Ticking
It has been seven months since I last self injured. It has been five months since I dropped everything and ran away. It has been four months since I was last hospitalized. Three months since I started my current medication regime. In two months I’ll be attempting to return to my old life.
I’ve been busy. A million different projects keeping me occupied. My mother told me not to overwhelm myself, to take it easy if I’m doing too much, but I have to do this, I have to make sure I’m ready to live again, and the only way to know if I’m getting better is to push myself.
But I’m afraid. I’m afraid of falling apart again. I feel like I’m on the edge between okay and not okay, and all it takes is one little thing, or nothing at all, to knock me back down into being in a bad way.
I’ve been re-reading Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. I was in high school when my Creative Writing teacher recommended it to me, based on what I’d written in our daily journal assignments. I don’t think I appreciated it then the way I do now. There are so many things I connect with in that book, and I keep thinking to myself that I need to have my mother read it, so that maybe she can understand.
I’ve never done drugs before, but I think that if I did, I’d want to do something hard and destructive. I would do it to destroy myself.
It’s like I’m always fighting with myself. I tell myself, I’m never going to be anything in life. I tell myself I better hurry and succeed now, because I’m not going to have forever. In high school I was convinced that I would be dead before I turned 18, and I was quite stunned to make it past there.
I just wish there were a way to know the future. To know if I’m going to be okay or if I’m going to relapse. To prepare myself, at least. And mental illness feels like a death sentence because I can’t make any plans for the future, because there’s a realistic chance I won’t be able to follow through with those plans.
People see me and they think I’m okay. I go to class. I go to dinner. I go to the mall. I laugh. I smile. But I’m not okay. I’m a time bomb.
Ticking..
Sleepless
I’ve had horrible sleep habits since I moved back in with my parents, mostly because I’ve not really had much to do. I’d stay up until 3am and sleep in until 2pm and it wouldn’t matter because I never left the house anyway except for doctors appointments. My life has become busier in the past month so now I’m trying to get back into healthier sleep habits but it’s not working.
The past few days I’ve been running on four hours of sleep. I’ll wake up early to go to school, but then when I get back home I’m sluggish and unproductive. Tired, but not quite tired enough to sleep, and I tell myself not to sleep anyway because it’ll just slow off my schedule even further. Then around 10pm I’m suddenly struck by a bout of creativity and productivity, and, being that I’ve just spent most of the day doing nothing useful, I don’t want to waste such energy. So I work on blogs or stories or other such things, and in a few hours the energy dies down. But, although tired, I still can’t sleep. I’m restless. I toss and turn. My mind fills with all these other things I need to be doing. And before I know it it’s five am and I realize I need to be up again in a few hours.
I’m hesitant to admit this might be the beginning of hypomania. I’ve always argued that I’m not bipolar, that I don’t get mania, but then there’s the occasional bout of something I don’t understand. And therein lies the key factor — I don’t understand mania, I still don’t have a firm grasp on it, and thus I have a hard time recognizing it.
And it’s all very frustration because I was doing better dammit, why does this always happen when I’m doing better?
It could just be nothing. It could just be creativity and sleeplessness. I don’t have rapid speech. I don’t have grandiosity. No reckless behavior. And I am tired. I just can’t sleep. But mental illness makes you paranoid. It makes you not trust anything out of the ordinary, because it could become something worse, because it could be something else wrong, something else to screw things up, something else that needs fixing.
Trying
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind, dragging me irresistibly toward January, when I’ll be moving four thousand miles away to attend university. January is when I have to be able to stand on my own two feet. In my mind, January is when I have to be cured.
Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, cannot be cured. You live with them for your entire life. Sometimes they go into hiding. Sometimes you forget. Sometimes you think you’re okay, you’re better, and then they strike without warning.
It’s hard to come to terms with. With my current combination of medications and therapy, I seem to be stabilized. I seem to be mostly okay. But every once in a while I get struck down by depression, every once in a while I get ambushed by anxiety, which makes me stress even more because I become convinced that I’m not okay, that I’ll never be okay.
I’m moving away in less than three months and I’m terrified. I’m terrified that I’m going to screw things up again.
And I tell people I’m going back, and they ask me, “Are you sure that you’re ready?” And I tell them, I don’t know. I won’t know until I get there. And that’s the point. I can’t just sit around waiting to get better. I can’t just stop living until I’m cured. The only way I’ll know if I’m better is if I go out and live. You can’t succeed if you’re too afraid to try.
I’d rather fail at doing something than succeed at doing nothing.
