I was going to keep drinking today,… and tomorrow,… and all weekend long.
And that’s exactly what I did. It really didn’t matter to me that the prescription bottles told me to avoid alcoholic beverages. Well, wait,… that’s not exactly true. Two of the three told me to “avoid alcoholic beverages.” The third told me to “not drink alcohol TO EXCESS,” while using the medication. Bingo! That’s enough for me. If one of the bottles told me it was okay to drink as long as I didn’t drink TOO much,… well then, shit,… I can drink. And if I’m gonna drink one beer,... I might as well make it ten. Or fifteen. Whatever. Listen,… ain’t no bottle gonna tell me what to do.
So, Thursday was beers. And then Friday was a few beers (read: nine). And, of course, Saturday had to be a few beers,… it WAS Saturday after all. And Sunday is the day I start out by reading the sports page, listening to Jazz or New Age music,… and drinking mimosas.
Oh,… I still had to work all those nights,… so all those nights’ drinking was accomplished after eleven pm. Saturday was the night it got bad. Really bad. I had had my wife’s internet passwords for some time. Email,… facebook,… bank account,… you name it, and I had it. So I, with about a stomach full of alcohol, went online. I erased her emails—that she needed. I “unfriended” a dozen or so people on her facebook account. And then I drained her bank account by transferring all but a few bucks to my own account. I did all this because she had the unmitigated gall to go out with her friends from work and not get home until after I was home from work—at 11:00 pm. Also, she didn’t answer her cell phone when I called to tell her I was out of work and on my way home. When I got to the house, and she wasn’t there, I felt a rage unlike any other I had felt in my life. So I started to drink. I called her cell phone again—still no answer. The anger doubled in intensity. She reached the driveway about five minutes later and said she hadn’t heard the phone ring. Tangentially, I have mentioned in a previous chapter, my growing and seemingly uncontrollable paranoia. I demanded answers, and she was unwilling to argue with me,… which only made me more angry and paranoid. She must have been up to no good. She most definitely was doing something out there that was intentionally going to hurt me emotionally. By the time she got to sleep, I had hatched my hacking plan.
I woke up Sunday morning with a really bad hangover and regret that is unbelievable. But I certainly wasn’t going to own up to it. I certainly wasn’t going to tell her about what I had done. I would let her discover it on her own (except for the bank account—somehow, even in a drunken stupor I realized that THAT was going a little too far—I had already replaced the money I STOLE from her). I rationalized that she had hurt me so significantly and cold-heartedly, that I was going to hurt her right back. Sunday was awful. I felt uncomfortable, ashamed and worthless. I also felt utterly alone: completely ostracized in my struggles to even recognize myself and what I had allowed myself to become. I think I was still struggling with the doctor’s diagnosis of my condition. “I am absolutely positive that I don’t have this brain chemistry issue,” I thought. “There is no way I need to be put on a fucking mood stabilizer for bipolar disorder.”
I had to work on Sunday at 4:00, so the mimosas were out. I still had the newspaper and sports page, but even that didn’t ease my sense of growing doom. My wife discovered in no short order what I had done the previous night. She confronted me with it, and I denied it. I DENIED IT? SERIOUSLY? Who the fuck else could have done this, John? Do you really think you’re going to get away with something like that? So I owned up to it. And, of course, she lost her mind—quite rightfully so and completely defensible—and I drew my own line in the sand, and we argued the entire day. I eventually called off from work. It was going to be impossible to face customers and managers with a pleasant demeanor that evening,… I was fuming! So,… after I decided I wasn’t going to work,… yep,… I started drinking again.
And I continued on that trend for a few weeks. I stopped eating except for once a day (about four or five ounces of sliced deli turkey for lunch), and drank my dinner when I got home from work at nighttime. I lost weight,… at an alarming level. I had started March at 257 pounds (by the scale at my local grocery store—somehow I had smashed the one we had in the closet). By May 31st, exactly three months later, that same scale told me I had lost forty pounds. It, of course, wasn’t healthy. I looked better than I had in about twelve years, but I had accomplished all of the weight loss by starving myself and swallowing more stress than I can explain. I ate the little amount I described above,… but I insisted to myself—and anyone else who would listen—that it was a result of me being on my feet and walking as much as I did at my job.
And well into June, the mood stabilizer and anti-depressant the psychiatrist had added to the cocktail still were having no effect on my mood. I never felt any better, I had insisted. I owned up to the continued drinking of beer when I visited him in mid-June, and he explained to me that I was masking the ability of the prescriptions to provide me some sort of relief. If I wasn’t going to stop my intake of alcohol, I wouldn’t allow the drugs to work,… they were a complete contraindication.
By the end of June, I was a complete and utter wreck. I had dropped another few pounds and continued to treat my wife shabbily. I even started harping on my sixteen-year-old daughter. She had always turned to me when things were going wrong in her life to the extent that she just needed to feel safe. It wasn’t so long ago that I was a teenager myself. I remembered how difficult it was to grow up,… and she knew that. I had been, until that point, the one person she could count on to make things better; I was her rock. And then I turned on her. There was nothing she could say or do to make my mood any better. I argued with her about trivial things, but the absolute worst thing I did was to ignore her. On nights that I worked, I got home late enough that she was usually in bed. The other nights, I barricaded myself in my bedroom by eight pm,… poking my head out only briefly enough to retrieve another beer. She finally said, “it used to be fun coming over here and now it just isn’t.” Mortified by this statement, I tried to make her feel wanted and welcome and safe again right after that. It didn’t work, and I gave up again and retreated to my solitude.
