Monday, November 28, 2016

My mom's secret alter ego

is Mega Super Awesome Pill Figure-Outer Lady with Pillbox Thumb Opening Action(R) and Micro Pill Splitting Power(R). Seriously. You should see how fast she can calculate and portion weeks of simultaneous weanings up and down in separate am and pm boxes without running out of refills for me.
I don't know how she does it all without getting her cape caught in the pillboxes but that's part of her superpowers and we mortals don't question anybody's superpowers. Mostly because it's impolite. But also because we secretly want to try on the cape but it's considered the height of rudeness to ask.

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Go, Team Jake!

Here's me and 4/7ths of Team Jake, who are on call 24/7 to provide wake-up calls and remind me to take my meds and send me random texts to remind me I'm loved and provide courtesy laughter for (most of) my dumb jokes and refuse to let me feel like I'm broken and give me big hugs out of nowhere and to tell me gently and respectfully that I have too many shoes, which, of course, I don't because there's no such thing as too many shoes but I play along with our little charade because it makes them feel appreciated and I genuinely appreciate every one of the things—both little and big—that they do for me. Because some days I really need to feel loved and every day they remind me that I am.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

The therapeutic benefits of ice cream

Misery is feeling so shitty at work that you have to admit defeat and come home early from the job you love and never want to jeopardize.

Cozy is getting home to find your folks have made up the couch like a bed so you can climb in it the second you get your shoes off.

Happiness is being awakened in time to have a home-cooked dinner with your folks.

Frustration is choking down the newest mountain of evening psychotropics in the hopes that this cocktail will finally—FINALLY—be the magic bullet that promotes social confidence and friendly comfort and eliminates embarrassing side effects like wiggling and grunting and face touching and hair swirling and eye rolling and knee shaking and foot tapping and diminished motor skills in my hands and fingers and time-sucking distractibility with Facebook or rubber bands or the shoes I'm wearing or how many 5 Hour Energies or Diet Mountain Dews I can nurse before lunch.

But there is a mighty cloud of joy amid all that complicated emotional mess: the unbridled happiness I get from slurping up a giant chocolate malt my dad made for me (with extra malt because we're not savages) and enjoying it along with my parents as we discuss the news of the day interspersed with attempts to fix my mom's perpetually broken iPad even though none of us has even a modicum of a clue what we're doing. It's a small gesture of love and goodwill for what I often feel is an irreparably broken man.

Monday, November 21, 2016

Don't cry for me

So I made it through two and a half Evita performances over the weekend without even a hint of the grunting and twitching and wincing and eye rubbing that have been my constant companions on my current cocktail of bipolar meds. But they started to flare up in the second act of our closing show on Saturday night, and by the time I got to my car after the show I was a full-throttle circus clown of grunting and twitching and wincing and face touching and eye rolling and invisible gum chomping. So I regretfully skipped our cast party and came home to hide under the covers. Today at work I was thankfully a few clowns short of a full circus, but I compensated with hand tremors and a pronounced loss of dexterity in my fingers when I tried to open and close shoe boxes so I could write about them or press the button on my key fob to lock and unlock my car. Plus my face is now chronically red and raw from involuntarily rubbing the fuck out of it whether I'm asleep or awake. Plus my left ear has the on-and-off sensation that I've successfully driven a railroad spike in it. I'm frustrated to the point of never leaving the house again, but there are shows I want to be in and people I want to meet and uncling I want to do and acres of shoes I want to wear and maybe another marathon I want to tackle and family happiness I want to enjoy. And thanks to an after-hours call with my psychiatrist tonight, I have a new med to get my hopes up over. So I'm heading to bed with a new psychotropic joining my existing army of four and wondering which Jake I'll be in the morning. Good night to all of you who managed to slog completely through this endless manifesto. And thank you to everyone who calls or texts to see how I am. I may not have a coherent answer every time but your friendships mean the world to me.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Here's some friendly midnight advice from your crazy Uncle Jake:

If any doctor tries to prescribe a psychotropic drug for you, the FIRST thing you need to ask about are the withdrawal side effects you'll endure when you stop taking it, which—trust me—you eventually will. The ramp-up and day-to-day side effects of taking psychotropics definitely come with their challenges, most of which are a welcome trade-off for eliminating the mental-illness symptoms they were prescribed for. But eventually something in your head will change for the worse and your doctor will start to tinker (rather blindly) with the drug or cocktail of drugs you've been having success with. And the fallout can be unpredictable and devastating.

I ended a seven-year relationship with Abilify over a week ago because within the last year I'd developed a hefty case of tardive dyskinesia that made my legs shake involuntarily, uncontrollably and—most important—embarrassingly. And my current doctor was pretty maybe kinda sure Abilify was the culprit. And at first it seemed she was right. The leg shaking started disappearing almost from the moment I started tapering my dosage.

But.

The leg shaking seems to have been replaced with a three-ring circus of embarrassing side effects: involuntary eye rolling, power squinting, face rubbing, scalp swirling, nose pinching, beard rubbing, chomping, grunting, hyperventilating, spasms down the back of my neck, and an increasingly obvious sense of fogginess and confusion—all of which started manifesting themselves since I took my final tapered dose of Abilify. I'm so miserable I can hardly stand it. And my face is raw from the constant rubbing.

I have two choices: Go back on Abilify and (maybe) trade back my new side effects for my old ones, or stay the course and endure the withdrawal side effects until they (hopefully) go away. I have NO intention of reliving the withdrawal side effects I've survived to date so I'm going to stick with the plan and hope for the best. But I can honesty say that if the doctor who first prescribed Abilify for me could have impressed on me the degree of severity and misery I'd have to endure in my eventual withdrawal, there's no way I would have started taking it. There have been entire days over this last week where depression seemed exponentially easier to endure than withdrawal. Hands down.

You know that fogginess and confusion I mentioned two paragraphs ago? And you also know how in real life I'm a professional writer with (if I may indulge in some immodest immodesty) a quick wit and some mad typing skilz?

It took me almost two hours of intense concentration and multiple fits of intense face rubbing to write this, what should have been a 20-minute post. And I'm beyond the capability of proofing it.

Timber!

Seven years ago today—three years after leaving the hospital and just hours after taking the very first dose of yet another new bipolar med ...