Patient History

Pretty Random...

2005-11-27T13:02:00.000-05:00

So I was watching the old dumbbox, and a commercial came on for Directv, with this song about how “somebody up there loves me” because you’re getting so many channels. I find that kind of sad, that someone might think, well, now my life is complete, ‘cuz I’m getting HBO and HBO West. It’s sad to think of someone who has settled so much in their life that the only thing that they have to be happy about is the television.

But then, we are a people who love our stories. Since the beginning of our being, since the time when we were living in caves, we were telling each other stories. We have records of the stories told by the earliest peoples, paintings on rock and cave walls. We have the ancient mythology of Egypt and Greece and China. I’ve never really been one of those people who disparage the television as being the murderer of young minds and imagination. I think television is just another means whereby we tell each other stories. So what if it shows us everything so that we don’t have to imagine as much as we have to when reading a book? Nobody ever gets all hot and bothered over a book that has pictures in it, because it’s robbing us of the opportunity to imagine the action.

Neither does anyone get upset about movies. Does anyone yell about the draining of the human imagination from watching a movie? No. So what’s the big difference? I’m serious, I want to know what you think! Is watching the TV really so bad? Like I said, it’s just stories.

I admit I do get upset by people who watch TV and movies but never read. That does distress me, but that’s really just because I love to read so much that it saddens me to meet people who do not know the pleasure of holding an entire world in their hands, packaged in paper and ink.

Well, I suppose this is just a random rant. I’ve not been online very much in the last week and so have not posted to this blog. I hate that, I do, but it sometimes seems a great effort to log on. And I have a cable modem, which makes it sad, I know.

Allow me to sink into self-pity for a moment: Damn, I’m sore. Really, really sore. My back…I started Physical Therapy, and I guess it’s just taxing me, which it’s supposed to, I know. I don’t resent the PT for the pain, in the long run, it’s what’s best for me. I’m sore right now, but I hope that in the future, all this pain will help keep me from injuring my back again, as bad as I did on October 27th.

Sometime I’ll have to tell all about that experience. Riding in the ambulance to Somerset County Hospital, it was pretty miserable. They shot me all full of Dilaudid at the hospital, which hurt like hell, and then they made me sit up and walk! Can you imagine! The sadists.

get a life...hmph

2005-11-23T01:47:00.000-05:00

When your psychiatrist tells you to get a life, that's definitely gotta be a sign, right? And not one that's too hard to interpret. (If one can interpret something, how come one cannot outerpret that thing, as well?) But yeah, I saw my psychiatrist last week, and he told me to get a life. Used the words, and everything. The man knows how sick I am, knows the ins and outs of the reasons I stay home. And yet... Well, I guess that means something.

I was thinking of buying a car. I wonder if I can get anything for about five thousand that won't fall apart in a stiff breeze. The idea of driving around in a vehicle held together by duct tape doesn't appeal to me.

So, I've been hunting blogs kept by Brits. I'm working on a book, and, just to torture myself, I made one of the characters English. Of course, the extent of my knowledge of English lingo comes from Monty Python and Harry Potter, so... I need some actual casual use of the speak, you know? So.

But, yeah, getting a life. I wonder if I can buy one off of ebay? Starting bid, five bucks. I'm used to my single, solitary existence...it's been awhile since I have had to deal with other people on anything like a regular basis. Anyway, I'm tired and off to bed. I will write more tomorrow, I cannot believe I let so long pass between posts...

Yesterday and today...

2005-11-16T11:26:00.000-05:00

So, being sick, I had a hard time sleeping last night, and was up quite early this morning. Looking through my old computer files, I found this journal entry from September, 2001, when I was in this torturously long period suffering from insomnia. (This was before I was being properly medicated, I would fall asleep early, exhausted, and then wake up at four in the morning). The journal entry sort of fit my feelings this morning, so I thought I would quote it right here, though it’s a bit dated. Remember, this was only a few days after 9/11, so there are a couple of references to that. I have an entire conversation I had with a friend over AIM the night of 9/11 saved on my hard drive, I was thinking of sharing it here in my blog one of these days. It’s a unique record of that day, of what we were all feeling, of the fear and trauma of that time…I think we can all think back and remember how we felt, but the real details are only to be found in journal entries and the like. It’s something worth looking at, I think…something to save for future generations.

Anyway, here's the journal entry, from 09/14/2001:

Insomnia again, 5:52 AM and I slept for two hours last night, cheers. My mom gets up at 6 and I am impatient, lonely, desperate, opening the tiny door at the bottom of my bedroom door to let the cats in and with my Chibi comes my mother’s cat, Cyrano, who is aggressively affectionate and will not settle down and finds my chest extremely comfortable and likes to knead my tits with his claws out. Damn cat smells, too, what the hell has that woman been feeding her, or is it just that the thing like to play in the kitty litter too much? Why do cats always like me so much?