Then an event occurred that woke me the fuck up! Immediately! I didn’t hurt or attack anyone,… except for verbally. I didn’t threaten anyone,… except for myself. But I was removed from my house. I spent four days away from my wife and my home by going down to my mother’s house in Bradenton. The alternative, she explained to me in a language that I easily understood, was being committed to a hospital for observation. I had completely lost my mind.
I, indeed, had gone temporarily crazy.
Next time,… Something Light Before I continue.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better
And you’ll be all alone.
That was my thought as I walked out of the psychiatrist’s office. I stepped out into the parking lot with two prescriptions and no optimism about the future. I’ve never been good with optimism, anyway. You see the glass as half full, and I wonder why you pulled out such a big fucking glass in the first place. The doctor—I was still wondering if I should really call him that,… I mean he may be able to prescribe medication, but I wouldn’t go see this guy for a bloody nose—explained to me that I should do some thoroughgoing price shopping for the mood-stabilizer,… it could be tremendously expensive in some traditional pharmacies. He mentioned one potentially good supplier (read: legal drug dealer): one of the national warehouse chains where you can buy two-gallon jars of mayonnaise and a six-month supply of mouthwash if you had a membership. “Call around,” he said, “you’ll be glad you did. And don’t forget to include the one place I told you about. You don’t need a membership to use their pharmacy.”
So, I moped to my car in the mid-May stagnation. It had been a particularly long and cold winter. Up until late March, the daytime high had been ten degrees lower than the average overnight low—it was a miserable season. Now,… with the temperature pushing ninety, and the air so thick you needed a towel after walking a few paces, I pined for the days so cold your sack needed a sweater of its own. (Welcome to Florida,… it’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.) I got home by sheer muscle memory. I don’t remember paying attention to the road—I do remember stopping to get another cup of coffee at the 7-11. Blueberry coffee. Now, normally I would tell you that fruit is the devil. But one day, after buying what I believed to be a French Vanilla flavored coffee and driving to work, I discovered,… in the middle of a seven-mile bridge,… that the moron who prepared the coffee at the store had put blueberry-fucking-coffee in the French-fucking-vanilla pot. I was furious. I don’t like fruit. I certainly don’t like fruit-flavored coffee. But I needed coffee and I was in the middle of a seven-mile bridge,… in a traffic jam,… and I was late for work already. So I drank the stupid blueberry coffee,… by the time I reached my office, I had a new favorite coffee. Okay,… so I’m pliable, kiss my ass.
I finally got back to the house. I still struggled with the diagnosis the psychiatrist had arrived at. Bipolar—one who had two distinct and diametrically opposed poles. “This guy can kiss both of my poles,” I said out loud,… for nobody but the dogs to hear. They didn’t know who I was talking about, fuck ‘em. I cried for a little bit,… maybe fifteen minutes (that was a walk in the park for me around that time), and then I checked my email and my facebook page. And then I cried a little more. I called my wife at work to tell her how my appointment went. She told me that she had considered the exact diagnosis to which the psychiatrist had arrived already,… several times. She reminded me that she had told me once that she thought I was, indeed, bipolar. She then reminded me that I had told her to fuck off immediately thereafter. “So,… what you’re saying is, ‘I told you so?’ You’re basking in the limelight of your prescient prognostication of my misery? Is that right?” So then,… she told me to fuck off.
I called around to the pharmacies as I had been instructed. (What an obedient puppy I could be.) The big drug store chain headquartered in Illinois quoted me a price in the mid $140 range. The big drug store chain headquartered in Rhode Island quoted me a price in the high $130s. The local Grocery store told me it would be around $130, and the giant superstore where all the locals with less-than-full-mouths of teeth shopped had a price of nearly $120. Finally I called the warehouse club that the Crazy Doctor told me about. I called the number I got from the website and pressed zero for the operator. She asked me to hold on for a moment while she prepared to look up the price for me…. And she hung up on me. I’m sure it was a mistake with the phone system or something,… but that just made me cry for a while. After fifteen minutes or so of bawling, I gathered up the nerve (with the help of a Xanax) to redial the phone. The same woman answered the phone and apologized profusely. She asked what the prescription was for, the exact dose and the quantity. After I told her, she asked me to hang on again. She didn’t hang up on me this time and instead got back on the line and told me what the cost of the medication would be: fourteen dollars and sixty-five cents. What a ridiculous discrepancy! I asked her why everybody else wanted so much for the same exact thing and her store asked so little for it. Her response was very enlightening,… “I have no idea.”
The warehouse club was a half-hour drive away. But to save over a hundred bucks, I’d push my grandmother out of an airplane or give a handjob to a moose or something else just as undesirable. I asked the woman on the other end of the line if she could fill the prescription while I was on my way up there so I wouldn’t have to wait. She explained that she couldn’t: they needed to verify the prescription on paper. I asked her long it would take to fill after I brought it in, and she informed that normally it would be about an hour, but they were short-staffed that day, so around ninety minutes. Super. Fan-fucking-tastic.
I listened to my favorite midday talk show on the way to the warehouse club. The guys on the program were castigating some celebrity over some egregiously bad behavior he or she had exhibited. It was hysterical;… I didn’t laugh;… I cried instead.
When I got there, I was stopped at the front door by the burly gatekeeper and asked to display my membership card. I told him I had been informed that if I were just going to the pharmacy I didn’t need a membership. This guy eyed me up and down—as if trying to determine what my ailment was. I was sure that he, seeing no outwardly visible symptoms, had figured it out immediately. I knew what he was thinking: “fucking bipolar motherfucker.” But all he said was, “okay.” The same woman who had answered the phone earlier was behind the counter. She remembered the conversation, and I was convinced that she had the same perception of me as the gatekeeper.
