Crazy gets physical

OK, so what the hell?  My head is turning itself inside out, and it’s starting to make me physically ill.  As in nauseaus, sweating, terrible insomnia, and brutal headache.

Why so stressed?  Well, like everyone else spanning the globe these days, I’m freaking out about my financial life.  I have been so drugged and out of it for so long that I think I have simply been ignoring the fear that lives there.  But now that I’m thinking clearer, I decided I had to actually look at things honestly.  I have some financial decisions to make in the very near future, and I need to know what’s what in order to make good choices.

I did not anticipate a panic attack in the process, which is pretty much what I’m fending off at the mo.

It would seem that no matter what I do, I cannot make ends meet.  That is so fucking frustrating.  The best I can do is try to get myself into the least amount of trouble I can.  But that is a sinking ship.  This business of being a single-parent who can’t really work regularly is a bitch.  I need a partner – if I had that going on, things would look drastically different.  But I don’t want to choose a partner based on their financial picture – how gold-digger would that be?  No, there are a million other reasons I’d like to have a partner, but I guess if I’m honest with myself, this does factor into the decision too.  I guess the scary part about that is the potential to be stuck in a relationship because of the financial impact of splitting up – been there, done that.  Don’t plan to ever be in that position again.

I definitely need to talk to a doctor about this.  I can’t stand my head bouncing off the walls the way it does these days, with nothing productive to come of it.

Crawling out of my skin.

I really want my mind to slow down.  It won’t just relax.  It’s moving, moving, moving.  If only it were a steady, productive motion.  But instead I am running this hamster wheel with every ounce of energy I don’t have.  God, it’s exhausting.  I’m even having trouble stilling my eyelids if I try to close my eyes.  This is terrifyingly pathetic.

My head is poundingpoundingpounding, a tightly snapping band that traces the base of my skull from ear to ear.  Make it stop.  Just make it stop.

The mental part of the cessation of oxy was not ever the issue for me.  Until tonight.  My body felt like it was crawling out of my skin, my mind felt like a badly synced percussion band, and my back was killing me.  Oh, and nausea beyond all get out.  And although I have been at a complete loss as to how someone goes through the whole withdrawal process only to begin using again, it all came clear tonight.  It’s not necessarily the craving of the “high” that people are after.  It’s a numbing of all the other background (and foreground) noise that prevents us from hearing our own breath.

I didn’t want the rush tonight – it was a rare occasion that I ever had.  What I wanted was the quiet.  The comfortable silence.  Not just the absence of sound, but the presence of possibility.  I wanted that more than I may have ever wanted anything in my life.  So far, I’ve managed to keep at bay the realization of that desire by opiate catalysts.  But the night is young yet.

So now I get it.  The infamous “they” always talk about addictions developing to mask or deny the pain.  Until tonight, I don’t think I had ever fully understood that sentiment.  Yes, I understood that people with painful emotional scars often became addicts of one variety or another, and that their drug of choice could be just about anything under the sun, from heroin to sex to booze to shopping to work, or a million other possibilities.  I guess this is the first time I have ever truly comprehended what a devastatingly physical pain those emotional scars can beget.

I want to relax, get out of my own head.  I want to shut down for a little while, just turn it off.  I want my feet to stop jiggling, my stomach to stop rebelling, my head to stop pounding, my skin to stop crawling, my nerves to stop jolting or shocking me throughout my system.  I want to be empty, for a stretch.  I can’t even calm the thoughts down slow enough to properly catch what they are.  There’s about a million and 9 of them dancing around in my head, just outside my circle of comprehension.  I feel like I’m getting dumber by the minute.

I smoked a joint to try and take my pain down a few notches – both the physical and the mental.  Worked for about 15 minutes, at best.  I’m still sitting here staring at a couple of bottles of different strengths of oxy’s, not 10 feet away from me.  I’m trying so hard not to go there, because if I go back down that road, I’m not sure that I will be able to stop it.

Best that I can do is to sit here and write.  Maybe if I get it out of my head, I won’t have to remember it all anymore, at least not all at once.  Then I won’t have to carry it around with me all the time, and I can make a little room for something new.  So I write, and I write, and I write.  Not that anyone but me is likely to read this, I suppose.  But then, that’s not the point now, is it?