And why is there never any good tv on in the early early mornings, nothing but Gilligan’s Island and boring farm reports and religious shows where we must Witness and praise the sacred heart, can I get an Amen? How come they were always meeting new people on that island, and they never went with them when they left? People landed planes and boats on that island and yet they stuck around for the coconut sound system, the sweet acoustics?

I like infomercials, the kind where the audience knows all the catch-phrases and shouts them back at the host when prompted. I love that rotisserie thingum, where you can cook chickens and game hens and ribs and the fat just slides right off. (Set it and forget it!!) I do own a George Foreman grill, and am quite proud of it.

I guess they figure, if we program lots of boring shit at those hours, the insomniacs will fall asleep. I just want some freaking ENTERTAINMENT here, because there’s only so much intellectual stimulation you can cull from that damn Janet Jackson video where she’s standing in the middle of nowhere wearing more makeup than any wax dummy I ever saw and shaking her bare stomach at her car.

And look, it’s that Sugar Ray video, and dear God, Mark McGrath is very pretty all done up like Duran Duran circa Rio. And damn, John Norris looks SO CONCERNED about all those poor people suffering here in New York City and isn’t that little girl at the start of the new Macy Gray so damn cute?

I’m thinking about the grout in the blue bathroom, because if I call within the next ten minutes, they will supersize my order and give me whole buckets of that ultra-cleaning shit.

The Pentagon, one of the centers of our nation’s government, has had a plane flown into it. Christ, if that’s not surreal, then pull out the Dalí and let’s have some Serious Artistic Discussion, here. Ugh, there’s a lot of news on tv. I’m almost tempted to watch Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley try to sell me another piece of exercise equipment.

Not that tempted, though, no, and back to MTV. Insomniac Music Theater ended on VH1 at 6 AM, when you cease being up too late and start being up too early.

Morning TV does suck, doesn't it? On mornings when I wake up early I pretty much rely on the inane shows on the childrens' channels until old reruns of Spin City come on at nine. Pathetic? Yes. Well-planned? Definitely.

So, the Christmas commercials have already started. At least they waited until after Halloween this year. I'm sorry, Christmas season doesn't start for me until after Thanksgiving. Any time before then, I don't want Christmas sticking its big nose in. I have really got to make an effort not to spend so much money this year. I went kind of crazy with the presents last year, spending way too much. It's all my savings, you see, I don't have a job. How could I keep a steady job, what with my stomach, the IBS? Do you know how often my life is paralyzed by my IBS? It's really so very hard to cope with. The cramping, the diarrhea...I am really going out of my mind here, stuck in this house all the time. I can't get out anywhere without chowing down a ton of Immodium, there's just no other way. It's so painful and embarrassing to be caught out of the home when I get hit with an IBS attack. Sometimes I get so depressed, staring at these same walls all the time. So very sad. But what else can I do? When I lived in the dorms in college, I was too ashamed to explain to my friends what was wrong with me, too ashamed to use the bathroom when I had diarrhea with my roomate just outside the door, so as a result, I went home all the time. In the middle of the week I might have my sister come get me to take me home. My friends didn't understand, they would make fun of me for leaving so often, for being sick all the time--I would just tell them it was my asthma, my chronic bronchitis, or else just give them a nebulous "I'm sick" without further explanation. I ended up missing out on a lot from going home so often. They would tease me, sharing private jokes without explaining them to me, telling me it was my fault for not being there when the joke started.

Sometimes it feels like it will always be this way. I don't want to be trapped at home for the rest of my life! Last night I was so depressed, what with having the stomach flu and the really bad back pain. What I needed to do was to get up and read or walk around, but my evening pills had kicked in and I was so sleepy I couldn't keep my eyes open, could barely move. I felt as if I had a ton of rocks on me, weighing me down both physically and emotionally. I wanted to die, I really did, it felt as if it would never pass, as if I would always feel that way, as if there would never be any future for me. Oh, God. My mother came up and sat with me for a while, and it was nice not being alone, but after she left I felt bad again. Finally it passed, just because I was so tired I fell asleep. I haven't felt so close to death in more than a year. It was so terrible, I don't think I can find all the right words to describe it. I was so tired, I couldn't even cry.