“Ninety minutes,” I asked.
“Ninety minutes,” she said, “at least.”
It was lunchtime. I wanted a beer. I found a real, honest-to-goodness dive bar. The kind with the windows blacked out so that you couldn’t tell if it was night or day outside. When my eyes finally adjusted, I asked the bartender for a beer. She scratched her ass and asked me if I wanted a draft or a bottle. “Both,” I said. I sat there for an hour and fifteen minutes and drank four beers,… maybe five. It was one-fifteen in the afternoon, and I felt nice and loose,… warm inside. And it was boiling outside. I got back to the pharmacy, and the woman behind the counter asked me if I needed consultation from the pharmacist on the medications I was picking up. “No,… I’m fine, thanks.” When I got in the car, I looked over the instructions. The potential side effects included dry-mouth and excessive salivation. It could possibly cause drowsiness or trouble sleeping. And then I saw the big warning on the side of the bottle,… “AVOID ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES.”
I needed to get home. I needed another beer,… or ten. I was going to keep drinking today,… and tomorrow,… and all weekend long.
Next time,… and even worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
That was my thought as I walked out of the psychiatrist’s office. I stepped out into the parking lot with two prescriptions and no optimism about the future. I’ve never been good with optimism, anyway. You see the glass as half full, and I wonder why you pulled out such a big fucking glass in the first place. The doctor—I was still wondering if I should really call him that,… I mean he may be able to prescribe medication, but I wouldn’t go see this guy for a bloody nose—explained to me that I should do some thoroughgoing price shopping for the mood-stabilizer,… it could be tremendously expensive in some traditional pharmacies. He mentioned one potentially good supplier (read: legal drug dealer): one of the national warehouse chains where you can buy two-gallon jars of mayonnaise and a six-month supply of mouthwash if you had a membership. “Call around,” he said, “you’ll be glad you did. And don’t forget to include the one place I told you about. You don’t need a membership to use their pharmacy.”
So, I moped to my car in the mid-May stagnation. It had been a particularly long and cold winter. Up until late March, the daytime high had been ten degrees lower than the average overnight low—it was a miserable season. Now,… with the temperature pushing ninety, and the air so thick you needed a towel after walking a few paces, I pined for the days so cold your sack needed a sweater of its own. (Welcome to Florida,… it’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.) I got home by sheer muscle memory. I don’t remember paying attention to the road—I do remember stopping to get another cup of coffee at the 7-11. Blueberry coffee. Now, normally I would tell you that fruit is the devil. But one day, after buying what I believed to be a French Vanilla flavored coffee and driving to work, I discovered,… in the middle of a seven-mile bridge,… that the moron who prepared the coffee at the store had put blueberry-fucking-coffee in the French-fucking-vanilla pot. I was furious. I don’t like fruit. I certainly don’t like fruit-flavored coffee. But I needed coffee and I was in the middle of a seven-mile bridge,… in a traffic jam,… and I was late for work already. So I drank the stupid blueberry coffee,… by the time I reached my office, I had a new favorite coffee. Okay,… so I’m pliable, kiss my ass.
I finally got back to the house. I still struggled with the diagnosis the psychiatrist had arrived at. Bipolar—one who had two distinct and diametrically opposed poles. “This guy can kiss both of my poles,” I said out loud,… for nobody but the dogs to hear. They didn’t know who I was talking about, fuck ‘em. I cried for a little bit,… maybe fifteen minutes (that was a walk in the park for me around that time), and then I checked my email and my facebook page. And then I cried a little more. I called my wife at work to tell her how my appointment went. She told me that she had considered the exact diagnosis to which the psychiatrist had arrived already,… several times. She reminded me that she had told me once that she thought I was, indeed, bipolar. She then reminded me that I had told her to fuck off immediately thereafter. “So,… what you’re saying is, ‘I told you so?’ You’re basking in the limelight of your prescient prognostication of my misery? Is that right?” So then,… she told me to fuck off.
I called around to the pharmacies as I had been instructed. (What an obedient puppy I could be.) The big drug store chain headquartered in Illinois quoted me a price in the mid $140 range. The big drug store chain headquartered in Rhode Island quoted me a price in the high $130s. The local Grocery store told me it would be around $130, and the giant superstore where all the locals with less-than-full-mouths of teeth shopped had a price of nearly $120. Finally I called the warehouse club that the Crazy Doctor told me about. I called the number I got from the website and pressed zero for the operator. She asked me to hold on for a moment while she prepared to look up the price for me…. And she hung up on me. I’m sure it was a mistake with the phone system or something,… but that just made me cry for a while. After fifteen minutes or so of bawling, I gathered up the nerve (with the help of a Xanax) to redial the phone. The same woman answered the phone and apologized profusely. She asked what the prescription was for, the exact dose and the quantity. After I told her, she asked me to hang on again. She didn’t hang up on me this time and instead got back on the line and told me what the cost of the medication would be: fourteen dollars and sixty-five cents. What a ridiculous discrepancy! I asked her why everybody else wanted so much for the same exact thing and her store asked so little for it. Her response was very enlightening,… “I have no idea.”