Moving Forward
Last week I started on 25mg of Zoloft and increased my Lithium to 900mg (300 in the morning, 600 at night). It’s always perplexed me how my doctors seem more concerned with treating my mania rather than my depression, when I’ve never really suffered from mania and the depression is usually more debilitating. Anyone I know who has bipolar has said they’d rather be manic than depressed.
I’ve been feeling generally queasy and I’m thinking it’s probably from the medication. Despite my previous rant about any sickness being automatically considered a symptom, this nausea has a quality to it that I attribute to medication. I can’t describe it.
I’ve been taking steps toward restarting university in January. I’m terrified. And it’s so distressing– I used to be so fearless, so self-sufficient, but something happened, I still don’t know what, to rob me of my confidence. I no longer feel capable of making decisions. I’m not the person I used to be and I’m not sure I’ll ever get that person back.
I just have to press forward. No matter how scared I am, I’m not going to back down. I want my life back, and if I’m going to screw it up, I’d rather do it by doing something than by not doing anything.
I am not a symptom
My mother has become convinced that everything I say or do now is a symptom. If I come down with a cough, it’s a symptom of my medication. If I snap at her in the morning, it’s a symptom of my bipolar. She tells me, “All this time I thought you were just that way, and come to find out it’s just your Borderline Personality Disorder.”
Whatever that means.
I appreciate that she’s trying to understand my illness. I know people whose family flat out denies the existence of mental illness, who tell them to just get over it. Or the maddening phrase, “you could be happy if you just tried”. As if people with cancer could be healthy if they just tried.
But at the same time it’s almost equally as maddening to be defined as your illness, to have everything about you attributed to sickness. Because normal people never catch colds. Because normal people are never irritable.
It’s tricky. How do you know when a mood is just a mood, or when it’s the depression? But when she says that, “It’s just your bipolar”, it feels like she’s brushing off my feelings. Like my feelings aren’t legitimate because I have bipolar. Like we should just ignore them, because they’re just a symptom. I feel like I don’t exist beyond a label.
Trial and Error
The first medicine I tried as a teenager was Zoloft. I don’t remember if it worked. I don’t remember why I stopped taking it. It exists in the pocket of my past that has been lost from memory.
The second medicine I tried was Depakote. I originally was part of a double blind study in which I may or may not have been given Depakote– after the study, we decided to continue on the Depakote. My only memory of the medicine is that it made my hair fall out. I don’t remember why I stopped taking it.
A few years later I began taking Depakote again, starting at 200mg and eventually rising to 1000mg. I never really know if it did much– I took it in conjunction with several other medications until last month, when it was determined that my ammonia levels were too high and they took me off of it. The only real side effect I ever noticed was hair loss.
The next medication I tried was Citalopram. It made me nauseous, tired, dizzy and prone to migraines (which I’ve always had). It ruined my concentration, made me restless and anxious. I saw some improvement, moodwise, but it was variable; one day I might be fine, the next day I’d be suicidal. I had difficulty sleeping. Less than a month after starting the Citalopram I had a frightening manic episode and checked myself into the hospital; they took me off of it and put me on Geodon.
I started out on 80mg of Geodon, taken 40mg with breakfast and 40mg with dinner. While I saw an improvement in mood and a lessening in impulsive thinking, it had drastic side effects. When I first started I could barely function. It was like a constant state of morning fogginess to the point where I couldn’t go to work. My brain was so foggy that I couldn’t perform simple tasks like counting. I would easily become lost or disoriented and eventually the idea of even leaving the house or being alone was making me anxious. We tried switching my doseage around, first making it 20mg at morning and 60mg in the evening, but while that helped for during the day, it made me useless in the evening. Finally I was reduced to 20mg in the morning and 20mg in the evening, and while the cognitive symptoms decreased, so did the therapeutic effect. I found myself back in the hospital again.
At the hospital they took me off Geodon and Depakote, and tried me on Lamictal. I was on 25mg twice daily for a week, and then we upped it to 50mg twice daily. I noticed improvement in my mood almost immediately to the point where I was really becoming hopeful that this would be the right drug. Then, three weeks in, I developed a fever and a rash. I was taken off the Lamictal.
Now they’re trying me on Lithium. 300mg a night for five days, and then 600mg. I took my first dose tonight.
My nightstand is cluttered with half-empty bottles of failed prescriptions. I’m losing track of which medications interact with what OTC drugs. I’m starting to forget what I’ve already tried and why they didn’t work. I’m starting to lose hope.
