Posted on April 29, 2017 in Abuse Anxiety Bipolar Disorder
I feel sorry for my wife.
Posted on May 7, 2015 in Anxiety Psychosis
Where had it gone? Where could I have transported it to?
Posted on April 27, 2015 in Anxiety Caretakers Suicide
We patients are told not to think of ourselves as the disease, but helicopter caretakers get no such warning.
Posted on April 22, 2015 in Anxiety Attitudes Compassion Depression Guilt
The black spiral literally knocked me off my feet. I decided on my own to stop taking Geodon — a horrible drug that left me dizzy for all but the last three to four hours of my waking day — and I crashed and crashed hard. My bedroom was my habitation; my cats my constant companions. I felt the after effects for months — a dimness of the world, a heaviness on the brain, and difficulty forming thoughts. Shortly after I emerged from more than a week of never moving from the bed, I wrote:
I count nine days of nothing but turning on my bed, sleeping on the best of them, just clutching blankets on the worst. I run back and forth writing, thinking, and hiding under the covers for this one. That’s my activity and I need to make more. I’d be at the gym working out except I took two Ativan and do not wish to risk the drive. And it is too hot and unshaded for the walk around the condos that I have made my regimen.
Coming “back” implies seemingly ridiculous victories. Today you brush your teeth. You take one less Ativan. You go for that walk twice at dawn like you should. You write in your journal. You blog. All in between visits to the bed, your teacher and your protector.
Just yesterday, I heeded studies which suggest that spirituality helps those suffering from depression and mixed and remixed the books next to my bed until I found a pocket Buddhist companion. This (translated into the objects of depression) made sense to me:
I am not my depression. My depression is not me. The world is not my depression.
This doesn’t say that I lie under the covers for not discernible cause and it doesn’t say to stop taking the meds as appropriate. It simply separates my disease in the same manner as one might separate the eye or the ear. My eye is not me. I am not my eye. My eye is not the world.
We get into an ownership thing in Western thinking — if not throughout the whole world. We own our body parts and our diseases rather than seeing them as causes. They are neither separate of us nor part of us. They are facts.
This gives me personal relief from this nine day good-riddance if rid of it that I am. And I’d rather not talk more about this. It makes sense to me.
Posted on April 7, 2015 in Agitation Anxiety Hatred Humiliation Mania Netiots USEnet
I realized my cause was so hopeless that not even St. Jude could fix it even if I visited a church in his name every day for a hundred years.
Posted on March 3, 2015 in Anger Anxiety Avoidance Frustration Mean People
I am thrall to this stupid, American insistence on balance, on not taking sides.
Posted on December 1, 2013 in Anxiety Bipolar Disorder Frustration
I constantly question the whirlwind. There must be an answer. And that takes over the mind.
Posted on November 9, 2013 in Anxiety Bipolar Disorder Frustration PTSD
The mind is not only its own place, but its own population.
Posted on September 3, 2013 in Anxiety Attitudes Bipolar Disorder Fear Reflections
Mistakes like this cause me to enter a highly vigilant state of mind.
Posted on June 26, 2012 in Anxiety Cancer Diary Cats Dogs Uncertainty
I must confess that I still feel a little selfish when I remind people that I am under stress — perhaps more stress than Lynn.
Posted on June 14, 2012 in Anxiety Cancer Diary
I’ve been trying to write this story for months, but the time and the motivation have not been there.
Two things tipped me off that something was wrong. First, I looked at my cell phone and realized that too much time had passed. Dr. Rettenmaier had promised a quick surgery — twenty five minutes — and now an hour and fifteen minutes had passed. Laparascopic hysterectomies were his specialties. The grin on his face had been confident and true. It was just a cyst. He did this all the time.
The disappearance of that grin when he came out to see me was the second clue. He led me into a small consultation room. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but the gist of it was that there was a malignant mass on Lynn’s ovary. He’d cut her open and removed the entire uterus including the cervix. He showed me a picture of a pile of bloody organs that he said was what he had removed. They looked like meat from a butcher.
His tone was grave. He made an effort to underscore that he hadn’t photo-shopped anything, that he had followed procedure, and that we were dealing with cancer. I’m sure the fact that I was bipolar danced in the back of his mind. I understand. He had probably dealt with plenty of husbands who, on hearing the news, wanted to shake him and tell him that he had made a mistake. My calm must have surprised him. I accepted fate and asked what questions my shaken consciousness allowed.
He let me call my mother-in-law so she could ask her questions of him. I don’t think she was any more thorough and coherent than I was. “How could this happen to Lynn,” her mother said to me after he returned the phone to me. Who had an answer for great matters of the universe as trivial in the greater scheme of things as this was. Dr. Rettenmaier told me to wait for the pathology report. He couldn’t tell me what kind of cancer it was without it.
Kay Redfield Jamison says that there is a big difference between bipolar depression and grief. I was feeling the latter now. I could walk, talk, see colors. Most distinctly, I could cry.
People in the waiting area who heard my news told me that this was the worst day, the day where you found out the fact and didn’t know the reality. The receptionist took pity on me and told me I could visit Lynn in the recovery room.
I stood by Lynn’s gurney. Her eyes flickered open. Had she heard the news. “What happened?” she asked. “You have cancer,” I whimpered.
“I have cancer?” she said, groggily.
“Yes,” I replied.
The nurse did not let me stay very long. They sent me up to the sixth floor of Hoag Hospital where I waited until they told me that I could go in. I used the time to call friends and family to tell them the news. Ovarian cancer, I kept murmuring to myself. The prognosis would not be good.
Posted on April 24, 2012 in Anxiety Dentition Dogs Health OCD Spirituality and Being Whines
Let me count the ways the events of the past few months have screwed me. Note that there may will be additions as the weeks pass…so keep checking this article. It will be a mega-whine!
YES I KNOW IT CAN BE WORSE AND THAT IS WHAT WORRIES ME!
Everyone is telling me that “things will get better”. I sigh and reread Job.
At least Lynn’s chemo is over and the scans are looking good. And Obama won.