But then, you know what? Morning came. The sun rose again, the sky grew light, the world woke up, and I wasn't so alone anymore. Sometimes it's hard to believe that the dawn will ever come, but it usually does. When one is battling bipolar, there is a great deal of trust involved in the struggle--trust that it will get better, that morning will come, that the future will be different, will be worth living, even if the present doesn't seem to be. Trust and effort, the continued effort to open one's eyes, to breathe, to take a step and then another, to move forward. Effort to keep living when it seems that dying might be easier.

right-brain-apalooza

2005-11-15T12:21:00.000-05:00

I thought I would post some of my artwork. Because of the 300 mb limit on images here on blogger, I thought I would just post a thumbnail that would lead you to the full-sized image on my domain space.

This first image to the left is completed. I hope to sell it at this new age wicca store in the town over from mine. The owner expressed interest in a piece I did as a present for my mother last year, one of the Crone, the third stage of womanhood. This piece is of a satyr playing the flute by moonlight, his music enchanting the butterflies to rise from the tall grass and dance, leaving silver trails of moonlight behind them.

This next image, to the right, is unfinished, that is, in progress. It is of Merlin, enchanted, and swallowed by the vines and branches of an enormous, great tree as a veil surrounds him. The stories of Merlin's enchantment by Nimue or Morgan Le Fay vary, some saying he was sealed up in crystal, or in stone, but I always liked best the idea that he was sleeping in the heart of a proud and ancient tree, holding him safe in its arms until he wakes once more. Again, I hope to sell this image when it is complete. You can see the amount of detail that has gone into this piece. I have already spent countless hours, no less than twenty, and am only perhaps halfway done. Ah well, what sacrifices we make, and for such small reward. I am enjoying doing this piece, though. There's something about drawing trees that just puts me in ecstasy. Crazy? Yep. But useful! *grin*

Results not typical.

2005-11-15T09:54:00.000-05:00

Well, *laughter*, I know why I felt so nauseous last night, why the smell of the food was making me queasy. I believe I have a stomach flu—I was up sick all night, got about five minutes sleep. Really, it’s a bit of a relief, at least I know that it wasn’t all emotional, the way I felt last night. I was kind of worried, there. Now I just have to worry about keeping hydrated, taking lots of Immodium, and, well, not to give too much information, but, the hemorrhoids. Oy. Sorry about that.

I was supposed to see the gastroenterologist this morning at 9:30, about my ongoing stomach troubles. As I said before, I screwed up my stomach, perhaps, according to my doctor, permanently, through prolonged use and abuse of the narcotic cough syrup, Tussionex. What it means is that if I don’t take Loperamide—the active ingredient in Immodium A-D—every day, I end up with chronic diarrhea, which can make life quite inconvenient. Yet another reason, besides the emotional swings of Bipolar and the lingering agoraphobia, that keeps me from going out all that much.

A couple of years ago I was trapped in the grips of agoraphobia. For those of you that don’t know, agoraphobia means a fear of going outside. It comes from the Greek “agora,” which was their word for an open marketplace, and “phobia,” meaning, of course, fear. By definition, a phobia is an irrational fear, but knowing that intelligently doesn’t really help. I didn’t leave the house unless it was absolutely necessary, not for two or so years. In 2002, my family wanted to admit me to a psychiatric hospital in Princeton, called Princeton House, but when the day came for me to go, I got hysterical, hyperventilated, and then vomited all over the living room floor. Needless to say, I didn’t go that day. I did end up admitted there, sort of against my will, later on, but that was at about two or so in the morning, and I was admitted through Princeton Hospital when I had a bad spell. It was one of those times, one of those nights, you know? I was heartsore, scared, tired, and on the verge of hurting myself seriously, so my parents bundled me up and took me to the hospital at around midnight.

I was admitted to Princeton House around two in the morning, and since I had been threatening to hurt myself, they made me sleep on a couch in front of the nurses’ station. The next day, they had me on suicide watch, so I wasn’t allowed to be alone. They made me stay in the main room which was, basically, an agora. A huge, octagon-shaped room with the ceiling at least a hundred feet overhead, the whole room being about the size of a football field, and filled with people. I had to confront my fear in the worst way, I panicked, started crying, begging to go home…but since I had signed a contract promising to give 24-hour notice before leaving, they wouldn’t let me go. In fact, the on-call doctor threatened to commit me to the state hospital if I didn’t calm down. Now, state hospital is no picnic, let me tell you, I have heard some horror stories, so I gulped down my sobs fast and took the tranquilizers they gave me like a good girl.

After a couple of days, I went home, so grateful. It was as if I had had a near-death experience, it was hysterical. Everything looked so lovely to me, the colors brighter, the air cooler, American beauty filling my senses. I switched to outpatient care after that for a couple of months, and slowly, I overcame my agoraphobia. Trial by fire, I suppose, and best for me in the long run, though at the time it felt like my heart was going to rip itself out of my chest and bleed itself out on the floor.