Bound for the loony bin?

May I just start off by saying that it is a very strange thing to watch one’s self descend into…madness?  I am still plenty well in control of my faculties to be aware of my own behaviour and thought patterns, but not enough so to do much about them.  Whether that is anyone’s clinical definition of madness, or simply the layman’s definition of an average Thursday, well, that’s up for debate.  Regardless, I’m not really coping well, and I don’t know if it’s my own inability to cope, or my choice not to.

There.  I said it.  Is it all a choice?  Is that the big kick in the nuts?

The grip that I feel like I have been losing on reality for the last several years, which has suddenly been thrown into hyperspeed since coming off the oxy…is that actually me losing the battle for my sanity?  Or is it me losing the energy to fight the battle?  Am I giving up on myself and giving in to the drama that might be ever so much more interesting than the reality?  Oh, and it would have the handy little side-effect of absolving me of all responsibility too.  How nice.

I’m tired.  I’m so very, very tired.  I’m tired of having to fight for every single inch in life, mine or my children’s.  Is it all really worth it in the end?  Are some of us simply “born lucky,” while others of us struggle eternally, and seemingly without reprieve?  Or, to put it a different way, will all the struggle in the world, on my part, ever make for any tangible changes in our lives?  I have my doubts.

OK, let me digress for a moment.  Because of this damn flu that we’ve all had, I have not taken my anti-depressants in about 5 days.  Hmm, can you tell?  Yeah, me too.  I guess, if nothing else, this answer’s my mother’s recent question about whether I thought I might be able to come off of the 40mg of Prozac and 300mg of Wellbutrin XL that I am supposed to take on a daily basis.  I’m thinking perhaps that would not be the smartest course of action, a point that is hammered home when I start considering different methods of suicide.  (Did I mention this was likely to be a really feel-good post?)

Now, what I’m wondering is whether obsessive thinking is related in any way to a Bipolar II diagnosis?  Because that’s what the last week has held for me.  Obsessively thinking about the same things over, and over, and over, and over, and over….right, you get the picture.  I definitely tend towards the all-or-nothing end of the scale, even on a good day.  But, this is going in a direction that is really quite new.  I’ve never really obsessed over people before – wait, to be fair, we’ve all had those obsess-about-the-cute-boy-you’re-crushing-on moments in our lives.  But in the past, they have at least all been boys/men that I actually knew.  As in, first-hand.  As in, not just on the freakin’ TV screen.  (As in, I’m no John Hinckley Jr., don’t worry.)  But this one is weirding me out.  I have never been one to be star-struck…my family’s in show-business, and I’ve grown up around it, and it’s never really been a big deal.  They’re all just folks like the rest of us, eating and shitting and sleeping and fucking.  And yeah, some happen to be particularly blessed with looks, while others are overabundant with personality, or humour, or joy, or love.  We all have our own gifts, and I have never considered physical appearance particularly more important than any other attribute.

But WTF?  New TV show this season.  I am obsessive about it.  That’s happened before – when Grey’s Anatomy first came out, I was pretty obsessive about it too (not nearly so good this season though.)  But it was never about one actor in particular – it was about the show and the storylines.  Well, this new show has me fairly obsessive about it too – the storylines and all.  But this one is weird because it really does revolve around one of the actors in particular.  I find myself watching every YouTube interview with him I can find, looking at years’ worth of photos online, etc. etc.  It’s kinda creeping me out.

Now, this is gong to sound certifiable, I fully realize.  The only other time I have ever felt anything even sort of related to what I’m going through now, it more like premonitory knowledge that this would be someone significant in my life.  And in that instance, I was bang on.  I knew that the person in question and I would end up sleeping together, and I was right on the money, and have continued to be so for the last 3 years.  So is this weird obsession a sign of mental illness, intuition, or just, I don’t know, menopause?

OK, enough of being sidetracked by fantasies of mysterious and sexy leading men.  (They’re only fun when you can choose to turn them on and off, not when they occupy your every thought.)  However, I guess it’s a nice diversion from the crazy I’m otherwise going.

