Inside of me and such a part of you

OoohhOoo let it burn…

I love the Smashing Pumpkins. If you don’t, it’s OK we can still be friends.

Today my mom and myself went to tackle a few errands. Starting with paying my ticket fines at the courthouse. Hopefully it will be a REALLY long time before I have to see the inside of that building again. Next we ran over to the Library so I could get some books on taking my GED and a couple Memoirs on Bipolar Disorder. “the dark side of innocence; growing up bipolar” & “MANIC”, both by Terri Cheney.

I’m going to start studying tomorrow morning for the GED and I already started on MANIC. So far so good.

I really have nothing to say if you can’t tell by now. So I guess I will go eat dinner and contemplate my life. Ciao!

Graves No More

So I no longer have Graves Disease as shortly after my first post here, I had surgery to remove my thyroid and goiter. Now I get to live with Hashimoto for the rest of my life and take Synthroid. Which is a thyroid hormone replacement drug. I am also supposed to be taking calcium, but I admit I’m not doing very good at that and it’s probably important. Doctor will not be too happy with me. I should start taking it tonight and just stick with it. Make it a habit. I am always so staunch with other people following their Doctor’s orders so I shall heed my own advice.

My hair is falling out by the handfuls and getting thinner and thinner. I don’t know what’s making it fall out whether it is stress or the beginning dose of my Synthroid is not enough. I wouldn’t rule out the stress completely though. I have been out of work for an extended period, I have bills piling up, I have to study for my GED, the list goes on.

I just wish I could be “normal” and not feel all this anxiety. I get anxious making simple phone calls. It’s just downright ridiculous and I hate it.

Bad Days

Today is not a good day. I am feeling frustrated and angry because of everything. Everything meaning being medicated, self conscious, not wanting to leave the house, having barely any friends, the list goes on. I feel like I cannot write the way I used to. Words would spill forth like coming from a fountain and now I can barely get a couple drops.

I used to have a creative mind and a way with words. Now I come up with a few words to barely make a sentence then stare at it for 10 minutes if not longer. I feel like my own worst enemy and I wouldn’t be shocked if I was.

I knew I would face some struggles, but I didn’t have a clue it would be like this. Boy was I stupid to it all, still am.

As my mother always says, though, ‘this too shall pass’.

The Bipolar Musings

This will be a collection of my thoughts, facts, feelings, emotions on living with Bipolar Affective Disorder. Last year had not been a good year for me. I started getting really depressed in March/April leading to an overdose on benzodiazepines, namely Ativan and Klonopin, for an attempt at suicide. I was rushed to the hospital where my heart rate was at 156 bpm. I didn’t know what was going on (duh!)  and I still don’t remember ever being at the hospital. I was told my mother and my then-boyfriend said I might have taken a little too much medication by accident when a tox screen had come back.

After that came a slew of Mania causing me to constantly go off with my girlfriend all night to the bars where I plaintively partied like a rock star. I was doing cocaine and sucking down Captain & Cokes like it was all going out of style.  That lead to a break-up with my boyfriend and a loss of my job in June. I moved back home because I obviously couldn’t afford to live on my own and got employed by another company. I started having delusions and hallucinations in September and October which lead me to seeing a Psychiatrist. I had been running on empty due to lack of sleep and lack of needing to sleep.

I don’t remember if I saw him before getting hospitalized for my delusions and paranoia or after. I think maybe I saw him after the first hospitalization in November. I then had a second hospitalization in December. I was in a total psychosis, meaning I was hearing and seeing things which were not there, and paranoid that people were watching me.

During all this I had been diagnosed with graves disease which we all believe was a driving force to slip me into that extreme mania because when your thyroid is in overdrive it runs your whole metabolism into overdrive which can affect the chemicals in your brain. It also doesn’t help when my doctor tells me I basically melted my brain by doing the drugs and alcohol like I was doing. So now he has me on medications to build up the gray matter of the brain and the filter part of the brain that separates reason and feeling. My mania is totally gone, but the embarrassment it has caused me is not.

I’m still in the acceptance part of this grieving process of coming to terms that I live with a mood disorder, but the severity is yet to be seen now that I have removed my thyroid and that lovely goiter I had.