Puking, shaking, hair loss and sexiness; medications galore

I think I expected too much from medication.

I didn’t want to rely on drugs to fix me, being that I believed (and still do, especially in the case of antidepressants and childhood behavioural problems that are too easily diagnosed as “mental illness”) that medication was overprescribed and nowt but a crutch for a weary mind to rest upon.  But I figured, if I’m not that ill, medication won’t hurt me.  It’ll only be for a month or two.  

I was prescribed Lithium and had read a lot about people who took it and just snapped back into life.  That will be me, I thought greedily.  So I took the pills.  Lithium was a disaster.

Well, disaster is putting it strongly.  Putting it mildly, Lithium was not my drug.   I felt like I was being punished for something.  First of all, I wasn’t allowed my own stash for about six weeks.  The Crisis Team administered the doses and I was reassured, this awful sickness would pass.   I took Zopiclone too but would still wake up in the night shaking and sick.   I could tell you every detail of the carpet in the bedroom because I had spent so much time with my head over the edge retching.  And the toilet bowl and I became acquainted.  I was sick, all the time, dazed, dandering through smoke and sepia and shaking constantly.  I slurred my words, I often couldn’t remember my name.  It wrecked my sex drive (a casualty of all my medications that I don’t discuss here for The Obvious Reasons) and grey, godless I was a shivering slump.

To top it off, it didn’t help me.  Even with Lithium and copious amounts of zonked out Zopiclone sleep, I lapsed into a manic episode and found myself unemployed.

I’m beginning to think that I have given up on medications too soon because of how terrible I found Lithium.  Things here is Not Good.  I’m not crawling into pits or spinning from heights but my moods are flip-flopping all over the place, taking my motivation, my emotions, my mind with them.  Huge mood swings are awful, but the constant cycling is also taking its toll on me.  

It’s been over two years, a lot of drugs and a lot of not being well.

Before I was formally diagnosed I was given Carbamazepine and Olanzapine to “calm me down”.  Shorthand for, “manic” but we’re not telling her.  I took Carbamazepine during one of the most sustained manic and psychotic episodes of my life.  I felt totally pissed.   I gained a shitload of weight on Olanzapine and couldn’t function.

I gave up on Depakote because my hair was falling out, I was constantly knackered, I gained a lot of weight and it really wasn’t helping me.   I also felt nauseous on that, too.  It doesn’t help that the dose I was on (1000mg) was like swallowing two large lilos a day.  Those pills are huge. 

I took Lamictal- on one dose, 150mg, I was a zombie, absolutely dead.  On another, 100mg, nothing worked.  I stayed on Lamictal for ages, but then took my overdose and now get Vietnam flashbacks when I even think of Lamictal.  I also kept getting rashes (I’m not sure they were related, when I become stressed, I get rashes) and withdrawing from it was hellish.

Then there were the antidepressants, each one a complete failure, if you define failure as kicking me into the most raging of dysphorias.  They are, in general, now off the menu for me. 

I continued to take Seroquel, I still do.  That should have been the first medication I was chucked into the Thames as it was largely the main culprit in my ballooning bottom, bosom and belly.  But it was the sleep.  Oh god the sleep.  I slept like the dead.  Sixteen hours a day at least.  After ten years of never-sleeping, this was so enticing.  Now I hate that.  I hate how much I sleep.  I hate that if I don’t go to bed immediately after taking my Seroquel, paralysis kicks in and I start to feel paranoid and unsafe. It does help mania and anxiety but mostly because I sleep so much that it’s nigh on impossible for me to be seriously manic unless I stop taking it.  But when I lower the dose to sleep less I go weird; when I higher the dose (to the prescribed dose) to be less weird I sleep too much and become depressed.  To be honest my initial lowering of the dose was because I’m on weeklies and I felt too shit to pick up my prescription, so I eked it out.

Those are just the ones I remember; at various times I’ve also been on Risperidone and valium for short bursts.

You may think, “Come off the drugs entirely”.  But you hadn’t seen me before. 

I started off as a la-de-da typical, textbook manic depressive.  Years split down the middle with mania and depression, all mingled with psychosis.  Then came the rapid cycling and the mixed episodes and my episodes were severe.   Really bad.  This, while not good, is better.   I have still stopped self harming and mostly stopped throwing up.  I do cope far better than I used to.  I’m still mad, but not insane.  I do think, and others agree, that I need the medication.  For now, at least.  It’s doing half it’s job.  

