I Caught Myself

October 28, 2012 By

Living with a mental disorder is far from being the tits*. Understanding a mental disorder can feel like learning a foreign language. Explaining it to others is as if you and they speak completely different languages and one needs directions. It’s aggravating, irritating, annoying, frustrating and again far from being the tits.

When you try to gain some perspective on it outside of your psychs highly scientific (it’s actually not all about chemicals–more on that in a bit) explanation, it seems everywhere you turn online whether it be support forums, blogs, what-have-you, it’s all bad and about triggers and trying to talk people out of offing themselves. I get it. It’s shitty. Having any mental disorder is wretched. But why bathe in it? Why so much negativity on something that is inevitable to live with? Why only share the most terrible times your disorder has branded you with?

I also felt so lost because anyone who, having bipolar disorder, shared a story or an update knew about Triggers. What threw them off and caused an episode if overwhelmed by it. At one point I was convinced I didn’t even have this disorder because I didn’t have ANY triggers. What is Bipolar Disorder without triggers? By how much I have seen online and experienced in one support group a few years back, they had triggers and they knew what those were.

I caught myself. Thursday.

Paranoia, anxiety, confusion all swept in and threw me on my ass in an instant. Actually on my knees, who needs specifics. Whether it was being away from people I knew and were apart of my everyday life, being alone in a place that wasn’t mine in a town I had no attachment to, or just being alone—could be one or a myriad of possibilities. My reality was completely slipping and I was sure I was going to fall right through the crack.

I picked my nephew up from school. Called my dad who in turn called my sister’s fiancé who picked us up and took us home. I left my car behind without a care in the world about it. Why? Driving is a trigger. Ding ding! Fast forward to Saturday I finally called my psych who upped my Seroquel from 25 to 300 mg to prevent psychosis. Or if it’s easier to understand, to keep me from going psychotic. Simple terms.

I’ve been used to depression since I was 14—traumatic experience happened—so it’s almost like I’m immune to it and can handle it a bit better than had it came with the Bipolar Disorder. My actual bipolar episodes are a whole different beast. I start connecting dots where dots are not connected. I believe songs on the radio are specifically played for me. If I am driving I feel all the cars around me can hear me through my stereo or that my car is bugged. I believe that I have to have all the blinds open so the cops are not called. I think people are apart of schemes that are completely made up–conspiracy theories. I become very child-like; animated, laughing at inappropriate times, etc.

But before I was completely gone, I was able to reach out for help. Though my episodes may be extreme (who am I fooling, they are duh!) I’m able to catch them before someone throws out the H-word**. Or the C-word**. It’s a good feeling.

More than Chemicals: Two parts/areas/whathaveyous of the brain are affected when it comes to Bipolar Disorder. The gray matter that surrounds your brain is less dense than non-bsds and the membrane (filter) between rational thought and emotional feeling is fragile and thin. So in psychiatry it’s more than just medicating the patient’s symptoms, it has to be about building the brain up. My psych specifically has me on a Lithium and Valproic combo. Lithium works better when you sleep because your brain is in rest mode and that’s when a lot of your information processing happens. Valproic helps get open up the thingies (fuck if I remembered what they were called, picture looked like DNA strands) so that more of the Lithium gets in to start building up your brain. This is all my own words, my psych would tell it better and it’s from a few appointments ago so it’s not that fresh. I know what I knows.

________________________

*figure of speech, not talking about any sexy bits.
**Hospital/Hospitalize, Commit/Committed. 

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Bipolar Disorder & Mortality

October 28, 2012 By
English: Stephen Fry

English: Stephen Fry (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve always joked about not wanting to live too long. What’s wrong with a little short and sweet? After all, summer flings are always the best kind. Or that could just be me. Though, to be honest I haven’t had a summer fling in forever, and even then I have only had one. Jokes tend to be 90% (lovely thing about statistics, you can make them up–99% of statistics are false) truth of the person delivering them, meaning that they believe partly to mostly what they are saying.

Anyway…

So I was watching a YouTube video on Stephen Fry talking about living with Bipolar Disorder. Unlike me, he feels the disorder is a disease and an illness. What caught my attention is when he called it a morbid disease, not morbid as used in poetry or other literary works to mean dark or grotesque, but the medical term meaning a disease that, in fact, causes death.

In my head I was thinking, “You’re shittin’ me. This cannot be true unless you are talking about suicide. I could understand if suicide is higher in those who have the disorder than those who don’t…” but I don’t, now, recall him mentioning suicide so it required some Googling.

