I haven’t been blogging because I’ve just been living. After a bout of severe depression, just living seems great.  The asthma attacks from the pollen and humidity haven’t been so great, but eh well, at least I know what to do about them, and they haven’t thrown me into some mood swing.

I did go see Lady Dr. Shrink earlier this week, though.  That went well.  We discussed what had been going on with me the last month. She had thoughts. I had thoughts.  We didn’t even knock heads or disagree.  Cool, huh?

She doubted the Zyprexa triggered the first severe depression since I hadn’t been taking it for a couple weeks when the second severe depression hit. I agreed. I’d come to that conclusion myself. She pointed out that two severe depressions in one month is pretty rapid cycling and thyroid problems could contribute to that. So we talked about thyroid, which I’ve had tested a number of times but has always been in the normal range. But what the heck, I’ll have it tested again.

I had some requests. Demands?  Strong opinions? I pretty much put my foot down on a couple of things. LOL  I want at least a year off from any major med changes unless there is a clear and critical reason to do it. Like say if we find my thyroid levels have tanked, we can fix that. These bipolar meds trials tear me to shreds and I am far better off with what I’m already taking than I have been trying anything else so far.  I’ll keep Zyprexa as a prn for mania or prednisone psychosis with the caveat that if it ever appears to throw me into such a severe depression again, I’m throwing it out. I’ll keep with the low dose Ativan for sleep since the trazodone was apparently triggering mixed moods. Because I don’t want to risk getting dependent on it, I’m going to double my daily exercise to try to avoid needing it at all.  She agreed to go with all that.  Can you imagine a psychiatrist saying, “Oh no, don’t exercise more!” anyway?  LOL

I’ll be interested to hear about my thyroid.  I went to the vampires yesterday.  You think maybe I’ll hear by tomorrow?  Eh, probably Tuesday.

That’s what my therapist said when I saw her yesterday.  Well, that was cheery, I tell you. But she was right. She never saw me when I first showed up at County mental health and had to be hospitalized with a horrid mess of bipolar mixed mania. Read the rest of this entry »

I saw Lady Dr. Shrink today. She was a tad annoyed at me for not taking my PRN Zyprexa. She did understand why I didn’t do it, though: I wasn’t quite *that* out of it, and I refuse to take it and muck up my blood sugar except as a last resort before having to go off with the little men in white coats.

I took most of a week off work instead, and that helped a good bit and didn’t muck up my blood sugar.  She just wanted to emphasize that if 3 to 6 days off doesn’t help any, that’s probably time to risk the Zyprexa for a week or so.  Ok ok, Lady, I can live with that.  She said aside from that, which could have helped a lot, I handled things great.

Um, I knew that. This has been the worst run of mixed mania I’ve had since I was last in the hospital.   I’d have been in the hosptal if I hadn’t handled things great.

She was somewhat alarmed at the continual mixed mania throughout the month and the other stuff like cognitive problems, and even bitter tasting sodas.  Oh, and the restless leg syndrome too.  She’d never heard of having such side effects 3 weeks after discontinuing a med.  I bet she has but didn’t recognize it. hehe  And RLS from trazodone is downright weird. Add migraines, insomnia and intercostal neuritis, and it’s all pretty strange.  What a month June has been.

Good thing I do good mood charts. They really do contain a ton of info to help figure out what might be going on and what might be useful to try. And she loves it too. LOL

The goal at the moment is to get rid of the mixed mania. All mania really. Getting rid of the depressive side would be nice too, but not as urgent at the moment. Then we’ll figure from there what should be changed back if anything.

So… upping the Trileptal from 1200mg daily to 1500mg daily. I volunteered for that after we’d gone over discussing a slew of other meds and reasons why I can’t take them, or at least can’t take them for more than a week at a time.   I’d tried the higher dose a little over a year ago when having mania problems, and it worked. At the time it clobbered my stomach, though.  I’m on better stuff for the stomach now than I was then, so hopefully that won’t be a problem.  Started that tonight. I’m mildly stoned feeling, but I expect that’ll be gone by morning… always has before when I was upping the dose to get to where I was yesterday.

