Amantadine day 2

I was noticeably more light-headed all day, but in a slightly loopy way and thankfully not a stand-up-and-black-out way like I was last night.

My ears have been screaming EEEEEEEEE! at me all day. Seriously. EEEEEEEEEE!

I had two video calls at work where I could see in real time how much I was fidgeting and rocking and twitching.

 
It’s breathtakingly exhausting spending all my energy trying to hold myself still, so I was very glad to climb under a blanket and a cat after work and nap on the couch (see photo).

Amantadine isn’t a psych drug, which would usually require me to endure weird (or uncomfortable or downright miserable) side effects for a few weeks while I waited for its efficacy to manifest or not manifest itself. So I’m in uncharted territory here as far as what to expect and how long to tolerate it before I decide whether or not the drug is doing its intended job.

 
Originally an antiviral used to prevent Influenza A, Amantadine is now primarily an antidyskinetic used to help control the palsies and involuntarily movements of Parkinson’s disease and my close personal friend tardive dyskinesia.

 
The only other tremor-control drug I’ve tried is the anticonvulsant Gabapentin, which didn’t seem to do anything for me except on the morning when I accidentally took two doses and literally felt like my heart was stopping and my eyes were crossing so hard that my optic muscles might rupture. So, yeah. I immediately started weaning myself off of THAT trainwreck-in-waiting.

 
If I were to judge Amantadine after just these two days I’d say it’s an abject failure as a tremor suppresant because I’m exponentially more twitchy and tremory. My increased orthostatic hypotension (my tendency to experience blackouts or near-blackouts when I stand up) is pretty alarming to me. And I disconcertingly need to monitor myself for a potential skin rash called Livedo Reticularis, which my neurologist and I both agree would be a fun, indeterminately ethnic drag name but that he warned me is also a very dangerous development potentially worthy of a trip to the ER.

So for now I sit (and twitch and rock and tremor) and wait. I think I’ll give it a week before I decide if these side effects are worth enduring—or if I even think the drug is working. I’ve lived with and learned how to manage tardive dyskinesia for 15+ years, so I’m in a devil-you-know/devil-you-don’t holding pattern until I decide which devil to live with (spoiler alert: I’ll probably pick the one with the cutest butt).

In the mean time, I have a kitty to snuggle up with …

Rolling blackouts

I had a rapid succession of near-blackout episodes yesterday—which are a super-fun side effect of my bipolar med cocktail—in a friend’s yard, and she had to social-distance nurse me back to some semblance of mental presence and then drive me home. I usually have 4-5 greyout episodes a week, and I know how to manage them and get on with my day. But yesterday the Mother Ship came by to zap me into foggy, flashing-lights-in-my-eyes submission.

I’m 95% human again this morning, but you can tell I’m still not 100% present on the planet because of my super-fabulous alien hair.

Well, THAT was awkward

We were running along at a nice pace down the Cedar River Trail, the sky started thundering at us, the rain started ... and I started having my own flashes of light. And the gray sand washing down my face that I feel when I’m about to have a blackout episode. Because bipolar meds are fun.

This happens multiple times a day when I stand up too fast. But it’s never happened when I’m running. I tried to slog through it, hoping it would pass ... and I got about half a mile before I noticed I was zigzagging so I wisely let what little common sense I had left prevail and I stopped. It was mile 3.12, which was almost our turnaround point. But it WAS a complete 5K, so I deserve a medal.

You know who else deserves medals? Rob and Scott, who stopped their run and insisted walking the 3.12 miles back with me. I kept insisting I was fine. I kept insisting that they run ahead and get their miles in. But they kept insisting on being awesome friends and not leaving me. Those jerks.

I feel normal now. The flashes of light and gray sand are gone. But I’m frustrated and a little concerned and totally embarrassed about the whole thing. And very soaked from the rain.

Shit.