What I put: Bipolar Morbidity Rate (I’m obsessed with capitalizing most words)

One of the articles I came across: Mortality Among Bipolar

If you aren’t in the mood to click the most beautiful link ever created, I’ll give you some fun facts from the article.

—”Bipolar disorders appear to increase the risk of early death from a medical illness, according to a new literature review study.”

—”Researchers comprehensively reviewed 17 studies involving more than 331,000 patients. Evidence suggested* that people with bipolar disorder have a higher mortality from natural causes compared to people in the general population of similar age and gender but without mental illness.”

—The various studies indicated that the risk was from 35 percent to 200 percent higher. The risk is the same for men and women. The most common conditions leading to premature death were heart disease, respiratory diseases, stroke, and endocrine problems such as diabetes.

—“The review of data gathered from large population studies suggests that having bipolar disorder is similar to being a smoker in terms of increasing a person’s risk of early death,” said Dr. Wayne Katon, a University of Washington (UW) professor of psychiatry.

—More recently, Katon said, researchers are finding that, while rates of suicides and accidents are indeed greater among those with bipolar disorder compared to the general population, they only partly account for the higher premature death rate.

—Biological abnormalities associated with bipolar illness might also be shortening lives, Katon noted. The illness can stress the immune system and the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, a system that controls many body processes. Bipolar disorders also heighten the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, which sets off the fight-or-flight response to stress.

That’s almost the whole article. You’re welcome.

Anyhow I find it funny that when I first became a Pharmacy Tech, well that’s not true, I was a Pharmacy Tech for Walgreens for 8 months then went to college for Film & Video then became a Pharmacy Tech again for CVS. I like working in a Pharmacy, obviously. So when I started with CVS I was putting the drugs away and I had a random thought and blurted out to my Pharmacist and Lead Tech that I didn’t ever want to have Bipolar Disorder or Thyroid Disease because you have to take medication for the rest of your life. A couple of years later I end up with both.

Makes me wonder when talking about not wanting a long life, if I’m kind of setting myself up for a premature death. Or maybe I’ll break the world record of living the longest life. I love life, but not that much.

_____________________

*Thank God/Ala/Buddha/Goddess/Zeus/Whatchamacallit the evidence suggested. Had the evidence confirmed I’d be in some bit of trouble. 

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My Disorder

October 25, 2012 By

Post inspired by Daily Post writing prompt:

“Take a complicated subject you know more about than most people, and explain it to a friend who knows nothing about it at all.”

First I would like to take a moment here to distinguish the term I prefer, disorder, over other terms such as, illness or disease. Dis•order; noun. 1. Lack of order or regular arrangement, confusion. Ill•ness; noun. 1. unhealthy condition; poor health; indisposition; sickness. Dis•ease; noun. 1. any deviation from or interruption of the normal structure or function of any body part, organ, or system that is manifested by a characteristic set of symptoms and signs and whose etiology, pathology, and prognosis may be known or unknown.

In my humble (OK, maybe a bit boastful) belief, I think of mental disorders as simply that; a disorder. Our brain works slightly different than the norm. Would some people think I’m fooling myself and wearing rose colored glasses? I wouldn’t be surprised. It is ingrained in our society to believe that people whom have disordered brains are sick, ill, diseased, etc. Our prognosis being nil to none; our treatments severe and sometimes worst than the actual disorder. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that we were locked in psych wards, fed massive amounts of psychotropic drugs and having our frontal lobes removed (the history of lobotomies is quite interesting, though).

Terms like insane, crazy, cuckoo, loony; all with negative connotations. Mental disorders are not that, we are not imbeciles or vile creatures; the criminally insane being the exception, but I think anyone that kills someone not out of defense of themselves or another is a little deranged.

My disorder is called Bipolar Disorder, or manic-depressive, which honestly to me I don’t know why they changed it. Probably one of those Pop Psych ideas. Bipolar is kind of like the world, it runs on one axis with a North Pole and a South Pole—mania and depression. To me, that pretty much explains normality, but who am I to judge. There is Unipolar Depression (pop psych) where they really only have a South Pole and need medications and therapy to reach the equator. (North Pole is referencing Mania if I haven’t made myself clear.)

Mania can be quite a fantastical ride, if not too high. You’re happy, the world is at your feet, you can do anything. You are at your most productive. In example, you can do in a week what most people take a month to complete. This is actually why Bipolar Disorder is one of the hardest mental disorders to treat, we don’t want to let go of the high. I’m actually at a point in my medication cocktail where some Bipolars (not afraid of their pdocs—he would literally freak out and fire me; giving me a document to sign so he’s not responsible if I kill myself or something) would jump off the med wagon thinking it will be all good. They’re cured and if not, who cares, they want that high. A lot of times only when we’re stuck in the South Pole do we reach out for help.

