Weeds. Gotta love them.
Reading this blog , I realized I hadn't said anything in a very long time about my own foray into madness. Too, I sometimes forget how hard being bipolar can be. Funny what you get used to. I don't know if the entries are in the archives - finishing the archives back six years is not on my list of priorities.
Two years or so ago, I abruptly went from being a life-long, garden variety, mild manic depressive to having a full-blown, psychotic mania. I've been told I tried to fly. I remember walking into traffic, not to die but to see if I could be stopped. I was hospitalized for a week or so, found a psychiatrist and the right meds (more or less) and I've been fine ever since.
The whole thing took my family and I by surprise. I learned that this happens to a lot of bipolar women when they hit forty or so. It hit me like a freight train. I had been taking Xanax for increasingly debilitating panic attacks and Ambien for insomnia. No one told me not to mix them. I'd like to think I would have been more careful if I had known, but at the time I was so frazzled and tired. I would go days, sometimes a week without sleep. I desperately just wanted to sleep.
I also didn't know that the longer I took them, the more I would have to take to get any results. On the day I was hospitalized, I can remember taking at least a dozen Xanax. With a half bottle of vodka.
I'm very lucky to be alive.
Fast forward the two years and I never use Ambien, anymore. I never drink alcohol, just in case. I take half a Xanax once every few weeks or so. The other meds, the ones that work more or less, there's the rub. If I take them as prescribed, they control the manias, but they drain the world of color. I lose imagination, creativity, desire for anything at all. Things don't taste good. I'm depressed all the time. Who wants to live like that? Not me.
But I have a responsibility to the people who need me. After some experimentation, I know that taking my meds once every three days controls the psychotic manias, keeps me from falling into clinical depression and allows me to be functional, creative and awake. You wouldn't think feeling awake would be so important to someone who has insomnia, but it is.
I guess the point for me here is to acknowledge how hard it can be to live this way and to find help through medication. To say to those of you out there currently struggling with it that it does get better, remind you that there is no quick fix (or even, for us bipolars, terribly consistent ones)and let you know that having good and bad days is the norm. The important thing is to have more good days than bad ones.
I love the front door to this place. Isn't that great? The design of this one is fresh and - well, juicy.