The warehouse club was a half-hour drive away. But to save over a hundred bucks, I’d push my grandmother out of an airplane or give a handjob to a moose or something else just as undesirable. I asked the woman on the other end of the line if she could fill the prescription while I was on my way up there so I wouldn’t have to wait. She explained that she couldn’t: they needed to verify the prescription on paper. I asked her long it would take to fill after I brought it in, and she informed that normally it would be about an hour, but they were short-staffed that day, so around ninety minutes. Super. Fan-fucking-tastic.
I listened to my favorite midday talk show on the way to the warehouse club. The guys on the program were castigating some celebrity over some egregiously bad behavior he or she had exhibited. It was hysterical;… I didn’t laugh;… I cried instead.
When I got there, I was stopped at the front door by the burly gatekeeper and asked to display my membership card. I told him I had been informed that if I were just going to the pharmacy I didn’t need a membership. This guy eyed me up and down—as if trying to determine what my ailment was. I was sure that he, seeing no outwardly visible symptoms, had figured it out immediately. I knew what he was thinking: “fucking bipolar motherfucker.” But all he said was, “okay.” The same woman who had answered the phone earlier was behind the counter. She remembered the conversation, and I was convinced that she had the same perception of me as the gatekeeper.
“Ninety minutes,” I asked.
“Ninety minutes,” she said, “at least.”
It was lunchtime. I wanted a beer. I found a real, honest-to-goodness dive bar. The kind with the windows blacked out so that you couldn’t tell if it was night or day outside. When my eyes finally adjusted, I asked the bartender for a beer. She scratched her ass and asked me if I wanted a draft or a bottle. “Both,” I said. I sat there for an hour and fifteen minutes and drank four beers,… maybe five. It was one-fifteen in the afternoon, and I felt nice and loose,… warm inside. And it was boiling outside. I got back to the pharmacy, and the woman behind the counter asked me if I needed consultation from the pharmacist on the medications I was picking up. “No,… I’m fine, thanks.” When I got in the car, I looked over the instructions. The potential side effects included dry-mouth and excessive salivation. It could possibly cause drowsiness or trouble sleeping. And then I saw the big warning on the side of the bottle,… “AVOID ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES.”
I needed to get home. I needed another beer,… or ten. I was going to keep drinking today,… and tomorrow,… and all weekend long.
Next time,… and even worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Living With the Stigma
And then,… he said it,…. “I think you’re bipolar.”
My initial reaction, as I listened to him tell me exactly what he thought was wrong with me, was to think, “Well, with all due respect, doctor,… fuck you.” I, of course, didn’t say that. For all of my faults, I still have some sense of tact and decorum. My mother did as good a job as she could have done raising me. For that, I will be forever in her debt. But hearing this man say this to me,… a man who had known me for a grand total of forty-three minutes,… floored me. It felt like a personal insult to me. How on earth could anyone hear what I had said for the previous hour and come up with this conclusion? I was paying $200 for this affront to my character and personality?
Bipolar Disorder is for crazy people, isn’t it? It’s not for people like me! I’m just going through a rough patch right now. I have an IQ of 141. I test out at the genius level for christ sake. I’m too smart to be fucking bipolar. I sat there trying to make sense of what he had determined was my diagnosis. I sat for a long time. I think at one point he even wanted to say something just to break the uncomfortable silence. “Did you hear me”? seemed like it would have made sense at that point. But he said nothing. He just waited for me to digest the statement and react to it on my own. Many more seconds passed. It might have been a full minute before I said anything. And then,… finally,… something astounding, provocative and insightful came from my mouth,… seemingly without me even having to think about what it was:… “Really?”
I couldn’t possibly be bipolar, I thought. I experienced no episodes of mania. I didn’t have periods of euphoria. I never indulged in unwise binges of reckless spending of money. I had no delusions of grandeur. I hadn’t thought of myself as superhuman. I was certainly never in need of less sleep. I didn’t feelings of excitement about anything, for crying out loud. Where in the world does the Mania part come in, doc? What the hell are you thinking, exactly here?
But this psychiatrist—I was growing less-and-less confident in his skills (did your degree come from Belize or Haiti, sir? Please tell me you’ve had more than eight weeks of practice in this field, because I’m not overwhelmed by your powers of perception. Can I actually see your degree from an accredited school, because the only things on the walls of this particular room were that shitty artwork I had noticed before you came in. For crying out loud, YOU’RE WEARING BROWN SHOES WITH A BLUE SUIT, YOU JACKWAGON)—stood behind his analysis. He explained to me, in no uncertain terms that the manic periods of can manifest themselves in a variety of ways. Hadn’t I told him that I suffered from bouts of anger that eventually led to fits of rage? Didn’t I explain to him that the anxiety and panic attacks that I experienced lead to abnormal behavior that negatively impacted my ability to control myself? Didn’t I admit to an unexplainably elevated sex drive? Hadn’t I expressed feelings of dramatic swings between these feelings and my episodes of major depression and crying fits that left me immobile? Mania didn’t have to mean excessive happiness, he told me. In my case, he determined, it came out in irritability, anger and hyper-anxiety. These, in conjunction with the debilitating depressive states made me an almost text-book case of manic-depression.
Also this,… he had a solution,… a plan to combat the disorder.
“Well, doctor—if that is your REAL profession—that’s all fine and good,” I thought to myself. “But you’re not the one who has to cinch up his big-girl panties and go out into the world and admit to everyone he comes into contact with that he is, indeed, a fucking nut-job whackadoodle.”