Now, I suppose I can’t go to the doctor this morning, and, oh too bad, won’t be able to receive the boring results of the painful and embarrassing blood and stool tests to which I was subjected last month. They would have called me if they had found something in my tests, they told me so, therefore I know that there is nothing wrong with me. I have to admit, I was half hoping for them to find a worm or some kind of parasite. You know, something they could discover, something that would explain my stomach problems, something that could be treated and done away with. Alas, it’s simply the effects of years of drug abuse, something only treatable with regular use of loperamide and diet change. I do not eat anything like healthy, too much soda, too many sweets, too much fat and carbs. I hate the pain and embarrassing symptoms of my IBS, and yet I am too addicted to food to change my eating habits. You would think that the pain would prompt me, wouldn’t you? But I suppose that only a smart person would change their ways for their health, right? I guess this is how people with diabetes let themselves get so bad that they go blind and lose limbs. They know they have to make drastic changes in their lives to get healthy, yet they just can’t bring themselves to do it!

The doctor told me to lose weight, too, which would help not only my IBS, but also my asthma. If only I could take a short cut, cheat by using those diet pills they advertise on television all the time. Testimonials from people who have lost fifty, sixty, seventy and more pounds, talking while all the white there’s a caption warning “results not typical.” What does that even mean? Are they telling us to buy their pills to lose weight, but be forewarned, we don’t anticipate that you will lose all that much. If you’re twenty or more pounds overweight, take our pills, but don’t expect them to work. “Results not typical.” Disclaimers really get me sometimes, you know that? Covering one’s own ass has become something of an art form in advertising, has it not? The directions on products these days have become ridiculous. Warning us not to spray toxic materials into our eyes, not to attempt swallowing our new sharp knives, not to ingest the temptingly tasty cleaning products...According to advertisers, the world is full of slack-jawed idiots, poking themselves in the eyes with forks and sitting bare-assed on their sizzling waffle irons. I would complain further, if I didn’t sort of agree.

And so, emotionally I feel better today, if physically I feel downright crappy. My stomach hurts, my back hurts where I injured it…I have to use a cane to get around, which is better, at least, than having to use the wheelchair my mother rented for me a couple of weeks ago. She returned it to the pharmacy on last Friday. I was a little regretful; I didn’t get to have any fun with it. I couldn’t enjoy it while I still really needed it, I was in too much pain to attempt doing wheelies and zipping around the neighborhood at breakneck speed down the hills. It really scared my cat, Chibi (pronounced chee-bee, it’s Japanese) to see me coming at him in that chair. But he gets scared when I wear my track pants, which I call my “swishy pants” because of the sound they make when I walk in them. Chibi is so sweet, and cute, and dumb. Plus, I think he’s got fleas.

Have I mentioned my screaming fear of bugs? Insects, arachnids, anything tiny and creepy-crawly. I killed a bee in my room this summer, and I couldn’t relax or sleep for the next two days, no exaggeration. I was never fond of bugs, they always freaked me out, but about thirteen or fourteen years ago, when I was in junior high, I had a bad case of lice. It kept me out of school for days as my mother treated my hair with this Nix crap that had a god-awful stench, which I would then do my best to wash out with shampoo. To this day, the smell of TreSemmé makes me queasy. Nothing against the company or anything, it’s just the association, like when I couldn’t eat Burger King for years after I had it while recovering from a hospital stay in high school.

Someone left me a really sweet comment last night, encouraging me to keep writing. I want to, honestly I do. What I want more than anything for my life is to become a novel writer, to be able to make a living at it. It’s hard though, so hard, to get the words to come. This, writing in this blog, is different, almost free association. Crafting a story, it’s like building a mansion, brick by brick. It used to come easily, but now it seems such a staggering task. It’s not even a question of a lack of ideas. I have plenty of them, many, too many. It’s hard to choose, even combining them…I have sheets of paper on my walls near my bed so I can jot down all the random ideas and names and quotes that come to mind throughout the day and especially at night. Sometimes I wake in the morning to see the unintelligible things I scrawled at three in the morning, things that came to me in a dream…But good stuff pops out of my mind, too—maybe too much? There are about a hundred notebooks on shelves and in piles all over my room, each filled with the beginnings of stories that never went anywhere. Follow-through is what I’m lacking. Maybe this blog will help me with that. Writing is a right-brain activity, the creative side, but discipline is a left-brain quality. Drawing comes more easily to me, it’s a total right-side activity. It just flows. Maybe this blog will help the writing flow again, for the first time in years.