Darkness and peace

I'm sitting in the half-dark watching and listening to my mom as she struggles to find a peaceful, restful balance between gasp-inducing pain and the loopy uncertainties of prescription pain medication 36 hours after undergoing shoulder surgery. She was told she'll probably need to sleep in a recliner for 6-8 weeks as she recovers, so she's now wrapped in an almost structural configuration of blankets and pillows arranged to keep her comfortable and stabilized and not too hot and not too cold on a borrowed electric recliner in our living room as I sleep on the nearby couch with a three-hour alarm set in perpetuity on my phone to ensure I give her her pain medications consistently on time.

This woman spearheaded a full-family battle for my health and my very sanity for years as my escalating bipolar depression clashed with a literally bewildering array of ramp-up and withdrawal side effects from increasingly desperate attempts to find the right cocktail of psych medications for me. My parents have helplessly watched me twitch and yell in my sleep, crawl like a blinded animal up the stairs from a drug-onset migraine, lie gray and unmoving in a hell of despondency in my bed, land in the ER after a blackout and a crash to the floor that was so catastrophic that the nurses assumed I was the victim of a violent assault, and stare emptily but gratefully back at them as they admitted me to a locked psych ward for what ended up being an eight-day stay. They've fought for me, they've stood by me, they've repatriated me ... and now it's my turn to start paying them back.

Mom seemed to be doing remarkably well in the first 24 hours after her surgery, but then the last of the nerve block wore off and waves of breathtaking pain started surging through her reawakened nerve channels, and we've watched helplessly as she's whimpered and cried and tried to keep a brave face through her pain and confusion and unsure self-awareness. But she knows she's loved and being cared for and watched over with the attentiveness she's given my whole family over the years. And she seems to be sleeping comfortably and productively at the moment.

I should be asleep right now too. The couch is all made up next to me and it's quite comfortable; this I know from endless days into nights into days that I spent on it as I fought my way back to sanity while sleeping as close to my parents as I could if I needed anything. But I'm rather enjoying sitting here with her in the dark, post-midnight quiet. The war-zone explosions of fireworks that kept alarming her and waking her up a few hours ago have died down, I just woke her to give her her midnight pain meds and a popsicle, she seems to finally be sleeping comfortably and restfully ... and her partial helplessness and need for me have me thinking that there will soon be more medical problems and more nights like this for both my parents ... until they simply won't have any more medical problems ever again. And I want to remember and savor these moments where I can care for and love them the way they have done for me.

When I got out of the hospital two and a half years ago and spent the next two years fighting to regain my own sense of normal, it became clear that I was going to spend this newest chapter of my life under their care. In return, I've promised them that I'll do everything in my power to keep them in their—our—home as long as I can as they get older. Because I can't imagine taking care of them any other way.

So here I sit. Watching the mother who showed me without fear or reservation how to love me and all my psychoses unconditionally as she suffers through what by all accounts will be a painful but successful healing process. But it is undeniably a harbinger of the future in our home. Which is scary in the abstract. But right now it's a present and a future managed with love and commitment and a deep, profound honor that I am able—in no small part from the lessons and examples my parents have provided for me all throughout their selfless lives—to care for them in the way they cared for me.

And it's all very peaceful.

Timber!

75 days ago, just hours into starting a new bipolar med, I stood up, blacked out, fell Timber! onto the tile floor (which I cracked with my face because GO BIG OR GO HOME), shredded my face on my shattered glasses, bit most of the way through my lip, loosened some teeth, got a concussion, landed in the ER, came home covered in stitches and glue and filled eyeballs-to-spine with a not-for-amateurs headache, and still found a way to take time out of my busy schedule to take a selfie.

Fast-forward 75 days to today, where I still have scars on my cheek and under my eyebrow and the right side of my upper lip is still so thick with scar tissue that I have a hard time drinking without drooling. And I clearly still need to get in the regular habit of shaving my neck. But I'd do it all over again instead of putting myself through the last hour I spent trying to find a way to put these two photos side by side with reasonably matching head sizes for a single before-and-after image. After googling and clicking and uploading and downloading and iPhotoing with absolutely zero success, I finally just opened the pix side by side in Finder and took a picture of my screen. I might as well have just drawn it all with ox blood and soot on a cave wall.

