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.