Garlic.

2005-11-14T20:49:00.000-05:00

I’m depressed, and my house reeks of garlic.

Because of the pain killers, I ended up sleeping all afternoon, from 3:30 pm to about 7:15 pm. I hate it when I do that, but I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. Now I am so down, sad, bummed…I just can’t shake it! And the garlic reek…it makes me nauseous! I’m actually queasy. My mother made chicken cacciatore for dinner, a meal which I cannot stand though my father and sisters love it. Lurve it, even. I don’t know, I guess I’m a bad Italian, I don’t like chicken cacciatore, lasagna, or most of the pasta dishes my mom makes. Although I’m not really Italian…I’m actually something of a mutt, what with my father being of Estonian, German and Swedish descent, and my mother being mostly Italian with a little German thrown in. But there’s a lot of Italian in me, and for some reason that makes me feel like a traitor for hating spaghetti.

It’s evenings like this that bring into stark relief the pathetic stagnation of my life. No job, no car, no friends. If I had a car, I could go somewhere, shake this off…but my car, my lovely little 1993 Toyota Camry that ran like a dream died when I smashed it into a behemoth of an oak tree at two in the morning in a rain storm in February of 2000. I was okay, I was wearing my seat belt and the air bag deployed, but the entire front of the car was smashed in, the engine block crushed, the body of the car totaled.

Just nothing to do, you know? I’m emotionally tired out. And intellectually I know that it’s just a down cycle, a bad patch, a part of the bipolar…but it’s also more than that, just the overall suckiness of my life. (Yes, I know, spell check, “suckiness” is not a word). The depression makes me see it all in a bad light. (What kind of light is a bad light? Does it have a color? Does it give you skin cancer?) More than that, the depression tints the future, not just the present. What I mean is, I’m not stupid, I’m not oblivious to the pathetic state of my life at any time, but usually I have a certain hope that things will some day get better, the shadows will lift, the clouds part, the clichés fall away, etc. But when I feel like this, the future doesn’t exist, it’s just always going to be this way. The future is nowhere I want to be…the future is where I am today.

Anyway, that’s all, I guess. Sad, depressed…I think I’ll eat something. That usually helps, treating pain with food. Probably why I look the way I do. Oy. Just ignore me. Tomorrow I’ll feel better, I’m sure, and then I will post an apology.

Brain and cotton.

2005-11-14T11:43:00.000-05:00

Whenever I missed a day of school in grade school, my father would accuse me of “dogging it.” My mother would ice me, give me the silent treatment. I’m not sure whether she thought I was faking, or if she simply thought me weak. She had something like a perfect attendance record when she was in grade school, and I suppose she expected no less from me. She thought it was all in my head; my Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) diagnosis didn’t help, since at the time the widely held belief was that the sickness was caused by stress. If I could only gain control of myself, suck it up, bite the bullet and stop being so goddamned weak, then I could make it to school every day, no problem.

My mother has mellowed quite a bit, immeasurably since I was a teenager. I am twenty-six now, we relate as adults and have a strong bond and friendship. When I was young, my mother was something of a tyrant. When I was a child I lived in constant fear of her. No matter how hard I tried I could never keep out of trouble, I was just too wild. I would hear my father cursing as he worked around the house and would repeat all the interesting and fun new words I heard. My mother used to wash my mouth out with soap when I was still in single digits, until one day, after calling my sister a bitch—a word whose meaning I did not know—I gagged on the soap bar and vomited all over my mother’s legs. After that, no more soap-meets-mouth.

The spankings were the worst. What got me was the anticipation. We could be taking a car ride on the way home from dinner or the mall and I might get into a fight with one of my two sisters, Jenn who is three years older than I, and Adri who is five years younger. The hell of it was when my mother would decide enough was enough and tell me I was in for a spanking as soon as we got home. Then, for the rest of the car ride, I had to live in anxiety of the coming whupping. I would sob, beg, plead, but my mother was like an obelisk of basalt, totally impenetrable and unbendable. That old silent treatment would kick in and she wouldn’t say a word as I worked myself in to hysterics pleading with her to spare me. More than once I ended up hyperventilating to the point where I grew light-headed and saw spots. God, I was so scared of my mother when I was young. I asked her the other day, if she had it to do all over again, would she still hit us kids? She said no. Perhaps she regrets having her young girls fear her so. Perhaps she is afraid that she was continuing the cycle that started with her mother, my grandmother, who used to beat the backs of her legs with a ping pong paddle. My grandmother was also beaten regularly for misbehaving as a child; apparently my great-grandfather could be quite cruel to his eight or nine children—that’s right, both my parents were only children so I have no aunts or uncles or cousins…but every one of my four grandparents were one of eight or nine children, and so I have a plethora of second cousins and third cousins and whatever-you-call-‘ems…I don’t know any of them, we don’t keep in touch. I met some of them back in 1991 when my grandmother was killed in a car accident, but that was the first and last contact I had with these people. It’s strange to think of how many people there are out there who share my blood…people I wouldn’t recognize if I sat next to them on the train.

