"I was more at the point where I felt like I wanted to be dead, but wasn't thinking about acting on it. I didn't have any plans or desire to do it myself. I just wanted to stop existing." -Me, February 13, 2011
So I off-handedly shared a major crisis in my life on a thread at Crazyboards Sunday. It didn't even bother me when I wrote it. Later, when I went back to the thread, and saw it, it made me do a double take. So blase, this has happened so many times, I think I know just what to expect.
My stomach dropped at rereading this hubris, this nonchalant dismissal of a time when I longed for death, as just "one of those things." To be clear, I am NOT longing for death at the moment, exactly the opposite. I would hardly use a forum to announce my impending suicide where people know me in person, and how to find me, I may be crazy, but I'm relatively intelligent.
It isn't that I am depressed at this moment. It is more that I am afraid. I feel like something may be stirring in Crazyland, but I can't tell for sure. Is it a bad mood? Might it be a side effect of medication? Or am I just due for a visit from the Mood Fairy?
Or perhaps my DH deserved to have his head bitten off this afternoon. Yes, I have snapped at him for the exact behavior before. But this afternoon I was very assertive about explaining what about a particular behavior bothered me so much. On the one hand, I interpreted in the most negative way possible. On the other, he admitted given the language he uses, he can understand how I might come to make that interpretation.
But irritability could be a sign of a mood swing in any direction, regardless of our eventually coming to an understanding. It's the fact that I initiated the discussion with anger that is different and troubling.
I will never entirely know what to expect. Bipolar is a difficult disease to treat. Its patterns change over time, confounding previously accepted truths. Drugs that work for years poop out, and drugs that don't work can make one even crazier than before taking the medicaton. I blandly assume that I have learned how to recognize a pattern or rhythm to help me anticipate episodes, to cut them off at the pass, so to speak, before they become too bad.
Then, suddenly, my brain decides it is time to clean house, and throw out all the knowledge, patterns, and tips I have accumulated over time, and make a fresh start. New types of episodes. More instability.
I can remember the year to which I so indifferently referred yesterday so distinctly. I had been laid off, yet was still teaching another semester at that school before I left, so that wasn't fun. The day I was laid off was also the day I had evacuated a busload of teenagers from the school campus, as wildfires raced towards it. The next day, I heard about the murder of my friend. Then came the week+ hospitalization for my kidneys. Followed by very, very severe depression. I ended up calling a crisis line for the first time in my life.
The first few psychiatrists gave me medications that either sent me into a manic frenzy, or were toxic to me. I ran out of money. Next stop, a crash landing in my parents' basement. I was so ashamed, and my mother made sure I knew she was ashamed of me, too. Her verbal brutality was just one more thing to hasten my downward spiral. And the headaches. Never forget the headaches.
Awful. I remember thoughts: "It would just be so much easier if I died. If I just went to sleep and never woke up." I never acted on it. I think there was only one time I was ever truly serious about taking action to bring about my own death, and that was a depressive episode that turned into a mixed episode. But that was several years in the future. This episode's theme was inertia. Hunger and inertia. I ate at night, to avoid my mother. I lived at night, to avoid my family. My dog, Bess, would lie next to me on the bed all day as I slept and hid, if I needed her to. She was my best friend. I never want to be without a dog if I am depressed again, even with my husband around. No person near me can understand the place I am living when I am so depressed. I need a dog to just shower me with love and affection when I am wanting to die, because it is such a simple straight-forward love, it is easy to return. No baggage.
And there's more. I have been on a new medication, a type of anti-depressant, a tricyclic. I actually am not taking it for depression, but to treat my intractable migraines. I was quite excited to try it, it was the first drug of this "class" of medications I had ever tried. I have basically tried multiple versions of all the other classes that my body will tolerate. Ironically, I seem to have magically stopped my standard rhythm of migraines 2 out of 3 days as soon as I started the new medication. Sheer coincidence, it actually still needs time before it will start working. But it has coincided with a 13 day period when I have only had two bad headaches and a three or four of mild ones. The first 5 days, I didn't have *any* type of migraine (migraine is a disease, the headache is just the worset symptom of it). I am still suffering from too many headaches. But less pain is less pain.
But with this exciting new (to me) class of medication, comes a caveat: While the amount of tricyclic used to prevent migraine is quite small compared to the therapeutic dose necessary to treat depression, as a rule of thumb, anti-depressants + bipolar = not a good thing. This is one of those rare instances where I have run out of other options to try to stop headaches that are ruining my quality of life. We are trying to delicately balance contraindicated treatments, hoping we can find the magic amalgam that will help with my head, but not hurt my mental stability.
So while we wait to see if the tricyclic helps, we also are watching closely for signs that it might be activating my bipolar illness: That is, triggering a mood swing. My doctors biggest concerns are that I have any lability of mood at all. My biggest concern is having a mixed episode: Mixed episodes are kind of like having a pocket-Hell that you are forced to carry around, and you have to negotiate life and cope with the havoc Hell is creating at the same time. No one else can see Hell in your pocket, you just seem flat out insane. Which I am. And part of that insanity is believing that others intentionally try to do everything they can to provoke Hell into bursting out of my pocket, and breaking things, forcing words that I know are dangerous even as they fly out of my mouth to come pourng out, throwing things, berating myself and my loved ones. Of course, I understand intellectually I am the one doing those things. But my intellect is being over-ridden by sick brain.
As a reasult every time I feel a petty thought, or am irritated, or tear up, or get overly excited about things, I begin to worry.
Usually, when I talk about depression, it is something in my past. My last one was a brief one in 2001. I almost had forgotten what it felt like. But re-reading the sentence I quoted above makes my stomach clench, makes me hyperventilate, makes me want to cover my head with a pillow. It made me remember a tiny inkling of what it was like, and now I am scared that the reason I can suddenly so closely identify with that feeling is that I am headed in a bad direction.