Get rid of the trazodone, at least for now. It’s an antidepressant (tricyclic or tetracyclic, I can’t remember which) and may destabilize or cause mania at some point. Since I’ve had to take it daily for almost a month, and take the highest dose I’ve been rx’d, that may well be a contributing factor in the mixed mania. For a few days I’ll take low dose Ativan to try to get my sleep straightened out.  As few days as possible — the idea of getting addicted to anything makes my toes curl.

Start taking Folic Acid supplement daily. That can help with depression sometimes, and also helps the body metabolize Trileptal better.  Ok, good deal. Good thing it’s not expensive either.

So I was off to see the Wizard today, and now I’m off on more adventures in pharmaceuticals. Isn’t there a song somewhere about how much we love bipolar disorder? *shakes head laughing*

My appointment with the shrink is tomorrow, not today. So I guess I’ll wait until then to talk to her about the trazodone and RLS. Ya think? And maybe about the bipolar roller coaster I’ve been on. Duhr. hehehe

I keep thinking my cognitive stuff is getting better. Then I keep finding that it’s not as much better as I thought after all.  Well, it is some better. It’s not as prevalent as it was. As far as I can tell. LOL So the amount of off the wall thinking and talking and losing track of things is going down.  It still happens far beyond normal, though. What a nuisance!

One of the strangest lately is that my buddy Milt keeps having to remind me to lock my car. Even as of yesterday. I’ve been walking off without locking it so often it’s downright weird. It’s weird because I’m normally hyper-vigilant to the point of paranoia about locking the car, the house and so on. (Mugging, rape and abuse will do that to ya.. gotta love locked in C-PTSD.) Milt doesn’t find it a problem to be less “paranoid” about locking the car. I wouldn’t either if it was a sense of greater security that did it.  This though? Not so much grand.

The less often all these cognitive things happen, though, the more comical it seems to me.  Yay for comedy!

And oh yes, I still submit that I am so not ever taking Topamax again.  (But don’t think it’ll happen to you — Jena takes Topamax and loves it, hasn’t had all these problems!)

The time off has helped me peel myself off the manic ceiling quite a lot. Not entirely yet, but much better. Hasn’t done as much for the depressive side of the equation, seldom does, but even that’s not so bothersome when I’m not also jumping out of my skin.  I’d far rather be manic OR depressed or preferably neither, than roil in the mixed mania I was coping with just a few days ago.

The depression isn’t so bad either.  Just mild. Not wanting to drop dead or anything. Just nothing much is interesting and I have no energy.  Overall my mood is better than it was.

Did I say “just” to lack of interest and energy? Like that’s a good thing?  Well, I guess it is in comparison to mixed mania or some of the extreme depressions I’ve dealt with, even the week before.  It’s all relative.

Why do I think the mania’s not totally gone from the mix? It’s horribly difficult to drag myself to bed at night, in spite of the fact there’s nothing that interests me going on. I am having a hell of a time sleeping, and when I’m solely depressed I can easily sleep 12 to 18 hours a day. Left to my own devices right now I’d sleep almost exactly 2 hours a night — and that’s with a moderate dose of trazodone to help me sleep!  I keep waking up after 2 hours and am wide awake, then have to fight to get back to sleep at all. That and I’ve got the hand tremors still.  And don’t have much appetite at all. Oh, and I can write forever. LOL These symptoms are not common at all to my depressions, but are common to my manias.

Cognitive loopies are still with me too. Astrid asked today how my week was last week. I had no clue at all. Couldn’t remember anything about it for about 10 minutes. Couldn’t even remember I took time off. LOL And words are still random or missing quite frequently (yes, I typed friendly for frequently at first, then caught that on proof).  Well, that’s not fixed yet.  Oh I am so not ever messing with topamax again.  It ate my brain! LOL  Give it back NOW!

I may work half days or one day off, one on next week.  I’m not totally past all this mixed mania stuff, obviously. But seeing as it’s my own business, I can’t ignore it very long and actually make any money.

It’s actually kind of bizarre, really. When I take a day off, even though I don’t announce it and it doesn’t change anything at my site where I sell my stuff, sales tank.  Conversely, if I do a lot of work behind the scenes that no one actually sees, sales go up. That’s all happened for years now, and it’s strange but interesting. Energy moving around makes weird things happen.