When I was a kid, I was filled with spite, bitter about my treatment. If you had asked me if I would someday spank my own children, I would have answered with a gleeful and evil “yes.” Now…I don’t know. I would never want my own hypothetical children to fear me the way I feared my mother. But discipline is important in raising a child; I’ve known too many spoiled brats who lacked a firm parental hand, whose behavior screamed for their parents to simply tell them “no” once in a while. But to hit your child, to cause them physical pain…it strikes me wrong.

What brought all of this on? I’m not sure. Prompted, perhaps, by my thoughts on my IBS, on being bed-ridden as I am with intense back pain. I am currently high on pain killers, Percoset and this good stuff called Soma that extracts your brain from your skull using a crazy-straw and spits it out to hover a few feet above you. I am home again, as I am every day, as I have been every day since early 2001. I am lonely; I have lost touch with all of my old high school friends, all my college friends, all the friends I once had through my former web site which was, for a one or two year-long period, quite popular. I live at home with my father, mother, elder sister and my younger sister who comes home from Rutgers on weekends. Jennifer, 29, is my best friend, but she works and we barely ever get to spend time together. I suppose I am lonely, it is as simple as that.

James Luxton at Doob LaVey wrote a recent post on his own profound loneliness. Now, I have my family, and in that I am lucky. Don’t for a moment think that I am not grateful, that I do not thank whatever nameless entity of good that connects us all every day for that, for them, for their continued health and presence in my life. But I need my friends, I need to relate to people my own age, as friends, socially. I was really counting on that trip to San Francisco at the end of last month—you know, the one I had to miss because of my severe back injury. I was counting on it for social stimulus, to see and make friends, to have discussions, to be out of the house…I was looking for it to rejuvenate me so I could come back ready to get cracking, to embark on my future. I am a writer, first and foremost, though the way I make occasional money now is through selling my artwork. Writing used to come so easily when I was still untreated for Bipolar. Those manic highs are great for multi-tasking, let me tell you. I could be writing a sentence, while thinking about the one I had just written and connecting the two, while planning the next sentence to come, and outlining the entire paragraph. My mind was in all places at all times, and I could sneeze out whole chapters in a day.

The medication I take, Seroquel, Effexor XR, and Neurontin (and these are just a few of the many pills I must take daily to combat the multiple chronic conditions from which I suffer like allergies, asthma, IBS, back pain, and irregular period for which I take birth control pills) help stabilize my violent mood swings. Violent is the word for it, you can see the scars on my left wrist where I used to cut, slicing at the skin with a pair of nail scissors, letting the skin peel and bunch beneath the blade and then watching the blood well slowly up to fill the grooves carved into my flesh.

So, the meds help, but they also dull my brain. It’s like trying to think through a wall of cotton, if that makes sense. Like struggling out of a strait jacket, a padded silk strait jacket. Like my brain is wrapped around and around with soft, white cotton. It’s harder to get the words out, now. Harder to extract them, like pulling a tooth from gums gone completely numb with Novocain.

The words are coming harder, even now, in this entry. I guess I’m just not good at working at it. It all used to come so easily to me. Even now, I struggle…

Lonely, yes. And so I started this blog, sending my thoughts out along the thick cords of the world wide web. Is anyone reading this? Am I speaking to myself, revealing my soul and pain to no one? If so, perhaps that’s best.

My brain has left my skull, my movements are sluggish, I had better sign off. More on loneliness, later; I have an old journal entry from college I would like to relate. Reading the thoughts and emotions of my 21 year-old self brings an obscure sort of ache. I feel sorry for her, this girl from the past. Maybe I can bring her to life again here, in this blog…maybe I can assuage her pain, if only just a little.

a quick note to...well, myself, really

2005-11-13T23:17:00.000-05:00

Hooray, Patient History has just gone online...in that I chose "Yes" as my answer to blogger.com's question, would I like my site added to their listing. Tomorrow, I plan to look around the web for places to pimp...ahem, that is, link my blog wherever I can. Until I get some readers over here, I'm just talking to myself.

Watching tv, and a thought.