Fucking H1N1 Mania Fear-Mongering. And I feel like crap.

Right.  So.

After all the hype and propaganda about the dangers of H1N1, I read some interesting stats.  Apparently we are more likely to die in the bathtub, or from a slip and fall that we are to die from H1N1.  Not only that, but more people die from the regular old flu than from H1N1 – like, at least twice as many.  Chances of dying from Swine Flu are roughly 6 million to 1.  So I have not been overly concerned.  Not only that, but having chosen not to vaccinate my children against any of the regular old diseases, I wasn’t about to stand in line for the H1N1 vaccine.  And I continue to stand by that.

And then <insert scary music here> it arrived.  First one kid started talking about having a sore throat, then the next, I got a little tickle, and the final kid started coughing.  Doctor at the clinic confirmed my suspicions.  Phoned ex-husband and new wife – they too are sick, all the same symptoms.  Sweet!  Good times.  We are now quarantined with the plague, one and all.  And Tamiflu is our new bff.

So I will now have 3 kids home sick from school, while I am also sick as a dog.  Oh yes, and I am supposed to maintain some sort of work presence with my clients, whose deadlines don’t shift because I fell ill to the Swine Flu.  I know.  Blah, blah, blah; whine, whine, whine.  Whatever.  People in Africa are starving, as my dad used to say to me.

And through all this, I am trying to wade through this potential diagnosis I’ve been given.  The doc who brought it up wasn’t sure, and called my psychiatrist to confer.  The more I find out about Bipolar II, the more it feels like a fit.  As in, like a glove.  Which would partly – or perhaps completely – explain why, although I am sick with the frikkin’ Swine Flu and tired as hell, I am still awake at 2:28 in the morning, with neither mind nor body settling enough for sleep.

This business of mania, it’s a weird one.  I guess what I experience is technically hypomania, not mania, strictly speaking.  But it’s weird enough, regardless.  And it seems to be getting worse.  At first, I thought it was just a reaction to getting off the Oxy.  Like a rebound effect.  But the longer this goes on, the more concrete it seems to become, and the less I feel like this is a temporary state of being.  This hypomania seems to be recurring, as opposed to a one-off, like I’d hoped at first.

These nights that I can’t sleep…these temperamental outbursts I can’t seem to control…these thoughts that I can’t slow down, or even follow coherently half the time…uh, what was I saying?  Seriously, I can’t seem to get a grip.  And part of me hates it.  Part of me feels like, finally, I can identify the crazy that has been growing in my head.  There have been moments I just couldn’t control my temper – I kicked a hole in the freakin’ wall yesterday, because my kids made me so crazy angry.  I hate feeling like I can’t control my temper – in some ways I am the most patient person in the world, and in some ways I am so not.  It just seems to get away from me, and I hate that place.

Pain sucks. Seriously.

This is probably the hardest thing I’ve done in my life.  Sure, I have, at various times in my life, stopped drinking; stopped smoking; recovered from I swear 43 different car accidents; carried three children to full+ term through two separate pregnancies (you do the math!); given birth to 3 separate children; stopped having relatively anonymous sex for the kick of it; stopped bingeing on everything loosely referred to as food that I could possibly put in my mouth (except mushrooms.  But really, who binges on mushrooms anyway?? Well, unless they’re those kind, which was never something on my personal radar); moved with a husband, 2 infants and a young toddler half-way round the world; moved, not 1/2 a year later, back home from halfway across the world with the two infants and toddler, but sans husband; retained a mostly amicable relationship with my ex-husband and his new wife; kept someone incredibly dear to me afloat when he was suicidal after his wife left him (OK, there’s no way I can take full credit for that one, but there’s a weird twisty place inside that feels proud that of everyone he could have called at that crucial moment, he called me); been a marriage counselor, confidant, and best friend when I should have been a child of nine (or ten, or eleven, or any number you pick until I was announcing my own engagement); broken in half when I had shut off to my brother, the drug addict – tough love and all that; and spent more hours than I can possibly count in therapy for…let’s face it…any of the above reasons.

And of all those list of things, which is by no means a complete list of personal whining, this thing is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life.  Ever.