Ironically, that new black-out-go-boom bipolar drug seems to be the magic bullet I've been looking for since forever; after the requisite miserable ramp-up period, I've had over a month of overwhelmingly good days. Minus a few blips here or there. And that hasn't happened in probably four years. So if you're so inclined, raise a glass and yell Timber! in my scab-reduced honor today. I'm going to the gym. Because for the first month in many years, I'm able to do so. 

Timber!

In which I whine like an entitled first-world child

(Self-indulgent navel gazing ahead. Plus words. Lots and lots of words. With a tinge of judgey misanthropy. Plus some legitimate stuff so I don't come off as some asshole judgey misanthrope. If I've already bored you by this point, you're gonna be hating my by the time I get to the closing parenthesis. Assuming I ever get there. I'm clearly in a cranky mood though, so I can't help you. Or is it won't? Anyway, abandon hope all ye who read from here. You've been warned.)

• Everyone at Kohl's tonight was either moving too slowly, chatting in front of the extra-large clearance shirts so I couldn't get to them or stupidly looking in the wrong direction as they bumped their carts into me.
• Stupidly.
• Plus Kohl's didn't have anything I wanted. At least that I could get to.
• The cute guy who waited to hold the door for me at Barnes & Noble and circled the CD racks with me and ended up right in front of me at the checkout told the clerk that the CD he was buying was for his wife.
• Dinner at Cheddar's was accompanied by a full 30 minutes of bloody-murder baby screams to my right and a bellowing right-wing redneck hawking up gallons of phlegm and emitting an almost visible effluvium of cigarette stench in the booth behind me.
• I got a Facebook memory reminder this morning with my dismayed post about just having shattered my iPhone screen. Which means I've been using and squinting through and whining about my shattered screen for a whole year. The Verizon guy tonight told me I had to get the screen fixed before he could do anything related to my warranty, so I let out a long dramatic sigh and reluctantly decided to suck it up and give up my phone for 24+ hours to finally get it fixed and I drove over to the fully lit screen-fix-it store just as my phone clock ticked over to 7:01 pm. Guess why I'm telling you this. Just guess.
• Aside from a few blips, I've had at least three full weeks of good and engaged and productive and present and functional and relatively happy days. Which is an almost unprecedented record over the last 4-5 years. So the new bipolar med cocktail that initially made me black out and sent me lacerated and bloody to the ER seems to be actually working. But the uncomfortable and frustrating and embarrassing side effects have steadfastly dug in their heels, and I spent the morning wiping miles of spider webs off my face and loudly chomping on invisible gum. And trying everything in my power to sit the goddamn fuck still like a normal fucking adult.
• Plus I seem to have stopped peeing. Both in frequency and volume. Plus I just told you about my pee problems. Which just compounds the embarrassment. Nice going, me.
• Our lying, petulant, willfully ignorant man-boy of a horrifying national embarrassment of a president gave a morally and intellectually infuriating press conference packed with accusations and excuses and insults and tantrums and laughably implausible generalizations yesterday that continues to send shockwaves through the media and the educated class and the reasonable voices that he's well into his second year of attacking relentlessly with a conspicuous and alarming and desperately pre-emptive level of defensiveness. The last four weeks have made my family and my ex and many of my friends almost physically ill with worry and discouragement and deep, profound concern. And yesterday—when I heard a staunch man-boy supporter sum up the press conference with a thoughtfully nuanced "he sure told 'em"—it finally broke me too.
• I have so many shoes and shirts and shorts and pants and belts and socks and probably layers of flattened desiccated cats piled up in my bedroom that I don't even know how or where to begin sorting and inventorying and letting go of any of it. Sometimes it makes me feel all cozy when I climb into bed surrounded by jumbled mountains of all my stuff. But mostly it makes me feel paralyzed with panic and shame.
• All my real-life and Facebook crushes are pairing up and getting engaged and getting married and are mostly straight anyway. Fuck.
• When I blacked out and cracked the tile floor with my face last December, I bit most of the way through my lip. It's still swollen and hard like it's healed as scar tissue and I have a difficult time drinking through a straw or eating without getting food all over my lips.
• Hey, paired-up and engaged and married and mostly straight anyway crushes who've been bored enough to read this far! How ravishingly sexy am I right now? You should date me! It'd be fun!
• Actually, dumping all this whiny shit out of my head and posting it here after everybody's bedtime where it probably won't be seen has alleviated most of my crankiness. Thanks, Internet!
• Except I'm still furious and incredulous and devastated about the petulant, inarticulate man-boy.
• And frustrated and embarrassed by the spider webs and invisible gum and whatever fresh indignities tomorrow has in store for me.
• Plus Bitch Kitty will sleep contentedly on my clean laundry but won't exist in the same room with me unless she can draw blood or crush spirit. And sometimes it just quietly destroys a little bit of me.