2005-11-13T22:44:00.000-05:00

Watching A&E’s amazing show, “Intervention,” always brings mixed emotions for me. I dropped out of college in 2000 after (barely) finishing my junior year at The College of New Jersey. At that point in time I was already a recreational drug user—never hard drugs, and I hate alcohol. My drug of choice had been, since junior high, the cough suppressant Tussionex, which contains Hydrocodone. That is the main ingredient in Vicodin, the highly-addictive pain killer, if that helps put it into perspective for you. Tussionex is one of the most addictive legal drugs available, it is a highly controlled substance. After dropping out of school, my abuse of the drug grew steadily worse.

At first it was just a once-in-a-while thing, as it had been for years. But then, as my Bipolar Disorder got worse and I did not get treatment for it (I didn’t even know what the hell was the matter with me, let alone that it was Bipolar) I did what most addicts do, the way most addicts start: I self-medicated. To treat the frightening highs, the manic highs when I was just insane and out of my head, unable to think straight, thinking of killing myself, staying up for days on end writing and writing, whole stories, whole novels in days and weeks…to treat that, I would take the Tussionex to dull the knife edge of the mania. And when I was in the depths of the depressive cycle, so down deep that my vision was actually tinged gray, I didn’t see colors the way I once did, couldn’t get the shadows out of my eyes…when I was down there, the Tussionex helped numb the pain.

After about a year or two at home, I became a full-blown addict. I realized I was addicted when I ran out of Tussionex one Friday. By Saturday morning, I was shaking, shivering, itching, I was nauseous, and there was this terrible hollow, insecure feeling in my chest and stomach, a feeling of horrible vulnerability. I had the shivers and the chills, and I said to myself, “Shit. I am an addict.” Yep, welcome to the wide wonderful world of being an addict, you stupid bitch.

Soon I developed the tricks that all addicts do in order to keep myself in the stuff. I would doctor shop, going to different doctors to get a prescription when others began to catch on. I was good at talking doctors into giving me refills, even better at talking pharmacists into filling my scripts early. Oh, the silvered tongue of an addict antsy for a fix. Lying is an art to the addict, you know. An art, and a survival tactic.

Now, so you know, the standard dose for Tussionex is one teaspoon, or five mL a day. At the height of my addiction to, and thus toleration for, the drug I was talking around fifty or fifty-five mL in a day. That, and whatever else I could get my hands on to enhance the high, whatever pain killers I had for my chronic (and honest-to-God) back pains and injury.

I knew what I was doing, knew what I am, but addicts aren’t just good at lying to others…they are best at lying to themselves. I hated myself, what I was, don’t get me wrong. Disgust is too weak a word. But it was always “one more time” “one more bottle” “one more teaspoon” “I’ll just use up all the refills and then I will STOP.”

Yeah, right. It took my mother stepping in to help me quit…the first time, anyway. I kicked it in May of 2004, and it was good, and I was glad, but I missed it like air, like food, like Satan misses God. So, in November 2004 I relapsed. I didn’t just relapse, I took a gleeful swan dive into a pool of thick, yellow, sweet, sweet Tussionex. Ah, that taste, that delicious sleepy warmth that dulls the world and lifts you above it to where you can’t even see the clouds below you.

The worst of it all was lying to my mother. She’s so good, and loving, and caring, and wants nothing, NOTHING, more than for her family to be happy and healthy and well. NOTHING MORE. She is the best person in the world, she is my friend and my protector and I love her, and lying to her was like shoveling dog shit into my mouth daily. But, in the end, she couldn’t help me. It had to be My Choice, my own motivations. So in July, I kicked it again. I can’t say I don’t still want it. And I can’t say I haven’t relapsed since then, but it was a brief, shameful dip into that sticky sweet pool…the one without any ladders leading up out of it. It’s easy to get into that pool, you see, but oh so hard to get out.

Right now I am, as I have mentioned, medicated because of my recent back injury, but no Hydrocodone, no Vicodin. I miss it, I won’t lie, but I don’t want it, I don’t want that Goddamn habit, that Goddamn monkey on my back, to quote George Michael.

And so, now here I am. My IBS, my stomach is completely fucked up from all those years using the Tussionex. I may have permanently made myself ill from it, may always be stuck with the chronic cramping and diarrhea, taking immodium and lomotil and anything else that will work. That is the price I am paying, one of many, like the loss of the last four or five years of my life. Look, I’m not going to blame it all on the Tussionex, because I am genuinely ill, this Bipolar is something I struggle with every minute of every day, and I have spent a lot of the last five years wrestling with that, it’s true. Wrestling with it like Jacob wrestling the angel… not that I’m much of a bible scholar, it’s just the first thing to do with wrestling that sprang to mind.