I have 6 bulging discs in my spine.  Now, I am nowhere near arrogant enough to think that I have it worse than anybody else, ever.  Definitely not true.  I do, however, have it worse than I have ever had it before.  What used to be routine things to do: bending down to kiss my child, to pick up a stray toy off the floor, to load the dishwasher, to do my children’s laundry…no more.  Sure, on a good day I can do any one of those things once, maybe even twice.  But the tradeoff may be that I spend the next 3 days on a heating pad unable to get out of either my bed or my chair (which is sometimes the ONLY place I can get even remotely comfortable.)  With the exception of one emergency room visit with my daughter who was doubled over in pain and unable to walk, I have not lifted up a single one of my kids in 2 years.  By the time I might be able to again, they will have far outgrown the possibility.

A year ago, approximately 1 year after injuring my back, my back pain worsened considerably.  That was the beginning of Oxycontin.  Well, to be fair, it started out as Percocet, moved swiftly to Oxycodone (short acting), and ended at Oxycontin (long acting.)  Over the year, my dosage went predictably up, up, and away.  Now, understand, I did not take this medication in a careless or unthoughtful way.  I was hyper aware of the risks – my brother had been a heroin addict after all, a close relative of Oxy.  I took my meds as prescribed.  And thank God, I escaped becoming an addict.  I did, however, become extremely physically dependent upon the drug, and would go into the beginnings of withdrawal at some point in the day, pretty much daily.  I didn’t understand that the brutal hot flashes I had several times throughout the day were the first signs of withdrawal.  Nor did I realize that the rash on my hip – itchy as hell – that just would not go away…probably also drug-related.  I had my suspicions about all of it, but my back just hurt too fucking much to consider not taking the meds.

However, 6 months in, I started to regret it.  Let’s face it: I was stoned.  All. The. Time.  And I hated it.  I can honestly say that I hated the “whoomp” when it would really hit my system.  I hated being so out of control.  (Hmm, does someone have some control issues, per chance?)  But seriously.  My life became a revolving cycle of sleep, pain meds, sleep, TV shows (Lord knows I was way too out of it to A. follow, or B. stay awake long enough to read a book), sleep, movies, sleep, falling asleep in the middle of conversations, sleep…you get the picture.  Did you read anywhere in there, “spend quality time with my children?”  Neither did I.

Eventually the fact that I was incapable of really being “present” with my children got to me.  I started probing my doctors more specifically about the long-term picture.  Their response?  I was medically in between a rock and a hard place.  I wasn’t good enough to “just live with it”, and I wasn’t bad enough for surgery (that would require full out disc herniation, which my children are still vocal about hoping I will deteriorate into, just so that something can be done!)  That left me with a prognosis of long-term pain management.  However, that just simply didn’t work for me.  I continued pressing my doctors at each appointment until I finally went in to my rehab specialist’s office and said, “That’s it.  No more.  I’m not doing this anymore.  I want off the narcotics.  My brother was a heroin addict, and I have my own addiction issues.  And most importantly, these meds are keeping me from being able to be present with my kids, and that’s time that I will never get back.  So what are we going to do about it?”  His response?  “I’m so glad to hear you say that.”

What the hell?

I had been saying it for 6 months.  I guess I wasn’t quite as much of a bitch about it, but I had been saying it just the same.  But no one had been hearing me.  And that was an enormous wake up call about our medical system.  Don’t get me wrong, in every other respect, this particular doctor has been great.  He has made time specifically to just sit down with me – for as long as it took, I might add – and listen to my story, so that we could navigate our way through this.  He has been an excellent doctor, and I have never once – other than the minor incident of pain management planning – been less than enthusiastic about working with him.

But, come on.  This was interpreted as the first mention I had made of wanting to get off the multitude of crap that I was putting into my system?!?!  Hello!!!  Do I need to tap dance naked on your desk to get your attention?  (Well, currently that would probably negate the need for me to get that particular brand of attention – if I could tap dance naked on anyone’s desk right now, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.  But I digress.)  Our medical system is really not set up well to heal.  It is set up very well to medicate and alleviate symptoms.  But neither of those things gets to the root of the problem.  And that is a problem of gross proportions.