The Lamictal Rash
I have a rash. I’m not sure if it’s The Rash. It started on my chest, appeared on my face and around my ears, spread down my shoulders and arms. My face feels like I got a bad sunburn.
My fever has been staying in the 100-102 range. Sometimes it drops below 99 then comes back a few hours later. I have random sparks of pain in my ears, but the headaches have mostly subsided. My eyes are bloodshot and watery. My lymph nodes have gone down but are still tender to the touch. I alternate between teeth-chatteringly cold and on-top-the-sheets warm.
Lamictal may cause severe or life-threatening skin rash, especially in children and in people who are allergic to other seizure medications. Serious skin rash may also be more likely to occur if you are taking Lamictal together with valproic acid (Depakene) or divalproex (Depakote). Seek emergency medical attention if you have a fever, sore throat, swollen glands, and headache with a severe blistering, peeling, and red skin rash. (Lamictal infromation from Drugs.com)
I was on Depakote right before they switched me to Lamictal. No step-down– I took it at dinner, and then the following morning I quit Depakote and started the Lamictal. I’ve also been known to be sensitive to many drugs– I had to be taken off Celexa after a bad reaction, and could only tolerate Geodon at a practically non-therapeutic dose.
The chances of the Lamictal Rash becoming life-threatening is considered to be very low, but most doctors will take you off the drug if you show signs of the rash, just to be safe. I don’t want to go off my Lamictal. It seems to be working, I’d been holding out such hope for something to work. I’ve been doing this for six months. I just want to be normal again.
I don’t want to go to the hospital again. I can’t afford this. I should have made a doctor’s appointment but at this point I doubt I could get in before next week.
Oh yeah, I got my prescription filled. It was $100 for a two week supply.
Sick (but mostly okay)
Three days of constant headaches, pain surging through my head whenever I moved it, even when I shifted my eyes. And then the fever hit, knocking me out for a day, huddled in the blankets at one moment; the next, sprawled out in front of the a/c. A cough further exacerbated the headache. My entire body ached. I was miserable.
The fever has mostly died down. The headache is a dull pain induced by moving too quickly or shifting my eyes. The cough is sparse. And luckily no sign of the deadly Lamictal rash.
I haven’t felt depressed at all, except for the occasional pang of regret. No more suicidal thoughts. I feel mostly fine. I feel mostly normal. If only I could have reached this point a month ago, before I went and ruined my life.
I don’t know where to go from here.
Medicine
Today I upped my Lamictal dosage from 50mg a day to 100mg a day (50mg in the morning, 50mg at night). I only have a week left of the free 2 week prescription I received at the hospital. After that I’m going to have to go to the pharmacy and see how much this prescription will cost without insurance. The local grocery store has a plan where certain medicines are only $4 for a month’s supply but I’m not sure if Lamictal is covered.
It’s been a week and so far I haven’t seen any side effect except possibly headaches, but I’ve always been prone to headaches so I can’t necessarily say they’ve been caused by the medicine. I honestly don’t know if I’m doing better or not. My moods weren’t as up and down today and yesterday as they were earlier in the week, but I’m still dealing with a general emptiness and lack of enthusiasm for life, which could be situational. I’ve also been irritable lately, but that again could be situational.
The hardest thing for me with medication is knowing if I’m getting better or not, because I can’t remember what better feels like.
Frustrated
I went for my second appointment with my new therapist today.
It was frustrating.
I’ll admit, I went into the entire thing with the mindset that it wasn’t going to go well. I really liked my previous therapist and it’s hard for me to believe that my new one is going to live up to him. I think I’m so resistant to this town in general, I miss my previous life so much. I become stubborn with the thought that nothing will measure up to what I left.
It was the type of session with long silent pauses where I guess I was expected to speak but I never knew what to say. She would ask a question and I would struggle to respond but I’d have nothing, would finally resort to “I don’t know.” I was frustrated with her for asking questions, frustrated with myself for not being able to answer them. I felt like she should just know.
We’re not mind readers.
But it’s so hard for me to explain what’s going on, and the more I talked, or didn’t talk, the more I felt like she just wasn’t getting it. And I have this constant fear that nobody understands the gravity of my situation, that people will just think I’m overreacting.
And part of the problem is that I can’t remember what it’s like to be low, even if I’d only been in that state hours before, so how can I possibly explain it to anyone if I don’t even understand it myself.
I told her I was feeling upset, and she asked what I meant by upset, and I kept thinking, “You should know what upset means.”
Describing my moods is like trying to describe colors.
I get frustrated and I want to throw things or destroy myself because that’s how I feel. Destroyed.