Everyone that would find out that I had been diagnosed as bipolar would consider me to be a pariah,… untouchable in the world that surrounded him. I knew what my conception was of bipolar people, and it could be summed up in one word: “FUCKING CRAZY!” (Okay, that’s two words,… sniff my bag.) Socially, the stigma attached to just the word “bipolar” was going to drive me even further into the deep end. It was like admitting failure,… failure that I had felt time-and-time-again throughout my adult life. Bipolar was the sentence for the crime I had committed: the crime of not being able to deal with the stresses and occurrences of everyday life. I had my very own label,… and I didn’t like it,… not one bit. Go to Google and look up the words stigma and bipolar together, and you’ll come up with more than 3.7 MILLION web pages that contain both terms. Everyone, seemingly, has an opinion on the people who are diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, and most of them just ain’t good. And now,… here I was,… one of them. Of course I resisted it. Obviously I questioned the veracity of the doctor’s analysis. But I couldn’t make myself say anything about it. I just sat there silent,… like the lumpy pillows behind my back. Stunned. In utter disbelief.
“Would you like to hear my suggestions for dealing with this,” he asked me,… almost sincerely.
“No,” I thought, “I’d like to smack that fucking beard right off your face.” However, what I said was, “I imagine so.” I IMAGINE SO??? “You sawed-off, capitulating piece of garbage,” I thought to myself, “you’re going to sit and listen to this guy tell you how to combat the craziness he thinks you suffer from even though you currently detest him for telling you you’re something you don’t even believe you are? Fucking pansy.”
“I’m going to start you on a regimen of medication which begins with a mood-stabilizer. Specifically, Lamictal.” Lamictal actually turned out to be Lamotrigine because that’s the generic for Lamictal, and I, of course, have no health insurance and couldn’t possibly afford the real stuff. “We have to slowly let your body adapt to the intake of this new medication. We can’t start you off at a high dosage of this med, so we’ll have to go slowly and ramp it up every two weeks or so. You’re going to start at 50 milligrams of this, and, in two weeks’ time, we’ll go to 100 for another two weeks. I’d like for you to come back in four weeks so we can determine the efficacy of the drug, and we’ll see where we go from there. I’m also going to give you a prescription for some Ativan, which will help you deal with the anxiety and panic” I had already been prescribed xanax by my personal doctor for the anxiety, so I knew I needed something like that,… but a mood-stabilizer? Really? REALLY?? SERIOUSLY??? “I’ll see you in four weeks. The good news is, every subsequent visit is only going to be $80.”
Wonderful, it will be more cost-effective for me to be told what a loser I am in the future.
I left feeling utterly defeated. I was done. It’s over, Johnny. You ARE crazy. This guy you just sat in front of knows it,… the pharmacist is going to know it,… your wife is going to know it,… and sooner or later, everyone is going to know it.
And you’ll be alone.
Next time,… it gets worse before it gets better.
My initial reaction, as I listened to him tell me exactly what he thought was wrong with me, was to think, “Well, with all due respect, doctor,… fuck you.” I, of course, didn’t say that. For all of my faults, I still have some sense of tact and decorum. My mother did as good a job as she could have done raising me. For that, I will be forever in her debt. But hearing this man say this to me,… a man who had known me for a grand total of forty-three minutes,… floored me. It felt like a personal insult to me. How on earth could anyone hear what I had said for the previous hour and come up with this conclusion? I was paying $200 for this affront to my character and personality?
Bipolar Disorder is for crazy people, isn’t it? It’s not for people like me! I’m just going through a rough patch right now. I have an IQ of 141. I test out at the genius level for christ sake. I’m too smart to be fucking bipolar. I sat there trying to make sense of what he had determined was my diagnosis. I sat for a long time. I think at one point he even wanted to say something just to break the uncomfortable silence. “Did you hear me”? seemed like it would have made sense at that point. But he said nothing. He just waited for me to digest the statement and react to it on my own. Many more seconds passed. It might have been a full minute before I said anything. And then,… finally,… something astounding, provocative and insightful came from my mouth,… seemingly without me even having to think about what it was:… “Really?”
I couldn’t possibly be bipolar, I thought. I experienced no episodes of mania. I didn’t have periods of euphoria. I never indulged in unwise binges of reckless spending of money. I had no delusions of grandeur. I hadn’t thought of myself as superhuman. I was certainly never in need of less sleep. I didn’t feelings of excitement about anything, for crying out loud. Where in the world does the Mania part come in, doc? What the hell are you thinking, exactly here?
But this psychiatrist—I was growing less-and-less confident in his skills (did your degree come from Belize or Haiti, sir? Please tell me you’ve had more than eight weeks of practice in this field, because I’m not overwhelmed by your powers of perception. Can I actually see your degree from an accredited school, because the only things on the walls of this particular room were that shitty artwork I had noticed before you came in. For crying out loud, YOU’RE WEARING BROWN SHOES WITH A BLUE SUIT, YOU JACKWAGON)—stood behind his analysis. He explained to me, in no uncertain terms that the manic periods of can manifest themselves in a variety of ways. Hadn’t I told him that I suffered from bouts of anger that eventually led to fits of rage? Didn’t I explain to him that the anxiety and panic attacks that I experienced lead to abnormal behavior that negatively impacted my ability to control myself? Didn’t I admit to an unexplainably elevated sex drive? Hadn’t I expressed feelings of dramatic swings between these feelings and my episodes of major depression and crying fits that left me immobile? Mania didn’t have to mean excessive happiness, he told me. In my case, he determined, it came out in irritability, anger and hyper-anxiety. These, in conjunction with the debilitating depressive states made me an almost text-book case of manic-depression.
