manage my Bipolar disorder

Without the mood stabilizer, I’m more volatile . . . but I think that’s mostly better, as I’m laughing out loud more often, and crying when something moves me. I just need to watch out for my mean bastard tendencies.

• Exercise – daily walk
• Sleep – wearing CPAP so I get good, restful sleep (even if it usually happens in 2-3 hour chunks)
• Create – either playing music/singing, or something with a more tangible product

I haven’t thrown away the meds yet . . . but I also haven’t refilled the prescription that ran out and started this whole experiment.

I came home from work on Friday after a dangerously sleepy drive home, and dropped down for a nap after giving instructions that I should be awakened at 10pm if I wasn’t already up.

After that 3 hour nap, I felt fantastic, rarin’ to go. On that energy, I stayed up about 2am . . . which means I’d been “active” for 21 of the previous 24 hours. Then I crawled into bed beside my best belovéd to sleep some more. Naturally, I awoke at 5am (my new “natural” waking time, it seems).

To most of my family, it must appear as if I never sleep at all.

I just need to remember that the 2am-5am sleep is critical if I’m going to continue driving myself to work. If I’m awake, and not feeling tired at 2am, I need to go lay down anyway.

I can do this demented übermann schedule all I want so long as it doesn’t harm my relationships with my family, and so long as it doesn’t negatively impact my career.

I got a diagnosis of depression about ten(!) years ago now, and it seemed to explain why so much of life had seemed so hard . . . not crushingly, despairingly, slitting wrists hard, just generally harder than it ought to be . . . for so long. So at that point I got on the pharmacological merry-go-round.

That made sense to me, too: If the problem was my brain chemistry, why not try tweaking the mix a bit to see if we could settle things. This also came as a family crisis boiled over – my dad went into a full-blown manic psychosis, and his brothers and sisters decided to do an “intervention” at my house to get him some help. (Unfortunately, they thought of his drinking as the problem, not a symptom. They were going after the wrong issue.)

So over the past ten years I’ve done a lot of different anti-depressants, trying to balance the good they do against the side-effects they have. Then, two years ago, something (for me) totally unprecedented happened. I experienced some mania of my own.

Wow.

After all those years of low energy, I suddenly had all kinds of things I wanted to accomplish and seemingly boundless reserves of energy to do them. I went to bed at midnight . . . and woke up at 3, raring to go! It was as if I had more time than mere mortals.

Then hypomania slid a little farther into mania. I had boundless energy, but couldn’t stay focused on any one thing long enough to accomplish anything useful. I had too many great, fun, exciting new ideas rushing in at all times to ever get to the end of the ones I was already working on.

Clearly, it was time for an intervention of my own.

I took a few days off work, vaguely citing a “family emergency”. I got an appointment with a counselor to start finding some additional tools for my mental quiver. And I expanded my daily chemical regimen to include a mood stabilizer.

Before long, I had come down from that delirious, exciting, dangerous, scary hypomanic place. And, thanks to the support of my belovéd (who has been dealing with similar issues of her own for far longer and with fewer medications), I managed to come down off the edge without crashing hard.

I began dozing off while watching TV with my belovéd last night, so she very sensibly sent my ass to bed at about 11 o’clock . . . and I slept straight through until 5 o’clock, at which point I awoke refreshed but not overly energetic. If I’m reading my condition correctly, this means I won’t have quite as much time in the evenings (which I’ll miss), but getting a good block of uninterrupted sleep leaves me less likely to doze off while I’m driving home from work (which would be a very bad thing).

I’m leaving the alarm set for 6:30 as an emergency backup, but I haven’t needed it since going off my antidepressant medication.

After a bit of a medication snafu, and ensuing conference with my health care professional, I’ve decided this is a terrific time to mess with my brain chemistry ever so judiciously and stop taking the antidepressant I’ve been on. I’ll continue taking a mood stabiliser, and doing all the other things that have kept the depression away for the last several years now.

But since my prescription ran out, I’ve slipped into a slightly hypomanic phase . . . which means that after four or five hours of sleep, I awake refreshed, alert, and ready to face the day (despite the fact that the day isn’t quite ready for me yet).

It’s kinda nice having time with my best belovéd in the evenings and having my “alone” time to get things done in the wee hours before heading off to work. We’re all keeping a close eye to make sure I don’t go off the rails again . . . so far, so good.