The Art of Breaking -- Part 2

The second half of the story... A story in and of itself, and several stories in one

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I didn't fully regain consciousness until I woke up in the hospital the next evening. How I'd gotten there was somewhat of a blur, and there were sizable chunks of time missing from my memory. My ex had gotten my message, and taken me to the emergency room of the only hospital in the area with a psych ward. Not the county asylum, thankfully, but a private hospital. I was dazed, and scared, and still very much at the bottom of a pit, but mostly, I was numb. Weirdly enough, I discovered that one of my ex's distant relatives had a room two doors down from mine. I didn't talk much the first two days, and when I did, my voice sounded small in my own ears. Small, and cold, and distant, as if I wasn't even in the same room as myself. The Dr's and nurses tried to get me to hold conversations, but they were lucky if they even got a full sentence out of me. I didn't want to get dressed. I didn't want to shower. I didn't want anything except my own couch, my own TV, my own bed, and my teddy bear. I felt tiny, like I'd fallen in on myself, like a child -- fragile and small -- and I carried that bear everywhere. There was group therapy, arts & crafts, food... It was a little like preschool, except with smoke breaks and strong narcotics.

The Dr. put me on Topamax (a mood stabilizer), Welbutrin, and Trazadone at first. When I wasn't "getting better" fast enough, he upped my dosages. Then I started getting panic attacks, so he put me on Ativan and upped the Welbutrin again. The diagnosis? Bipolar II, depressed episode. That was mis-diagnosis number five. And the amount of antidepressants he had me on knocked me into a manic state, so he upped my ativan to bring me down. That all, was mis-medication number two. He should have reduced the Welbutrin or taken me off of it entirely.

My stay in the hospital ended up being a horrific experience. There was a woman there, a little older than my mother, who also had bipolar disorder. She had gone off her meds, and gone into a manic state so severe that she had walked through Oakland, barefoot, for weeks without stopping to eat or sleep. She lost toes. She lost all hold on reality, and spent most of the night screaming at the top of her lungs. She couldn't dress herself, couldn't feed herself, couldn't clean herself, couldn't take herself to the bathroom. She didn't recognize her family when they came to visit. When I looked at her, I saw what I could become, and it terrified me. It terrified me to the point that I swore then and there that I would never go off medication. NEVER. No matter what.

Another thing that happened while I was there was that one of the patients (J) tried to kill one of the counselors. Six or seven of us were in a group session, and J suddenly gets up and starts walking towards the counselor with her arms outstretched. At first we thought that she wanted to give the woman a hug, but instead of opening her arms and leaning in, J wrapped her hands around the counselor's throat and started to squeeze. Three of us had to pull J off the woman while others went to get the nurses.

That was the first time I'd ever seen someone try to murder another person. The first time I'd ever had to STOP someone from trying to murder another person.

The look in J's eyes as we dragged her off the counselor will always stay with me. The cold burning fury, the intense calm, the emptiness behind that calm calculating blue flame of rage -- like J was being operated by remote control... In a way she was I suppose. J was a paranoid schitzophrenic with psychotic episodes.

And as we were holding her, waiting for the nurses, she kept chanting "You have to die. They said so. Kill you... Kill you all... They said... You have to die," over and over in a stone cold voice that sounded almost mechanical. Shortly thereafter, the police showed up and took her to the county asylum in restraints...

A day after the attempted murder, they let me go home. I was supposed to go immediately into an outpatient program at the hospital, so I wasn't assigned a psychiatrist. But there was an insurance snag, and my admission was delayed. During that delay, I started having adverse reactions to my medication.

I couldn't walk straight. Literally. I would end up walking smack into the wall. I couldn't think, couldn't remember things, couldn't follow a conversation. I lost the ability to speak, almost entirely. The words were in my head, but my tongue couldn't form them. I would stutter at best, and slur so badly that I was unintelligible. My mom began to freak out, saying that I sounded drunk. I didn't know what was going on, and I didn't have a doctor I could call to help me. I began to freak out myself, and ended up bursting into tears while on the phone with the HMO, stuttering and slurring and blubbering, begging for some kind of help. My mother called the HMO too, and pointed out in her best NY style attitude (bitch mode, she calls it) that they could easily have a lawsuit on their hands if they didn't authorize treatment for me immediately. Less than an hour after that call, I was admitted into the outpatient program, and the staff psychiatrist took me off the Topamax the next day.

No one there had ever seen someone have the reaction to the drug that I had had, but it was obvious that's what had caused it. Within a few days, the fucked up side effects had pretty much gone away... Though, I do still have the remnants of the speech difficulties. I trip over words, mispronouncing them, or slurring them if I try to talk too fast... As it turns out, tongue paralysis is a side effect that Topamax causes in a full 10% of people taking it, but it usually doesn't show up in the people using it as a mood stabilizer. Topamax is also an anti-convulsant, and the people taking it for that purpose are usually the ones who get the nasty side effects. Mis-medication number three, by the way.

So now I'm on two anti-depressants, 1 anti-anxiety medication, and NO mood stabilizer, in an outpatient program that I can barely get myself out of bed to go to, and I still can't sleep. Mis-medication number four.

If there's one thing you never want to do to someone with bipolar disorder, its hype them up on anti-depressants. So what does the doc do? Up my Welbutrin to the maxium dosage, and switch me from Trazadone to Remeron, which is about ten times stronger. Mis-medication number five. The thing about anti-depressants is that they generally take a few weeks to kick in fully. So after a few weeks I hit a manic high SO high that I literally could not sit still. Then and only then did they realize that they A: mis-diagnosed me in the first place, and B: forgot to put me back on a mood stabilizer.

The diagnosis got revised to bipolar disorder type I (mis-diagnosis number six), and they put me on Lithium, kept the Welbutrin the same, took me off Remeron, kept me on Ativan, and gave me Restoril to make me sleep. This ended up being mis-medication number six, because being on Lithium was almost as bad as the Topamax. My body shook uncontrollably. I couldn't write to save my life. I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't read. I didn't get quite so manic anymore, but I still got the depressive lows. I couldn't handle stress of any kind. So what did they do? Put me on Lexapro, another anti-depressant, gave me three more months off work, and shoved me out the door without so much as giving me a refill prescription or a psychiatrist to see. Mis-medication number seven, by the way -- the last thing I needed was more anti-depressants.

What happens after that? Well... My meds ran out of course, and I had to find a psychiatrist on my own, which, due to the side effects from the Lithium, was extremely difficult for me to do. Thankfully I found a good one. He took me off all those different pills (at that point, I was taking 10 pills a day of various different substances), and put me on ONE medication -- Seroquel. He also changed my diagnosis to Bipolar Type I and PTSD (the RIGHT diagnosis, in my opinion).

Seroquel is my miracle drug. I can function pretty normally on it, and it treats my symptoms well enough. The only side effect I get is being very tired most of the morning. I still have mood swings, but they're not nearly as bad, and fall mostly into the "normal" range. My anxiety level is one tenth of what it used to be. And I sleep, and eat normally. I don't hallucinate anymore either, thank god. I can't, however, handle stress very well at all anymore. I just don't have the strength for it, unfortunately. Maybe my meds need a little bit of tweaking. Or maybe I just need to recover more fully. Maybe I rushed back to work too quickly. In any case, here I am, surviving, as always.

Maybe, just maybe, I'm stronger than I think.