Also this,… he had a solution,… a plan to combat the disorder.
“Well, doctor—if that is your REAL profession—that’s all fine and good,” I thought to myself. “But you’re not the one who has to cinch up his big-girl panties and go out into the world and admit to everyone he comes into contact with that he is, indeed, a fucking nut-job whackadoodle.”
Everyone that would find out that I had been diagnosed as bipolar would consider me to be a pariah,… untouchable in the world that surrounded him. I knew what my conception was of bipolar people, and it could be summed up in one word: “FUCKING CRAZY!” (Okay, that’s two words,… sniff my bag.) Socially, the stigma attached to just the word “bipolar” was going to drive me even further into the deep end. It was like admitting failure,… failure that I had felt time-and-time-again throughout my adult life. Bipolar was the sentence for the crime I had committed: the crime of not being able to deal with the stresses and occurrences of everyday life. I had my very own label,… and I didn’t like it,… not one bit. Go to Google and look up the words stigma and bipolar together, and you’ll come up with more than 3.7 MILLION web pages that contain both terms. Everyone, seemingly, has an opinion on the people who are diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder, and most of them just ain’t good. And now,… here I was,… one of them. Of course I resisted it. Obviously I questioned the veracity of the doctor’s analysis. But I couldn’t make myself say anything about it. I just sat there silent,… like the lumpy pillows behind my back. Stunned. In utter disbelief.
“Would you like to hear my suggestions for dealing with this,” he asked me,… almost sincerely.
“No,” I thought, “I’d like to smack that fucking beard right off your face.” However, what I said was, “I imagine so.” I IMAGINE SO??? “You sawed-off, capitulating piece of garbage,” I thought to myself, “you’re going to sit and listen to this guy tell you how to combat the craziness he thinks you suffer from even though you currently detest him for telling you you’re something you don’t even believe you are? Fucking pansy.”
“I’m going to start you on a regimen of medication which begins with a mood-stabilizer. Specifically, Lamictal.” Lamictal actually turned out to be Lamotrigine because that’s the generic for Lamictal, and I, of course, have no health insurance and couldn’t possibly afford the real stuff. “We have to slowly let your body adapt to the intake of this new medication. We can’t start you off at a high dosage of this med, so we’ll have to go slowly and ramp it up every two weeks or so. You’re going to start at 50 milligrams of this, and, in two weeks’ time, we’ll go to 100 for another two weeks. I’d like for you to come back in four weeks so we can determine the efficacy of the drug, and we’ll see where we go from there. I’m also going to give you a prescription for some Ativan, which will help you deal with the anxiety and panic” I had already been prescribed xanax by my personal doctor for the anxiety, so I knew I needed something like that,… but a mood-stabilizer? Really? REALLY?? SERIOUSLY??? “I’ll see you in four weeks. The good news is, every subsequent visit is only going to be $80.”
Wonderful, it will be more cost-effective for me to be told what a loser I am in the future.
I left feeling utterly defeated. I was done. It’s over, Johnny. You ARE crazy. This guy you just sat in front of knows it,… the pharmacist is going to know it,… your wife is going to know it,… and sooner or later, everyone is going to know it.
And you’ll be alone.
Next time,… it gets worse before it gets better.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
It begins
Several months ago, I started feeling poorly. I wasn’t ill in the traditional sense. I was gloomy, depressed, nervous and irritable all at the same time. I have had bouts of depression in the past before. I’ve even been put on medications to try and combat what a doctor told me was a “brain chemistry imbalance.” I don’t recall the medication ever really having any effect on me.
However, this was different. Christmas was not enjoyable. Neither was New Years. I felt indifferent to the football playoffs (of course, it didn’t help that the Buccaneers were a terrible team last year), which I had always watched from the first kickoff to final whistle of the Super Bowl (please don’t sue me for using your copyrighted phrase, NFL—I know I’m supposed to call it The Big Game or some other such stupid shit because you want to protect your stupid words,… then again, kiss my ass, NFL,… sue me,… I don’t have a cent anyway). I was unemployed yet finally working toward my Bachelor’s Degree (yes,… twenty-or-so years too late, I get it!). I was applying to graduate school and taking the GRE (which I smoked, by the way). But I didn’t enjoy anything. I totally lost interest. I insulated. I started ignoring my daughter, my wife, my house, my dogs, bathing, the television, porn,… you name it, and I forgot about it.
Then I got a job. I really thought that this would make a difference in my life. I thought if I felt like I was trying to make a contribution to the success of a new organization—as well as to the finances of my own household—I would feel different,… feel better,… finally pull myself out of this funk.
Except for this,… it was a job waiting tables. I hadn’t waited tables since the early 90s,… and I had forgotten how much I hated it. I once read a study that said the Number 1 most stressful occupation in the US at that time was being a Dentist,… the Number 2 was being a waiter. Jesus-Christ-on-a-Pony I hated that job. It certainly didn’t help that the upper management in the place was so trigger happy that they continually seemed to fire people at an alarming rate. I saw people fired in the middle of a shift. I saw servers fired in the middle of the dining room in the middle of a shift. I was told at one time (by someone I won’t name out of discretion,… okay it was Chef Jeremy,… I’ve never been good with discretion, fuck it) that I was, “fucking retarded and didn’t know how the fuck to do my job.” I would walk into the restaurant every day wondering if it would be my last,… if I would screw up so significantly that mine would be the next head on the cutting board (they didn’t use chopping blocks because they would have been too expensive).
