Let's Looks At Taking Meds From A Different Angle

 Just when I start to get comfortable on my current med regime, along comes the announcement that the medications prescribed to control Bipolar Disorder don't really make a difference. Isn't there enough proof in the fact that tens of thousands of people have been, and are currently being helped by their meds.

"Post Pubesent" Puberty?

 In 1994, when I was first diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, the doctor put me on the "med of the day", Paxil, first introduced in 1993. One unfortunate side effect for me was weight gain, something I previously had never dealt with. For most of my adult life I had hovered between 140 - 145 pounds.

Once I began this med, I started to gain weight. The first month, I went up to 160#, the second month 170#, and on, and on, and on. Finally, my weight began to level off at 230#! What the hell just happened?

Over the years I would experiences "changes" that might or might not be attributed to the mediation I was taking; it was hard to tell. However,  I now have something happening that is both unsightly, annoying and painful. I have developed these large, painful pimples on the back of my head. To top it off, I have been bald on top since 1981, so even the hair on the back of my head is thinning. It seems that one goes away, and two come to take its place.

Nothing life changing, nothing even life altering. Just life annoying! How about you?

3458What do the following have in common?

   - finding yourself late at night below the bedroom window, screaming at the top of your lungs that  there was an abandoned baby ooutside the window, and you needed to get to it

   - awakening in the early morning hours, crawling along the bedroom floor, yelling out that the house  is on fire and everyone needs to drop to the floor and crawl to the door

   - becoming aware of your surroundings, only after running from the bedroom, in the middle of the night, and hurling yourself through the air (as much as possible when 5'7" and #230), and landing in a heap on the floor.

I'm Baa-ack

Howdy do. I know I am mending from the foot surgery because I am now focusing on my mental condition. Somehow I thought when I was recovering, and in pain that the MI wouldn't be here when I recovered. Yeah, Right! no such luck, so I welcome my old friend back.

The surgery went well, and I had a local nerve block, and the "Twilight" medication. (made me forget, I guess ... I forgot) I do remember them putting the needle into the end of my toe - that hurt a bunch - but otherwise, I simply dozed off, woke up, and was able to leave right away. None of that lying around waiting for the effects of the meds to wear off.

My main problems was with the vicadin. I decided that I would take it every four hours, so that's exactly what I did. Every four hours I'd pop one or two of them and, since I was back on my meds after surgery, I'd continued taking them too. Here's where something went terribly wrong.

I either took too much, or the combination of the two types didn't agree with me, or the "V" simply sat around in my system, and waited to attack the pain (me) all at once. Whatever the reason I spent most of the first two days trapped in some kind of Lewis Carroll fantasy land that scared the shit out of me. I finally realized that, duh, it might be the painkillers and I stopped taking them. After 4-6 hours, I started to return to "normal".

The great thing about this surgery is that once the memory of the surgery begins to fade, and I'm ready, I have to have the left foot done also.

The moral of this story: You can only take handfuls of pain killer for so long until until you wished you hadn't.

X /T + M > To = SM; where X=# of painkillers, T=time span for taking X,
M = psychotropic meds (constant), To = tolerance level (if you don't know this before, you'll
sure know it afterwards), SM = space mountain (remember when Alice fell down the
rabbit hole; what you'll experience here makes that seem perfectly normal normal.

Creativity - At Any Cost?

Do you know what is the worst part, at least for me, of being bipolar? Mood swings I can handle. Irrational thoughts and wandering attentiveness isn't so bad. In my case the constant counting and calculations that race non-stop through my mind. Don't get me wrong, these are difficult, but they don't even come close. Not even feeling lost and alone when you've got people who love and care for deeply. The handful of various medications are necessary, so you expect the many reactions, complications and side effects. No, even though all of these things are bad in their own right, the main reason why this disease aggravates me to no end is the way it squashes my creativity.

As it stands now, if my live were a car, my meds could, at any given time, place me somewhere between zero and 100 miles per hour. Where exactly on that scale varies, but it never sits idly in the middle. I usually run 60-70 on a good day; I am an ultra-rapid cycler (Ultradian), so I'm just left to grab the bus as it goes by. I become creative around 80-85, and when I near 100 or more, I can solve problems that you never even knew existed. Let me give an example.

One day I created a simple formula that explained everything, everything! It made perfect sense, and I remember showing it to others, but they couldn't understand my logic. It was so simple; it seemed nearly self-explanatory at the time. Yet I look at it today, and I am dumbfounded as to what it even means. I'd like to live "just south" of that point. When I am there I can write creatively and with feeling, I can see things more clearly and simply, and life just seems brighter and better to live.

But living there makes me susceptible to doing things "out of the ordinary". Where I want to be, and where my doctor says I should be, are two very different places. Getting back to that point, the point of reflective ponderings and rapid, creative thinking, and the place where expression, pure and simple, comes from the soul and ends us layed down on paper will cost. I have to decide if I think that cost is too high. I really don't know.