High five!

So the night I finally vow to everyone from my mother to the straining-to-be polite fitting and training technician lady that I'm FINALLY going to unpack and figure out and actually use my month-plus-old CPAP machine, my eight-good-day streak on the psychotropic that initially made me black out and rip up my face has ended.

Fuck.

I'm heartened that I haven't fallen into depression or anxiety, though those are things I know how to handle. Tonight I'm in a weird, unprecedented, floaty, dizzy, skin-hurty, face-touchy, eye-rolly, pig-grunty, unfocusy, shivery otherworld where gravity feels crooked and it's freezing hot and I should be asleep and I promised myself I'd limit my whiny bipolar shit on here but posting from the middle of the hurricane somehow helps me center myself and give me a record to look back on when I'm good to maybe help me to better anticipate and and ride out when I'm bad and even though my parents are upstairs and my sister's family is a mile and a half away and all of that is profoundly comforting and strengthening, talking about all of it in rambling detail in a public post—where friends and strangers can read it or not read it or like it or ignore it or block it—actually quells the confusion and fear and loneliness. I know it sounds dumb. I know it sounds Munchausen syndromy. But I also know it helps.

So in addition to my yes-I'm-still-wearing-it ulnar neuropathy arm splint and my perpetually bloody, Jell-O-y face scars and now my who-knows-what's-gonna-happen CPAP machine, I'm piling on my floaty, dizzy, skin-hurty, face-touchy, eye-rolly, pig-grunty, unfocusy, shivery, otherworldly, I-truly-feel-better-for-posting-about-ity psychotropic side effects and taking the best possible left-handed fight-the-man selfie I can with my compromised superpowers and crawling into bed.

Scars and haircuts

One month ago right now I'd just completed my signature black-out-and-fall-Timber!-and-crack-the-tile-floor-with-my-head-and-lacerate-my-face-with-my-shattered-glasses-and-bite-mostly-through-my-lip-and-get-a-concussion-that-hurt-like-hell trick and I was finally back awake and reasonably coherent as the emergency room doctor sewed up my face with anesthesia that totally didn't work. But I was a big boy and I whimpered only 37 times. Before I lost count.

Anyway! I sure can prattle on and on and never get to the point sometimes. OK, all the time. Like right now. I mean really. How tedious.

Anyway again! I've had stitches and protective stitches glue and scabs and oozy gross stuff all over my face and in my beard since my visit to the anesthesia-resistant emergency room sewing circle and since I looked like a moldy desiccated cat anyway I kinda stopped caring that my gooey beard was scraggling down over my neck and my hair was blossoming into a luxurious, full-bodied thneed.

But! As of this week my beard goo has finally disappeared and nearby children have stopped spraying me with Zombie-B-Gone and since it's actually been one month to the day I finally went and got a haircut and a beard trim and five new shirts at Target but don't tell my mom that last part because she keeps saying I'm finally handsome again and if she found out I'd gone recreational shopping it would totally harsh her buzz as the kids say. Or the drug addicts. Whatever.

Whew! So I finally got to the point and I feel human again and my mom says I look handsome and I'm kinda hoping when everything is totally healed I still end up with a badass scar on my cheek so when I'm in the nursing home and little schoolchildren come visit me through their scary-old-people-need-love-and-poorly-drawn-crayon-art program and they ask me about my battle scar I can regale them with the epic tale of that one time I passed out from standing up too fast to change the laundry.