Surprisingly, this environment didn’t help with my emotional state. Shockingly, I didn’t feel any better at the end of a shift than I did at the beginning, regardless of the fact that I may have pocketed a whopping $140 or so on a decent night. In fact, I felt worse. Much worse. I started having anxiety spells,… anxiety spells that began to incrementally become more significant,… anxiety spells that eventually led to full-blown panic attacks. There were times I would go into my walk-in closet, close the door so it was completely pitch black, curl myself into the tightest ball possible and cry uncontrollably for nearly an hour at a time. I was losing it.
And so I made a decision to try and cope more successfully with my contemporary situation by doing what I was absolutely certain would work: I drank more. Surely, increasing my alcohol intake would make me feel better. Yes, I know that alcohol is “technically” classified as a depressant. But I knew what the fuck I was doing and who the fuck were you to question me on how I wanted to live my life? I had identified my new coping technique,… and it tasted like beer,… lots of yummy, delicious beer. I had always been a beer drinker. I had a period in my early twenties where I tried to become more refined,… I attempted to drink scotch or bourbon or some-other-such brown drink because that’s what REAL adults did. But when I did, I became belligerent and difficult to deal with—and the hangovers were so much worse. I went back to beer. And I stayed in a beer bottle for the next twenty years. I would submit to you that I never went a full three days without drinking at least a couple of beers a day for that entire period of time. I drank beer,… it was what I did,… it was part of who I was,… it was just a natural extension of my personality, wasn’t it? In fact, it enhanced my personality,… the only problem was that my personality was that of a complete asshole.
The moods started swinging between depression so debilitating that I couldn’t even leave the closet,… much less the house,… to anger so sharp that it developed into a rage that made me unrecognizable to myself. I truly felt like I was losing it. I was not going to be able to hold on to my waning grasp of reality for much longer. I REALLY WAS GOING CRAZY! I haven’t even mentioned the developing mistrust of everyone and paranoia I had started experiencing.
That’s when the people I love and who—I’m pretty sure—love me stepped in. They urged me to go speak to someone about my condition. Then they begged and pleaded with me. Then they threatened to put me into a 72-hour observation period in a hospital against my wishes (the infamous Baker Act here in Florida).
I got it finally, and an appointment was made to see a fully-licensed, competent, highly-recommended psychiatrist. This guy was going to be a mix between Mister Fucking Rogers and Doctor Fucking Phil, I thought. Oh, it was going to be all candy and nuts for Christmas, I thought. I resented people for demanding this drastic step of me. I didn’t need this. I wasn’t so bad off that I needed to go see a psychiatrist.
Then there came the weekend that I had to call off from work three days in a row because the panic attacks were so deep that I thought I’d never get out. Tranquilizers prescribed my regular physician weren’t enough to combat these attacks. I truly thought the only way to feel any better was to keep taking these tranquilizers until I could finally catch my breath. Until this thought occurred to me,… one more of these tranquilizers, and I might just get so relaxed that my lungs would decide for me that breathing wasn’t so necessary for me anymore. Okay,… so maybe the psychiatrist was an option after all.
I went to see him the following week. I sat there for an hour filling out paper work and then another fifteen minutes waiting for him to come into the examination room. It was a comfortable little room with really shitty paintings hanging on the wall. Now, I’m no art critic, but if this was what this guy considered real artwork, I’d have to reserve my judgment on anything he said being worthwhile. I sat there and guzzled water out of liter-sized bottle and coffee out of the largest cup 7-11 had to offer. I didn’t like this guy already and I hated him for what he represented in my mind—failure,… failure so significant that I needed to seek someone out just to help me whistle my way through a cloudy fucking day.
He came in. He smiled. He introduced himself. And I found myself liking him,… the smug jagoff. He listened to me for about forty-five minutes. I explained my current situation very similarly to the way I’ve written it here. I talked to him about my previously diagnosed Clinical Depression from a dozen years ago. I told him how the medication never really seemed to help back then, but that talking to a mental-health counselor weekly did provide me some relief—at least temporarily,… for a day or two. He listened. He nodded. He pecked out notes on his shitty little laptop with a screen that certainly was no bigger than nine inches—I remember thinking for the very first time that size, indeed, does matter. He handed me Kleenex for the tears and coasters for the water and now-empty coffee. And he let me finish. Then it came time for him to speak.
He told me that he thought I had been misdiagnosed all along. That clearly what I suffered from was not simply Clinical Depression. That I was having to deal with more complex issues than an anti-depressant would combat.
And then,… he said it,…. “I think you’re bipolar.”
Next time,… living with the stigma.
However, this was different. Christmas was not enjoyable. Neither was New Years. I felt indifferent to the football playoffs (of course, it didn’t help that the Buccaneers were a terrible team last year), which I had always watched from the first kickoff to final whistle of the Super Bowl (please don’t sue me for using your copyrighted phrase, NFL—I know I’m supposed to call it The Big Game or some other such stupid shit because you want to protect your stupid words,… then again, kiss my ass, NFL,… sue me,… I don’t have a cent anyway). I was unemployed yet finally working toward my Bachelor’s Degree (yes,… twenty-or-so years too late, I get it!). I was applying to graduate school and taking the GRE (which I smoked, by the way). But I didn’t enjoy anything. I totally lost interest. I insulated. I started ignoring my daughter, my wife, my house, my dogs, bathing, the television, porn,… you name it, and I forgot about it.
Then I got a job. I really thought that this would make a difference in my life. I thought if I felt like I was trying to make a contribution to the success of a new organization—as well as to the finances of my own household—I would feel different,… feel better,… finally pull myself out of this funk.
