Amantadine day 3

As is often the case on weekends, I woke up with a migraine that shut me down for most of the day. I even had to cancel my piano lesson, and I was all ready to KILL on the C.P.E. Bach “Solfegietto.”

 
I’ve had many discussions about why migraines tend to hit me mostly on weekends. Maybe I consume more caffeine than I realize during the workweek and I crash on the weekends without it. Maybe my illness-addled brain politely waits until it knows a migraine won’t disrupt any major plans and only then does it unleash the kraken.

 
Maybe someone’s trying to contact me about my warranty.

 
But now there’s the unknown universe of miserable Amantadine side effects in the mix, and I’m just gonna give in and chalk this morning up to that.

I was able to make myself functional enough by 3:00 to work at the meals program where I volunteer. (Side note: The people we’re serving are growing in numbers, and quite a few felt the need to inform us that this was their first time needing to get a free meal. The fact that new visitors are self-conscious and almost apologetic for some reason always hits me the hardest.)

My body and brain had only 50% battery power by then, but I still went to see a superlative production of a show some friends were in. I was seated by my mom, and she pointed out that I was noticeably less shaky. My brain was in crowded-theater mode and I was already subconsciously holding myself still, but the more I paid attention to it, the more I realized I was spending WAY less energy than normal trying to hold myself together. But maybe I was just still exhausted from the migraine.

 
My litmus test is putting toothpaste on my toothbrush. It’s been maybe a year since I started having to set my toothbrush on the counter to get the toothpaste on it because my hands were too shaky to do it when I was holding both things in front of me. And that was still the case just now.

 
But as I sit here typing this, only one foot is swinging and twitching. Usually both are on fire 24/7. It’s really quite remarkable. So I’m cautiously letting myself think the Amantadine is finally letting me SIT THE FUCK STILL LIKE A BIG BOY.

Giving cigarettes the Axe

My seizure medication (Lamictal, which is being slowly titrated up from 400mg/day to an eventual 800mg/day) hasn’t killed my cigarette-smoke hallucinations, so I’ve resorted to attempting to mask the imaginary stink with one of these plug-in room-smell thingies (in the default—but debatable—Fresh Linen scent):

And even though it’s on the lowest setting and hidden halfway behind a huge piece of furniture, it makes my entire Basement Bachelor BunkerTM smell like a middle-school boys’ locker room the day after a massive sale on Axe Body Spray.

It does mask the cigarette-smoke hallucinations—which get especially strong (or at least acutely noticeable) as I work at my desk—but it’s giving me a low-grade headache.

Even worse, it’s giving me flashbacks to my boyish middle-school waistline, first fuzz of pubescent armpit hair and store-brand parachute pants. Can I borrow some hair mousse?

Carpe diem

I was supposed to leave this morning for my annual summer vacation to visit friends in D.C. and stay at their best-porch-on-the-planet beach house in Rehoboth, DE, but I had to cancel a few weeks ago due to work issues. A lot of cool things have popped up on my calendar here in Cedar Rapids this weekend though, so I'm more or less OK with missing my trip.

But I still missed work this morning thanks to a rough descent into a bipolar depressive episode that started last night. I talk a lot about being bipolar, and every time I think I should stop someone messages me out of the blue to thank me for being so open and honest about it. Enough people have confided in me the stories of their struggles with mental illness that I sometimes worry I won't remember everyone in my mental checklist of kindred, struggling spirits. I've developed close, supportive friendships with a lot of these people though, and our check-ins and conversations and even drives across town just to give hugs are so dear and so valuable to me that I'll probably never stop talking about my own struggles.

So here's this morning's report: I woke up at 6:00 in a motivational black hole with a fiery headache and enough disorientation that I knew enough to skip the gym—which is huge because some days working out is the only thing that keeps me human—and to let my boss know that I'd come in after lunch, if at all today. Then I went back to the kind of non-sleep that feels like you're staying awake getting more and more exhausted compounded by the stress of feeling worried about getting more and more exhausted. But when I woke up around 11:00 my head was clear enough that I could look at the episode objectively and summon the coping and pushing-through skills I've learned over the last decade and I showered and ate and made it to work, where I've been surprisingly productive ... albeit profoundly exhausted.

So to all the people I know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the people I don't know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the rest of you curious enough about my struggles today to have read this far: You will fight this battle all your life. You will get meds that don't work, you will get meds that actually make things worse and you will find meds that you'll notice start to make improvements ... though you'll spend ages waiting cynically for them to fail you. In the mean time, learn what helps you stabilize yourself and what helps you push your way out of the wet wool blankets and the rolling fogs that trap you. As soon as I felt coherent this morning, I texted one friend who right now is in a bottomless depressive episode so we could both not feel alone in our struggles and I texted another friend who as far as I know is not having an episode just so I'd know that someone who deeply understands what I'm going through is at the very least thinking about me. And then I picked out a shirt that says Carpe Diem on it and I know that it's totally goofy bordering on stupid, but if I'm wearing a shirt that means something to me on a certain day or in a certain situation, I feel compelled to go out in the world and show it to everybody.

And after what my head put me through this morning, I need everyone to know—no, I need to SHOW everyone—that I'm seizing the hell out of the rest of my today.

In which I am a damn drama queen

I woke up in a mild bipolar crash that was still bad enough that it gave me a powerful headache and what felt like a fever. I decided to skip the gym to sleep so now I feel fat. Then I decided to take the morning off to sleep so now I feel guilty for missing work. Then I got a raspberry seed wedged in my teeth when I finally ate something. Then I somehow nicked the top of my ear while shaving the side of my face. Because WHO DOES THAT? Now I'm at work and I'm groggy but functional and here's a funny cat picture.

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.

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."