So, here I am, watching “Intervention,” a truly good show on A&E Sunday nights, 10PM EST. For most people, I assume they watch the show with a rush of gratitude for their own lives, a sort of “Heaven forfend.” For me, the show brings guilt, but in a good way. It’s that guilt that keeps me from using, from backsliding, to becoming a liar and a cheater again. I recommend the show, I do. Whatever reaction it gets from you, it will probably be one that is positive, at least in the long run.

And a beginning...

2005-11-12T21:47:00.000-05:00

Finally, and only after the rest of the world has done so, I begin a blog. What finally prompted me to do it? Free time. Lots and lots of free time. On October 26th, I threw my back out. No, I didn't just throw it out...I tossed it, chucked it, flung it, exploded it... I went in an ambulance to Somerset Medical Center where I was put in a private room in the ER...Special treatment? No, just a slow day at the ole SMC. They brought me to the torture chamber/X-Ray room and made me get into positions that a Chinese acrobat couldn't achieve. Then they gave me shots...lots of shots. After that, I was still in agony, but I didn't seem to care as much...Hmm.

The embarrassing thing was how I threw my back out. People keep asking me this, and I have to answer that I did it by lifting my hips. Yep. I was sitting in the passenger seat of my sister's crapmobile and I wanted to get my chap stick out of my pocket. I lifted my hips to get at my pocket and snap! It was pretty terrible. I think I blacked out for a while.

Anyway, I have been pretty much bed-ridden since then, which sucks more than it sounds. It took about three days after the initial injury for me to get to the point where I could sit up for a while. I had been lying down since the ambulance ride, never being propped up for longer than it took me to sit on the toilet and pee. (Sorry if that's just a little Too Much Information). So here I am, bed-ridden, and bored. So, the idea of creating a blog, which I had been bandying about for maybe a year, thrust itself into the foreground of my idle mind, and here we are.

I think what was holding me back all year was the absence of a theme. It's great when people have blogs that are no more than journals, I love that, but for my blog I wanted a theme. Why? How the hell should I know? *shrug* I'm all doped up on Percoset, here, okay? Who can explain the drugged-up workings of a mind unhinged?

Inspired by my lovely little two-and-a-half week enforced vacation from ALL ACTIVITY (which, by the way, kept me from going on a trip to San Francisco for a Yaoi Convention that I had been planning for an entire YEAR), I decided to theme my blog with illness. Oy, I know, right? Whine, whine. But the thing is, I think I have something to say about the subject. Let me be honest up front. I've had chronic bronchitis since I was nine, and that led to bronchial asthma. Big deal, I know. Then the IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome, the only thing more fun than having the disorder is telling people its name) kicked in when I was 11. I can pinpoint the week that summer. It's a little-understood sickness, originally thought to be caused by stress, though now there's some evidence that it has something to do with bacteria. The fact is, though, that stress is a major cause of the symptoms of IBS, being alternating diarrhea and constipation and terrible stomach cramps. Crippling ones. The year I was in the eighth grade, I was absent from school 40 days, no lie. The stress factor in that case was my junior high, because I was unpopular and got teased a lot, but that's another story.

Around that time I started seeing a therapist for anxiety disorder. I didn't like the guy, and I was ashamed of being in therapy at the time. I also felt that he made light of my suicidal tendencies and existential pain--all thirteen-year-olds think that no one takes them seriously, though to be honest, they are usually right--and so I kicked that habit as soon as I could.

Things trucked along. Senior year of high school I was absent 40 and one half days. How did I graduate? Well, I gave the vice principal oral sex. That helped a lot. That, and a lot of letters from my mother and my doctor explaining my illness. I mean, I had a 3.8 GPA. They wanted to hold my back just because of my attendance record, it had nothing to do with my grade. I was in the top ten frelling percent of my class! Bureaucratic buttmunches. Grrr.

Anyway, I graduated and went to college at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) in Ewing, New Jersey, and things went downhill from there. My grades were great for the first couple of years, but emotionally I was on a downward spiral. It's a long story, but I ended up dropping out my junior year. After a time, filled with much drama and trauma, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, with a secondary diagnosis of Clinical Depression, Anxiety Disorder, and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. You should SEE how much medication I take every day, and it doesn't help that I have no prescription insurance plan. I have to get all my pills from Canada fer cryin out loud.

I think it just might be possible that I have something worthwhile to share with people about illness and recovery. I've dug up some old journals, which I hope to quote here. I hope to tell my story (my Patient History, if you will) while also recording observations about my life now. This site is young, and bare, and skinny. I will link it up to as many places as will have me once it's grown up, wearing clothes, and gotten a little fatter.