MedicAlert Bracelet

Posted on March 6, 2003 in Medications Possessions Psychotropics

My mother gave me an appropriate gift for my birthday: a MedicAlert bracelet. She had me fill out the forms myself and then sent them in with the check.

I needed to call the company today, at their request, to fill them in on some dosages. When they finished getting me defined by the milligrams I take for this and that every day, they read off my list of diseases: depression, asthma, allergies to Clyndomyacin and Pennicillen. “Where’s depression?” I asked. “I suffer from Major Depression.” It wasn’t on the list. I know I had put it there.

Mom had said something the other day about my not signing the forms. I know that I did. I know, too, that I had listed Depression among the illnesses. Then it occurred to me: she filled out a new set of forms herself and not included depression on the list.

It’s a battle I’ve fought with her for years. She asks, nearly every time that I see her, when I am going to stop taking the Effexor and the xanax? It shamed her that her mother suffered from this disease and it shames her that I suffer. She, herself, has been on medication for anxiety and obsessive compulsive behavior. Her mind, I think, remains in the era where nurses lined up for stints in the psycho ward so that they could have a good laugh and, maybe earlier, when strait jackets were the standard and inmates spent their days locked up in Utica cribs.

If folks wonder why I stick my neck out, it is because I want it known that this is just a disease. Sometimes it affects my thinking through my moods — as it did when I was unmedicated — but then sometimes I can’t climb things or run because of my asthma. It’s not all the time and just as I can tell when my asthma is kicking up, so, too, I can tell when my moods are going a bit awry. I had to learn about both. Being asthmatic doesn’t make me a wimp. Being depressive doesn’t make my views — as long as I am aware when I am spiraling into it and trust those closest to me who have educated themselves about what I have.

Better that I live in a world where people are aware what depression is all about than one where everyone is Rush Limbaugh and makes up theories of inferiority and degeneracy to suit the political and personal beliefs of the moment.

I’ve set things straight.