Med Change

Posted on June 26, 2006 in Mania Psychotropics

After my Abilify disaster, my psychiatrist switched me to Geodon. For the first few days, I did well, but then the Manic High hit. The line of exes on my mood chart bucked and groveled above the green line day after day. The worst stampede came this weekend. I charged right up to the point of calling my psychiatrist and begging for a commitment. I left a message on her machine which quickly ate up my allotment.

(I am not even sure that this article will make grammatical sense. Your blogger bubbles and falls. Think of the Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone. Think of the heat, the fury, the churning from beneath.)

Friends at the Saturday morning DBSA meeting showed concern. I became overstimulated by all the conversation. Even though I was able to hold myself together and even give cogent feedback, I could feel myself deteriorating, little bits of psyche blowing off like flecks of sandstone. Joel the strong was going down and whatever what built upon him would come with him.

I left the meeting early, zapped myself with xanax to calm the rage. I’ve come to believe that bipolar disorder is a kind of epilepsy. (Why else would anti-convulsants fix it?) In my episodes, I feel bewilderment. My arms want to fix on everything as if I were a tunnel spider dashing up and down its web.

My eyes play this trick on me. When I do close work (like making a maze or writing) all will be well when suddenly the orbs shift right and left for no apparent reason. I’ve tried to find what is going on here. Maybe I need a new set of glasses? I had an epileptic girlfriend. Once during sex she had a seizure. Her eyes rolled up and her eyelids fluttered. Some say that Lord Byron had epilepsy though Kay Jamison has challenged this. Perhaps the confusion comes because bipolar disorder and epilepsy are of the same order of illness, with the depression in the bipolar being a much needed rest?

The weekend shook me around like a terrier shakes a rat, but I survived. I am not in the hospital nor am I on the way any time soon. A faithful reader recently asked just what was it that made me bipolar. The garrulousness sounded, well, normal to him. It is the conversation that never ends, the jumping from subject to subject because of an association no larger than a wheat germ that distinguished the hour of my mania when I talked to the research assistant. And there was so much more, the sense of a gully into which the herd of my mind was going to rush over, rush over and end itself in a crash that only led to another crash.