So I have to do some work so I can pay bills and buy meds.  But I will go easy on myself nonetheless. After all, it’s working

By the way, with the 50 or 100mg dose of trazodone, I’m getting restless leg syndrome.  Granted, I can’t take seroquel because it gave me RLS from the start. I don’t HAVE restless leg without these meds, at least, not in the last decade or so. And these are meds that people take to get rid of RLS effects sometimes.  What’s up with that?

Yeah, yeah, I’ll ask the shrink tomorrow. And yes, I’ll make it to see her. Didn’t come unglued. Just a bit mucked over. LOL

Visit with therapist was not so hot yesterday. Mainly because of me. I was just starting to slide into mixed mania. Low grade to middle grade. But that makes my life go all baby puke green. And she was being reasonable. Reasonable doesn’t work for me so well when I feel hopeless and am so agitated I can’t sit still and so hyper I can’t shut my mouth.

The big thing was: Life is messy. You are normal.

Life is messy. No doubt.

I, however, am certainly not normal. I laughed at her saying that.  Bipolar disorder symptoms are normal? Excuse me? Not being able to have a romantic relationship is normal?  Not being able to have kids is normal? Menopause starting at 39 is normal? Not being able to tolerate working except at home because of get too angry with it and the people there? Not being able to force oneself to take a shower daily. Having to fight daily to force oneself to brush  teeth. Getting waylaid by your own brain regularly?  And on and on. That is NORMAL?  Oh fuck no.

Yes, I’m mostly ok with these things much of the time, but they’re not normal and it is silly to pretend they are.  Yes, I handle it well, even better than most and even THAT is abnormal.  I’m not capable of living a normal life. A good one, yeah, at least a good part of the time. But normal? Um, no.

Gah. Unproductive and annoying session. But that’s a fairly good description of how I go on and feel about stuff when mixed mania bites me. At first anyway. It gets worse from there.

About 10pm, though, the mix left me with just the hypomania.  YAY! God I hate mixed mania, however mild it may be at the time.

This has been a bloody weird ride lately. Waves of medication induced stupidity and waves of mood and energy swinging around. But that’s normal.  heeeehehehehehe

Now Immi goes off cackling to do 23 things at once.

Father’s Day.  Solstice. Cat anniversary. Sunday.  Grab whichever applies to you and run with it.

I can’t believe it’s been over a week since I last posted. I guess I’ve been even busier than I realized. Considering that my brain still isn’t working right, that’s no big surprise.

I don’t know what that stuff did to my head, but it’s getting annoying at this point.  I still have aggravating word find and word confusion problems. That doesn’t seem to be letting up.

Words are a mystery.  Now, to be fair, I’ve had word find problems since I started Trileptal, but it had settled down to a small nuisance. Now it’s far worse after the Topamax. Sometimes random words come out that may or may not be related to what I’m trying to say. It would be funny if it weren’t so weird and annoying to have it going on.  ”Farmer John’s” came out in place of  the name of a local farmer’s market, for instance.  And calendar instead of iced tea. I sound somewhat nuts a good portion of the time. But maybe I am? teehee

And now I realized I can’t add! Jeesh. I can’t add by looking at objects or by playing with the numbers. I proved it when trying to buy 10 peppers. I counted out 3 for my friend. Ok, fine, then I proceeded to buy 4 yellow, 3 orange, and 3 red ones for me to round out the 10.  I was convinced 3+4+3+3 = 10.  I made the cashier triple check. Oops, I can’t add.  Or subtract. I have to be somewhere at 1pm today. It’s 10:15 now.. so 1pm is 7 hours away, right?  Ugh. Disheartening at times, it all is. But there are calculators, so I manage.

Carbonated sodas are still bitter. They don’t taste like piss, but bitter. An improvement I suppose. But not very tasty.  I taste one every day to see, and still bitter. Bummer.

My mood’s pretty ok. I don’t feel awful. Starting to get a bit hyper, though, so a little hypomania trying to get going.  I’m working on that as usual. Wah! I don’t want to! I love hypomania! But I hate having farther to fall so… I should stay somewhere near middle.

It’s been over 2 weeks since I took my last dose of Topamax. My psychiatrist will faint when she hears how long it’s taking to get this stuff out of my system. Ok, she won’t faint. She will get really big eyes and shake her head, though.

So, that’s the Immi report. Busier than hell. Still having side effects from bipolar meds I stopped taking over 2 weeks ago. Life is just going on as usual. LOL