As I try to navigate yet another medication to help me, it seems that there are all kinds of new frontiers. I can’t focus my thoughts today very well. I’m very forgetful. I can’t focus on one thing at a time, because too many things are coming into my brain at once. I can’t keep each one of those things within my memory, so I am forced to write them down as I remember them again. I feel like the tilt a whirl at the amusement park. Going to many directions, spinning around, I’m getting sick to my stomach. Have any of you ever had the experience of trying new medication for mental illness? I feel like a test subject animal instead of a patient with needs, and feelings, and things I have to deal with a brain that actually works. It frustrates me that there are ways to get the correct medication for my particular DNA and chemical make up in my brain, but that is elective, but that is expensive. Insurance companies see me as WORSE than a test subject! They see me as a number that they get money from, but they never want to spend the money on me, MY money on me! Then, as I’m looking at the possible side effects of not only the pills I’ve been on for 20 years, but the pill they want me to take now, and the general feelings of person with bipolar two would be having, they all seem to jumble together and be the same s**t! I feel like I am living my own nightmare of being in an institution where they have no idea what they’re doing. The only difference is that I can live in my own home, pet my dogs, and generally do the things I want to. I mean, my Effexor for example is a medication I have been on for 20 years, and yet there are side effects where I’m supposed to call my healthcare provider at once if I experience them. Some of them are; acting aggressive or violent, new or worse anxiety or panic attacks, feeling agitated, restless, angry or irritable, an increase in activity or talking more than what is normal for you, changes in vision. Well, let’s see all these things were happening since May, and I again did not have the money to get the right care at that time. So, I finally go to see a psychiatrist and also my OBGYN, and find out that my anxiety is actually bipolar 2, and that I am also perimenopausal. Oh, and they say “by the way, you really ought to get a mammogram for that mass in your left breast“. Really? You’re going to add that to too huh? Right now I am thinking, (or rather trying to think of the next word I want to put down here, because I can’t think of any vocabulary at the moment), “ what if my original medication is the real problem here”? What if this was all because of the massive amount of stress I’ve been under for the last year? What if this is my hormones messing with my brain chemistry and making everything not seem like it makes sense. Like, I feel as if I’m going completely nuts some days. By the way, I don’t recommend having a mental illness, but then nobody gets to choose whether they have that or not. There are many jerk-faces out there, who think you can just stop feeling the way you feel. It’s no different than telling somebody with cancer “oh, just tell yourself that everything‘s fine, that you’re not really sick, that it’s all in your head“! Well, ha-ha-ha, mental illness IS all in my head. How is it possible to have a normal partnership with someone who cannot possibly understand what I’m going through, because they are so lucky to be normal? Only people who suffer and go through similar things in their lives can understand the people who have gone through suffering and similar things in their lives. Aren’t we all here to support each other??? It seems the best support is from the people who are just as mentally ill as I am, or the people I PAY to talk to about these things. During this lovely year of COVID-19, earthquakes, pestilence, violence, tornadoes, voting, and all kinds of other great stuff, it’s very hard to find anyone who is not so exhausted that they can actually listen to me, and help me with what I need with just support and love, because they are so massively tired, and in pain, and worried for their own selves and their own families. I feel more isolated than I ever have before, because people just cannot be there for me. It’s not because they don’t love me or they don’t care, it’s because they are going through their own hell right now. This is a very rough year in so many ways.
Have you heard of Oxytocin? Have you heard of all the herbs, mushrooms, foods, and exercise that boost oxytocin? I really fucking need those, right fucking now! NO JUDGEMENT!!! Anyway, I was prompted to just write in a ”spewing it out manner”, right after I was thinking that the only way to wade through all this crap was to write. The only way I got this done was to speak it into my iPad. There’s just to much brain power needed for typing or writing with my hands, so stream of consciousness it is!!!
I’m on a lower dose of Abilify, and I feel so much better. Next, I start weaning of my Effexor.
"Chemical Chimeras"
Whenever and however you want to, need to get it all out of your head is good. Somecdays I feel like my brain is scrambled eggs. Worse days, like someone turned a Mixmaster on high and the eggs are splattering on everything. It's ok. People who love you don't care. And there are always, always more of those people than you think there are.