Where mania becomes dangerous is when you ride it too long and are so creative and productive you forget to sleep and then BAM! you’re delusional, snappy, mean (to say the least). You hear things that aren’t there. Can be in a restaurant thinking everyone in the room is having conversations about you. Feel as if you are being followed by all the cars around you and that they can hear you. It’s true paranoia and psychosis. When you are in it you are so confused and scared and you don’t trust a single soul—not even yourself. You physically and mentally become overwhelmed by any noises whether it’s the radio, someone trying to talk to you, the rain on the window. That’s when your brain is broken and the ones you love you hope it can become unbroken. I went through psychosis twice; once in 2007/8 and again in 2011/12.

This is where now the new manual on mental disorders is changing (DSM-V). Because of my two psychosis’ I could have been considered Schizophrenic. Now though, for some reason, they are realizing there is a form of Bipolar Disorder 1 (what I have) that mania can turn into psychosis therefore making it kind of the most severe form of BD. Namely, I will have to stay on my medications for the rest of my life. Relapses are very prone to happen for me. & it may not be the same medications or cocktail as treating mental disorders is more of an art than a science.

My Disorder doesn’t rule my life because it’s not who I am. It’s what I have. I control it, it doesn’t control or define me. If it did than strangers would pick up on it without me having to tell them. “Oh, you there have Bipolar characteristics and traits. Good to meet you.” No. I am nice, quick witted, combative, literate, intelligent, and honestly sometimes boastful. I can be mean, argumentative, negative, uncooperative, messy, disorganized, absent minded, and too honest.

My name is Sarah. Not Bipolar. Any questions?

Filed Under: Personally Me Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

To Medicate or Not to Medicate

October 24, 2012 By

The United States is over-medicated, that’s a fact. We are probably too much of everything, that’s an opinion. The medications I am on are as follows:

  • Synthroid; synthetic thyroid hormone used when you are either hypothyroid or hyperthyroid and need your thyroid removed. I was hyper (mix that with mania and I was a mess to say the least!).
  • Lithium; used as a mood-stabilizer among other things. Toxic if given too high of a dosage or not enough water intake.
  • Depokene; also known as Depakote, Valproic Acid, etc. Used in combination with my Lithium to balance me out.
  • Amilioride; diuretic so that the Lithium salts don’t build up in my kidneys causing me dialysis later in life. My pdoc swears I would be bored to death waiting in the office reading 5 year old fishing magazines. His words, not mine.
  • Lamictal; I’m sure this is a common one among fellow Bipolars. For me, it’s used to keep the depression at bay. Pdoc says its studies at relieving depressive symptoms in Bipolar Disorder are far greater than some of the other meds that can be used. I trust my pdoc. More on him either in this post or a later one.
  • Seroquel (oh how I love thee so); anti-psychotic that in the therapeutic dose is to bring one out of psychosis, has a hypnotic effect to induce sleep. Sleep is VERY important to people who have Bipolar Disorder. We don’t like to sleep causing our brains to never rest and reach a true REM state. I now use a low dose just for sleep because if given Ambien or any of the Benzodiazepines, I’d abuse them.

It may look like a lot, but if it keeps me out of the hospital where they hit you with high doses of everything then I have no problem. I feel like me, sound like me, look like me and that’s important. But in the same sense, I know some of my friends who have Bipolar Disorder that go along without medication. They function just fine and I would be lying my ass off if I didn’t say I wasn’t a little envious.

Statements in the graphic above irritate me, though. I get that drug companies are making a fortune off marketing and advertising, mark ups, enticing doctors to prescribe a new expensive medication over the well known one that’s been on the market for over a decade and cost way less. I also understand the importance of diet and exercise and that alternative/natural medicine can have better lasting results and may even cure altogether.

That doesn’t mean western medicine has to be degraded to the point that some people are dangerously weening themselves off important medications without consulting their doctors. Maybe I should have prefaced with the fact I was a Pharmacy Technician for the last 8 years.

If you can get off certain medications by exchanging bad habits for good habits, then do it. Just consult your physician first. They aren’t going to bite your head off or force you to continue with it. If you have an unwilling physician (maybe he drives a Ferrari–haha) who refuses to help you, get a second opinion.

Filed Under: Debatable Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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