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Borderline Personality Disorder Blog. Bipolar Disorder Blog. BPD. DBT. Cleveland. A Fragment in Orange.

5.13.2013

I saw my psychiatrist and he thinks that ECT would be a good thing for me.  He referred me to one of his colleagues who performs ECT; I have an appointment with this other doctor in a few weeks time.  The plan is to do it in July. 

My psychiatrist wanted me to try taking lithium.  I took lithium for a few years in college and it did nothing for me, but he thinks something might have changed since then and that it's worth a shot.  In the first year of taking lithium, when I was nineteen, I went from weighing 125 pounds to 215 pounds and I've never taken that weight off.  But I decided to give it another shot.  However, if I gain more than ten pounds I'm stopping it.  So far I've done a week of half a dose, and two days of the full dose, and I've gained nine pounds.  I'll give it a few more days...

My psychiatrist also prescribed propranolol to reduce my hand tremors.  Strangely my right hand is doing pretty well, but my left hand is shaking like crazy.  Go figure.

    

4.30.2013

This is me, right now

I've never felt this way before, that I have no options.  I am barely making it through each day, and there's no end in sight.  There's nothing to look forward to, no relief.  There's no thinking that "if I just make it through this phase..."  So much is wrong in my life, above and beyond my mental illness and I don't know how I'm going to turn it around.  I see my psychiatrist in two days time and hopefully we can figure something out.  If I could, I'd choose to do ECT immediately.  But I'm single, I live alone, and there's no one who can come help me out right away.  My parents live thousands of miles away, and I'm sure they would be here right now, but my mom is having back surgery next week and my father will be taking care of her over the next few months as she recovers from this extensive surgery. 

I imagine what would happen if I just stopped.  Stopped going to work.  Stopped paying my bills.  And let it all crumble around me.  My motivation, over all these years of struggle, has been to be able to support myself.  I've kept the same job for seven years, which is kind of miraculous when you have treatment-resistant bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder heaped on top of that.  All this time my main focus has been on getting up in the morning and going to work, and trying not to get fired each day.  It's a real challenge when you're mentally unstable.  When you're depressed, just standing up and walking twelve feet is a struggle -- to perform your job well and within a reasonable amount of time for eight hours each day is an agonizing feat.  But I've done it.  Add to that the challenge of faking that you're perfectly fine and not letting the depression affect your interpersonal relationships at work.  Thankfully I don't have manic episodes, but I do have hypomanic episodes -- racing thoughts, trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating, getting overwhelmed very easily, inability to complete one task at a time, sensitivity to noise/light/change,etc,  irritability, being prone to sudden and severe shifts in mood, speaking a little too loud and a little too fast, and making inappropriate comments and/or saying the wrong thing (the tiny bit of filter you have when you have borderline personality disorder is practically nonexistent when you're experiencing hypomania).

These past few weeks I've been rapid cycling between depression and hypomania.  Before now, for two months, it's been hardcore depression.  Not the weepy emotional kind of depression, but the depression of constant physical pain, constant fatigue (no matter how much sleep you get, or how much you rest) and the overwhelming feeling of I Can't Continue To Do This One Second Longer.  At first the hypomania was a welcome change, just for something different.  To have energy and desire to do things (I want to go skydiving!  I want to go to an orgy!  I want to adopt ten dogs from the pound!) is delicious.  You feel full of life and full of love, and you want to tell every single person that you come across that you love them.  Or at least that's what happens to me. 

But hypomania is the most damaging to your life.  Poor decision-making.  Erratic changes in interpersonal relationships.  Who talks like this?  Interpersonal relationships . . . that's SO therapy-ish.  Whatever.  You get the point.

Anyway.  To be continued . . .

Oh wait, I forgot to mention -- over the past year I've been stockpiling a few medications that mixed with alcohol are almost guaranteed to be lethal.  Unless I vomit them up, which is what scares me and has me thinking twice, or thrice, or a million times over.  The point being that I have the means to commit suicide.  I've never been suicidal before when I had the actual goods to get the job done in an efficient, effective, no muss no fuss way.  And it's a scary place.  It's very real.  Ugly real.  And I've scheduled vacation time off from work to get this done.  Properly.  With all of my bills and banking account info and my will and my internet passwords to important accounts and contact information and all that stuff that will make the job of finalizing my stuff (house stuff, debt stuff, etc.) much easier for whoever ends up having to deal with it. 

I don't know what will happen between now and then, the planned day.  If I'll change my mind.  Or chicken out.  Or decide to grasp at some other straw.  If it was all as simple as a light switch, turning the switch from on to off, I would do it tonight.  I wish that was an option.  But no, life is never that simple, is it?

4.27.2013

It seems that ECT is the next step.  I'm running out of options.  And I'm tired of everything.