Pre-existing conditions and the ACA

Before the Affordable Care Act, I was completely uninsurable—no special considerations, no gray areas—if I was unemployed, which I was for over a year before the ACA was enacted ... though I did qualify for relatively expensive COBRA coverage through my former employer that very fortunately filled that time gap.

But COBRA eligibility expires after a fixed time, and without the ACA—and until I could get stabilized enough to hold a job—my expanding schedule of doctor visits and my compounding and perpetually evolving psychotropic prescriptions and my surprise hospital visits would rapidly drain me to bankruptcy and eventually relegate me to living on expensive federal disability coverage.

I now have a job but I'm staying with my ACA-sanctioned plan because it specifically covers the entire network of doctors and specialists and pharmacies and hospitals I've managed to assemble and sign release forms for and ensure are thoroughly and reciprocally sharing my complete medical history. Plus I'm not 100% stable and I'm still—and definitely not without precedent—spooked about becoming unemployed again, and my ACA-sanctioned plan gives me tremendous peace of mind about maintaining a reliable continuation of coverage.

Let me clarify for the sake of precluding any tedious welfare-state arguments that might arise that I am paying the full premiums and co-pays and deductibles for my coverage and am receiving no federal subsidies. U.S. households with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level are eligible to receive federal subsidies for policies purchased through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, as they should be. For me, the ACA simply allows me to purchase coverage through a broker or directly from an insurer just like anyone else, with no restrictions or refusals for having a pre-existing condition.

Four weeks ago, I started taking a powerful psychotropic that within a day caused me to black out, slam my head into a tile floor, shred my face with my shattered glasses, bite deep into my upper lip, suffer a concussion and not fully come to until I was holding the side of my face together with a bloody cloth in my sister's car on the way to the emergency room.

We just got the bill for that little adventure, which if I'd still been uninsurable would have struck an immense financial blow. And it doesn't even include the cost of an ambulance since my sister drove me to the hospital. But as this photo shows, my ACA-sanctioned insurance helped save my face, my brain and my finances.

The Affordable Care Act is a vital, grossly overdue federal program that provides medical care and financial protection for millions of citizens in a spectrum of medically and economically challenging situations. Our new president and our newly Republican-controlled congress continue to work noisily and patronizingly and almost belligerently to repeal or dismantle or destroy—or whatever the spin-certified verb du jour is—the Affordable Care Act without providing a consistent or sometimes even plausible justification for their efforts and after months and years of chain-rattling still failing to provide even a shadow of a shred of a consensus—much less a foundational set of proposals over which to negotiate—on what to enact or not to enact in its absence.

The whole exercise stinks of political theater and desperate partisan grandstanding and manipulative demagoguery that cruelly continues to waste time and resources and patience while the health and solvency and even dignity of millions of sometimes desperate citizens and their families and dependents hang in the balance.

And I can personally attest that it's costing our country immeasurably more than just money.

Despite what your lying eyes might tell you ...

I am not an internationally famous pout model. I'm a PERSON. And I deserve to be treated as such. Except for apparently a few more weeks while what remains of my stand-up-and-black-out-and-crack-the-floor-tile-with-my-face scars continue to dig in their little scar heels and slow the healing process to a glacial pace. Fortunately after three weeks they continue to itch and sting an creep creepily and all spidery into my visual periphery. But now they're also—and I swear I'm selecting my words judiciously so I don't get all graphic and horrifying here—more stickey-outey on my face and tiny sections of them are clearly starting to follow gravity but with a stated mission to never let go—how am I doing so far?—but I still can't be a big boy and bravely pull them off like a band-aid because—and I'm sorry but there's really no delicate way to put this—my absorbable stitches haven't finished (or even started?) absorbing and the damn things are still stitched to my face. 

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done writing about gross things. I think.