Except for this,… it was a job waiting tables. I hadn’t waited tables since the early 90s,… and I had forgotten how much I hated it. I once read a study that said the Number 1 most stressful occupation in the US at that time was being a Dentist,… the Number 2 was being a waiter. Jesus-Christ-on-a-Pony I hated that job. It certainly didn’t help that the upper management in the place was so trigger happy that they continually seemed to fire people at an alarming rate. I saw people fired in the middle of a shift. I saw servers fired in the middle of the dining room in the middle of a shift. I was told at one time (by someone I won’t name out of discretion,… okay it was Chef Jeremy,… I’ve never been good with discretion, fuck it) that I was, “fucking retarded and didn’t know how the fuck to do my job.” I would walk into the restaurant every day wondering if it would be my last,… if I would screw up so significantly that mine would be the next head on the cutting board (they didn’t use chopping blocks because they would have been too expensive).
Surprisingly, this environment didn’t help with my emotional state. Shockingly, I didn’t feel any better at the end of a shift than I did at the beginning, regardless of the fact that I may have pocketed a whopping $140 or so on a decent night. In fact, I felt worse. Much worse. I started having anxiety spells,… anxiety spells that began to incrementally become more significant,… anxiety spells that eventually led to full-blown panic attacks. There were times I would go into my walk-in closet, close the door so it was completely pitch black, curl myself into the tightest ball possible and cry uncontrollably for nearly an hour at a time. I was losing it.
And so I made a decision to try and cope more successfully with my contemporary situation by doing what I was absolutely certain would work: I drank more. Surely, increasing my alcohol intake would make me feel better. Yes, I know that alcohol is “technically” classified as a depressant. But I knew what the fuck I was doing and who the fuck were you to question me on how I wanted to live my life? I had identified my new coping technique,… and it tasted like beer,… lots of yummy, delicious beer. I had always been a beer drinker. I had a period in my early twenties where I tried to become more refined,… I attempted to drink scotch or bourbon or some-other-such brown drink because that’s what REAL adults did. But when I did, I became belligerent and difficult to deal with—and the hangovers were so much worse. I went back to beer. And I stayed in a beer bottle for the next twenty years. I would submit to you that I never went a full three days without drinking at least a couple of beers a day for that entire period of time. I drank beer,… it was what I did,… it was part of who I was,… it was just a natural extension of my personality, wasn’t it? In fact, it enhanced my personality,… the only problem was that my personality was that of a complete asshole.
The moods started swinging between depression so debilitating that I couldn’t even leave the closet,… much less the house,… to anger so sharp that it developed into a rage that made me unrecognizable to myself. I truly felt like I was losing it. I was not going to be able to hold on to my waning grasp of reality for much longer. I REALLY WAS GOING CRAZY! I haven’t even mentioned the developing mistrust of everyone and paranoia I had started experiencing.
That’s when the people I love and who—I’m pretty sure—love me stepped in. They urged me to go speak to someone about my condition. Then they begged and pleaded with me. Then they threatened to put me into a 72-hour observation period in a hospital against my wishes (the infamous Baker Act here in Florida).
I got it finally, and an appointment was made to see a fully-licensed, competent, highly-recommended psychiatrist. This guy was going to be a mix between Mister Fucking Rogers and Doctor Fucking Phil, I thought. Oh, it was going to be all candy and nuts for Christmas, I thought. I resented people for demanding this drastic step of me. I didn’t need this. I wasn’t so bad off that I needed to go see a psychiatrist.
Then there came the weekend that I had to call off from work three days in a row because the panic attacks were so deep that I thought I’d never get out. Tranquilizers prescribed my regular physician weren’t enough to combat these attacks. I truly thought the only way to feel any better was to keep taking these tranquilizers until I could finally catch my breath. Until this thought occurred to me,… one more of these tranquilizers, and I might just get so relaxed that my lungs would decide for me that breathing wasn’t so necessary for me anymore. Okay,… so maybe the psychiatrist was an option after all.
I went to see him the following week. I sat there for an hour filling out paper work and then another fifteen minutes waiting for him to come into the examination room. It was a comfortable little room with really shitty paintings hanging on the wall. Now, I’m no art critic, but if this was what this guy considered real artwork, I’d have to reserve my judgment on anything he said being worthwhile. I sat there and guzzled water out of liter-sized bottle and coffee out of the largest cup 7-11 had to offer. I didn’t like this guy already and I hated him for what he represented in my mind—failure,… failure so significant that I needed to seek someone out just to help me whistle my way through a cloudy fucking day.
He came in. He smiled. He introduced himself. And I found myself liking him,… the smug jagoff. He listened to me for about forty-five minutes. I explained my current situation very similarly to the way I’ve written it here. I talked to him about my previously diagnosed Clinical Depression from a dozen years ago. I told him how the medication never really seemed to help back then, but that talking to a mental-health counselor weekly did provide me some relief—at least temporarily,… for a day or two. He listened. He nodded. He pecked out notes on his shitty little laptop with a screen that certainly was no bigger than nine inches—I remember thinking for the very first time that size, indeed, does matter. He handed me Kleenex for the tears and coasters for the water and now-empty coffee. And he let me finish. Then it came time for him to speak.
He told me that he thought I had been misdiagnosed all along. That clearly what I suffered from was not simply Clinical Depression. That I was having to deal with more complex issues than an anti-depressant would combat.
And then,… he said it,…. “I think you’re bipolar.”
Next time,… living with the stigma.
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