’t feel anger as often as I feel my other emotions. I am sad more than I am angry, I also feel happiness more often than I feel anger. But when I’m angry, it lasts longer than any other emotion.

Anger grows in the pit of my stomach and eats at my body from the inside out. I fixate on it, my anger becomes manic and my mania makes me feel like anger is driving and I’m in the passenger seat, watching as anger destroys everything in my path.

Anger will put me in the backseat, bypassing an invitation to view things through the windshield.

I am the oldest of four kids. My siblings, who have seen more of my outbursts and blackouts than any other trinity, used to call the third row of a car the “very, very back.” Today, I feel myself withdrawing into the “very, very back” of my mind. As I write this, I feel extremely grateful to those three, whom I know have been impacted by growing up with an older sister that suffers from bipolar disorder. C, S, and B, I love you. Thank you for loving me even on the days where I am in the very, very backseat of myself.

Right now, I am still driving but I can hear the whisper of anger. I can feel its attempts to coerce me into giving up the driver’s seat.

Anger and I are on a drive, I pull over and it says, “Let me drive, you’ll be safer in the back.”

Too many times I have believed anger, and just as many times I have lost myself in the backseat while I let anger take the wheel. I thought medication would make me numb, it’s moments like these that remind me that my feelings are still intact and some most of them are more amplified than others.

I’ve felt anger to the point of dissociation a handful of times; blacking out because I felt out of control in a situation that no one would let me control. I’ve had knuckles bloodied by broken glass windows and one time I accidentally slammed someone’s hand in a door because I was too afraid to watch them leave.

What is it they say about anger being a secondary emotion? Is it really an emotion that follows another, or is it an emotion all on its own?

Whoever said anger is a secondary emotion was full of shit.

I’ve never blacked out from being too happy or too depressed. I have blacked out in a rage. When it comes to being bipolar, the rage is the most embarrassing thing to navigate. I’ve lost hours of my life to complete darkness because I got so mad that someone wouldn’t turn the car radio down. I am embarrassed of my ability to snap in two within seconds, one half of myself so withdrawn that I can’t even see.

I end up being overcome by an inability to access the light that burned so brightly not even an hour beforehand.

This post isn’t about excusing my anger and it’s not an excuse for all the times I’ve blacked out in a rage; it’s about how important it is to prevent myself from getting there in the first place. At the end of the day, I am responsible for my behavior whether I remember what I did or not.

I am responsible for every time I yelled at my siblings until they cried, I am responsible for slamming another person’s hand in a door, I am responsible for every bloody knuckle and broken windowpane. I am sorry to those I have hurt in my angry moments, and I extend an apology to my younger self, for not knowing how to protect myself from myself.

Today, instead of splitting in two, I sat and I wrote. By writing this, I have maintained my position in the driver’s seat. I am able to remember the morning I spent on the beach, free of ink stains and loose threads. Today, I prevented myself from getting there; my knuckles are unbloodied and no one’s hand is stuck in a door hinge. Life goes on and anger fades,

I just have to take the time to make sure I take my anger and buckle it’s ass in the “very, very back.”

[askatherapist-blog]

#hearingvoices #schizophrenia #hallucinations #delusions #medmanagement #psychiatrist #therapy #creativity #criminalminds #drspencerreid #mentalillness #endthestigma #askatherapist #seekhelp