So I'm trying not to be all-bipolar-all-the-time because despite my long and verbose and thoroughly documented history of being all bipolar all the time I'm actually fucking sick of it: the free-falls to despondency, the impermanent triumvirates of normalcy and clarity and energy, the endless and clearly more and more arbitrary attempts at changing meds that eventually and predictably fail one after another after another, the new wrinkle that I'm apparently apt to stand up too fast and black out and crack the tile floor with my face, and the endless worry and frustration and exacerbation I cause my family and friends as I cycle through all of the above and ultimately end up sleeping through life. So I'm actively trying not to think about it. But while we're here ... speaking of all of the above, I'm (I hope) finally emerging from a rough four days of hairpin ups and downs and canceled plans and missed uncling and a weekend where I've barely left my bed and never left the house all as a prelude to point out my soaring bedhead. Honest! I just broke my promise to myself to drastically minimize my bipolar talk with the honest intention of providing a few words of context beyond "I haven't showered all weekend" to help you laugh at my lofty locks with a more informed sense of derision. You're welcome.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done wallowing in emotional and tonsorial self-pity. I think.

Actually, no. In the last few months, four—four!—guys I've had long-ago, too-shy-to-ever-tell-them, clearly unrequited crushes on have announced their happy gay marriages on here. I haven't seen or even thought about some of these guys in over a decade. I didn't even realize we were Facebook friends. And I'm not sure what to do with all these weird, long dormant emotions these four rapid-fire revelations have awakened. And I'm not sure why I'm being all Duckie and weighing down this already ponderous post with this information except to get it out of my head. Which I guess I've done.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done brain-dumping all the vaguely whiny, I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-all-of-this emotional noise in my head. For realz.

So it's a relatively quiet night here at the Stigers Home for Bitchy Cats. Mom is reading, sometimes aloud to my mostly blind dad; Sibelius' watery, disciplined, asymmetrical, shamelessly triumphant Second Symphony is on repeat in the background; Dad just accidentally stepped on the cat, an incident I will be neither amused nor disquieted by; I downloaded a Gaither Vocal Band southern gospel song for my folks and now iTunes is trying to sell me all the desperate tatters of the inauguration entertainment lineup; we're all waiting for the dire-warninged but now rudely late snowpocalypse that has kept everyone pre-emptively hiding in our houses all day; and one of us is obsessively typing a seven-mile Facebook post on his shattered iPhone screen. But I won't say who.

And you can open your eyes now. Or close them with me; I'm going to bed now so I can get up at six for a much-needed ass-whupping by my trainer. And I'm not taming my hair for her.

But you should see the other guy

OK. First of all, I swear I am not trying to make social media my public diary of dramatic medical catastrophe. That's why I frequently pepper my posts with whimsical stories about our sick cat or my parents' pending mortality. But—aside from selfies, cat pictures, way-too-easy Trump jokes and long folksy narratives on the let-me-tell-you-an-amusing-yarn importance of family—dramatic medical catastrophes seem to be all I have to work with on this, the last dying gasps of the carnivorous year that ate all our beloved celebrities. And you have to admit that bipolar depression is so stupid fucking dumb that all you can do is laugh at it. And with my surgically redacted filter, my meandering sense of humor and my location deep in the bipolar trenches, I like to think I'm able to find what's funny, dig deeper to figure out the least appropriate way to look at it and present it to you in the way that's most likely to embarrass my family. So there's that.

Now. On to the gruesome scabby stuff.

So what do you think happened to me?

1. I got in a rake fight with an Amish guy.
2. I sandpapered my face so Kellyanne Conway and I would look alike in our smash Broadway reinterpretation of Twins.
3. Bernardo really banged me up in the rumble under the highway at that part where the music gets really atonal.
4. I've always gotten dizzy after standing up too fast. Twice in the past I've blacked out and hit the floor, but it was on carpet and I landed on my back in that flattering S shape like when Donna Reed, the wholesome Hollywood actress from rural Denison, Iowa, might get slapped by Joan Crawford, the weirdly manly Hollywood actress from Wire Hangers, Ever, in an impassioned living-room quarrel over men or hemlines or eyebrows and lipliner or whatever it was that women with their hair pulled back too tight used to slap each over back then. So anyway, this, my 798th cocktail of bipolar meds, don't do jack fucking shit for my depression but they do an award-winning job at making me super-light-headed. And this is the awesome part: Monday evening, after emerging from a particularly demoralizing depressive collapse, I was trying to be all productive and shit and the washing machine ended so I jumped up to put the laundry in the dryer, took two steps, felt another dizzy spell start to hit, grabbed the walls to steady myself, completely blacked out, fell Timber! forward, slammed my face into the white ceramic tile in our hallway, lacerated my right eye and the right side of my face with my broken glasses, bit mostly through my upper lip, loosened a tooth, bled like a whatever, scraped an odd snakeskin texture into the back of my left hand—which is weird because all my other injuries were on the right side of my face—and gave myself my first concussion. And let me give you a little insider knowledge, just from me to you: Concussions aren't a glamorous football badge of honor; they are insidious fuckers that hurt longer and deeper than you can imagine plus they give you this gruesome sensation that you can feel every surface of your brain, especially the parts that you've maybe permanently injured.