This year, I want to become at least stable enough to do something, anything, consistently.  I don’t see myself going back to work any time soon (not unless people are employing Shaky Twitchy Talkative Depressive Moody Midgets) but I want to do something.  Right now, and for the past, oh, I don’t know, forever, I can’t sustain anything because my moods are so unstable that I get up the energy, which turns into raging agitation and paranoia then falls back into early-bed depression and complete silence.  I try, but it’s very hard.  And once again it’s beginning to fuck up my relationships.  It’s joyous.  It’s crazy white knuckle rollicking fun.  At the moment I am somewhere between depression and hypomania, of garbled thought that descends into paralysis then ascends again into nonsense and of wanting to run off somewhere but getting the energy for the shops is difficult. 

It’s not conducive with, well, much.   I just want, say, a month of doing something consistently.  At least last year I was consistently suicidal.  It was an achievement.  Every day I woke up thinking, “Hell, I want to kill myself today.  I wanted to kill myself two months ago.  Is this what stability is like?” 

I know I write, and that’s something.  I want to write more.  Fiction, articles.  I want to discipline myself and produce something beautiful and surprising.   Tons of people are writers.  To make a career out of it, you have to be talented, well connected and educated.  I’m, er.  Hm. And I want to learn something.   Last year was such a dry, dead year.   I’m taking the time to get better, but I want to be even better at being better.   I want a future. 

Do you think I have written things off too easily because of the side effects?  I think I might have been too hasty and maybe there’s something out there that will kill this enough for me to live my life somewhat.  It’s all I want, and by now, all I expect is a lessening of symptoms.  No cure, no blank slate, just a little less.  This is a little less but I have the feeling it is growing into something a little more.  I’d like to push it in the opposite direction.   Shrivel into insignificance.  I’m not afraid of being “well”.  I don’t worry about losing my identity- well, I do a little bit, since this is what I’m used to.  But I realised that I’m a moody bint anyway.  

When I look back, though, there’s not much that seems worth trying again.  I’m not being impatient.  If I wanted instant gratification I would have said goodbye to medication and hello to alcohol about two years ago.   I did the opposite.

Seroquel has been my main man for some time now, I’m very well aware of how it affects me.  I don’t want to be “fixed”.  I just want to be well enough for my life to not be consumed by manic depression, as it undoubtedly is right now.  Medication is just stabilisers but at least when there were still options I felt like if I fell, something could be done.  Right now, there is the worrying absence of a safety net. 

I’m not clamouring, “MORE MEDICATION! I LOVE IT! GIVE IT TO ME! I WANT TO BE DEPENDENT ON OTHER DRUGS TOO!”, just reflecting on, “Christ, I’ve taken a lot.  I thought I’d be smiling on the back of a book somewhere by now”.  

I really don’t know where I’m going in terms of treatment.  I’m continuing my appointments an’ all but I feel stuck.  It seems that if you’re not trying to top yourself or trying to top someone else that it means you’re magically alright.  It’s more insideous than that.   I can have all the insight and entertaining asides in the world but this is still this. 

But!  I dragged myself to the glamourous surroundings of the council gym earlier.  It was in the morning.  I don’t do mornings thanks to Seroquel.  I don’t really do afternoons thanks to Seroquel.  I’m very pale.   Rob pulled me out of bed and I very dopily wandered to the station with him, adrift on my own little personal cloud.  Then I drank two cups of coffee and tiptoed on the crosstrainer for ten minutes before getting a stitch.   I used to be able to pound it.  It used to quiver beneath my £3 trainers and beg me for mercy.  I’ve become so unfit.  As soon as I was done I lit up a cigarette.  I did walk to and from the gym so I got my thirty minutes of exercise a day, anyway.   And I’m sure this killing cold (I don’t have central heating and rely on a rather rubbish fan heater) is good for me.  Bracing, as some would say.  Though it’s not a good sign when you have Thelma and Louise hair indoors.

Anyway, I like this, because it reminds me of those “well being” videos that depicted people like us as plebs who watch too much Jeremy Kyle when we should be shiny haired and hosting dinner parties with Nescafé and fucking salmon en croute or en route or whatever the name for fish in pastry is.  And I watch TV online now so I don’t have to sit through the adverts.