So the takeaway from all this is pretty obvious but I'll say it anyway for all you fellow concussives out there: Doing laundry can fucking kill you.

There's so much more to this adventure but I've been typing this post two or three painfully cross-eyed sentences at a time—on the still-cracked screen of my iPhone, no less -- before getting so exhausted I needed yet another nap—and you'd better appreciate that Joan Crawford sentence because staying awake long enough to write it was like slamming my face into a ceramic tile floor—so I'll tell you the rest in mercifully brief—but in reality probably tiresomely long—bullets. Even though my Google search lied to me about how to make bullets on my iPhone so I'll have to use their lesser-and-more-embarrassing-because-they-eat-marshmallow-fluff-right-out-of-the-jar-and-wear-blingy-jeans-and-voted-for-Trump cousins, the hyphens. Sigh.

• I came to in my sister's car on the way to the hospital thinking Christmas hadn't happened yet and—for one brief glorious moment—not knowing I'm bipolar.
• I had an ABCDEFG—or whatever it's called—at the hospital to see if I'd broken any bones in my face. They told me I didn't, but from the lingering and sometimes breathtaking pain in my head I think they're playing some kind of cruel hazing prank on me to initiate me into being Bradley Cooper's boyfriend.
• My sister wouldn't give me my phone for fear I'd take lurid selfies and write embarrassing-to-the-family posts on social media about my adventures (DUH. I mean HA HA! AS IF!) so I joked—joked!—with the nurse that he should send in some cops and silly clowns and a circus band to accompany their wacky hijinks that would distract my sister from the fact that they were secretly taking my phone from her and giving it to me. AND HERE'S THE PART INVOLVING THE COPS THAT I VAGUELY HINTED TO YOU ABOUT: Soon after the nurse left, there was a knock on the door and THREE COPS WALKED IN in response to a complaint over a cruelly denied selfie opportunity. I—the consummate actor—played right along with their clever charade, demanding they wrestle with my sister to get my phone back. When they politely demurred, I—the consummate stealthy flirt—asked the cutest cop to take a picture of me and I'd give him my number (do you SEE what I did there? even with a fake not-broken face!) so he could text it to me. And then we could text each other a romantic location to meet and pick the colors for our destination wedding as soon as my face healed. But he—pretending to be oblivious to my stealthy ways—politely demurred and we all had a hearty laugh and I went back to the business of I-just-smashed-my-head-into-a-ceramic-tile-floor bloody pain.
• I joked with the stitches doctor that with every 10 stitches I should get a chalupa and he gamely—and adroitly—played along for quite a bit of superlatively clever banter as HE STUCK NEEDLES IN MY FACE and gave me 13 stitches divided into three different locations, none of which individually totaled 10, which I assume is the reason I didn't get my damn chalupa.
• At one point, I heard myself tell the stitches doctor I had no aspirations to be a model—which is sadly true—so I didn't care if he left scars—which I guess is also true—so the net-net of this harrowing experience may be enough facial scars that I get to play Thug #3 who gets thrown off the yacht by Jason Statham, who, after the director yells "cut" gently towels me off before we sit down to pick colors for our destination wedding.

WHEW! I somehow managed to tell a relatively short story—in fits and starts between barely restorative naps—in the godawful longest way possible. But I leave you with a more current selfie of my disfiguring wounds taken right at the scene of the crime: the white ceramic tile floor I slammed my face into four bottles of Tylenol ago.

<clumsy bipolar re-direct of narrative>

Since dear, spunky, inspiring, heavily bipolar Carrie Fisher—a woman I truly respected and adored—has now drowned in the moonlight, strangled by her own bra—as she requested her obituary to read—I will be honored to take up her mantle as a celebrity bipolar poster child. Except without the celebrity part. And more face scabs. And I'm more of a filter-compromised blogger than an international poster child. But still.

I know all of this jumbled verbal coda is a stretch—and I know I've managed to write another 10-mile post between naps—but this entire adventure happened because of a little bipolar pill—and the deadly evils of laundry!—so I want to end this with two iconic Carrie Fisher quotes:

“I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving it, but bring it on. Better me than you.”

"Being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge ... so if you’re living with this illness and functioning at all, it’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of."

So this happened last night

And my head and my brain are in such screaming pain right now that I feel compelled to type this very slowly on here before I attempt to escape the pain with sweet, sweet sleep. I'll give you all the blood-soaked details when I wake up and the pain subsides and my eyes uncross.

But I will tell you that one of the three cops involved was really cute.

EPILOGUE TO LAST NIGHT'S FESTIVAL OF MORBIDITY

I apologize for dragging you all down my feral rabbit hole last night. My depressive episodes tend to hit hard and fast and they don't play fair. But I've lately found an unexpected and highly illusory eye-of-the-storm place of Zen when I've slammed into the bottom of the hole. Unfortunately, that's where it always seems like a super-awesome opportunity to text emotionally unprepared friends or make epic, increasingly graphic posts that repeatedly use derivatives of the the word despondent. Thankfully, last night's post was not accompanied by an artfully cropped sad-face photo or the lyrics to "Soft Kitty." Anyway, as per the protocol established in the Fucking Stupid Depression I Hate You I Hate You I Hate You Treaty of 1968, my episodes tend to dissolve quite rapidly after 2-3 days. So—after an explanatory epilogue I've allowed to go on way too long—here we are: the end of my morbid monologue on depression and death.

But. Not really.

Do you see that handsome wooden box on the left in this picture? Our very handy neighbor made it from the polished walnut backings of some of the award plaques my dad received in his 50+ years in real estate. Do you see the handsome metallic embellishment on the lid? That's my dad's army dog tag, which our very handy neighbor artfully embedded in masculine bas relief in what I remind you is solid walnut, which is quite solid.

Now.

Do you know what that handsome dog-tag-embellished polished walnut box was constructed for? Do you? It's for my dad's ashes.

Let me repeat that: It's for my dad's ashes. 

Although he's still more or less alive by most medical and legal standards. On the one hand, I should deeply appreciate his forethought and careful planning for what will no doubt be a highly emotional occurrence somewhere in our future. On the other hand, he's currently displaying it under the antique marled-oak baluster-leg side table that's in many ways the focal point of our living room. So every time I walk into the living room and glance unavoidably in the general direction of our antique marled-oak baluster-leg side table, I'm confronted with the fact that HEY! YOUR DAD'S GONNA DIE!

Also.

Do you see the multi-finish, pounded-tin-cornered, faux-slatted wooden box on the right in this picture? It was sent to us filled with frosted holiday delectables by some dear New York friends and it currently occupies a place of honor on the sofa coffee table with the extremely paltry remainders of all the frosted holiday delectables we received this fattening holiday season.

And guess what! My mom, inspired by the forethought and careful planning demonstrated by my dad and discovering her own aesthetic liking for this multi-finish, pounded-tin-cornered, faux-slatted wooden box, has taken these two factors to their logical conclusion: She wants it for her ashes. 

And I bet you know what I'm going to say next: I sure take handsome photographs of boxes. 

But you'll probably also guess that I'm going to say that every time I walk in the living room and glance unavoidably at the place of honor on the sofa coffee table in an ill-advised quest for frosted holiday delectables that for some probably readily discernible reason remain to this day uneaten, I'm confronted with the fact that HEY! YOUR MOM'S GONNA DIE!

Tune in to my next post when I tell you all about Monday's blackout, face plant, concussion and run-in with the cops at the ER! For realz!