Tags
Alice in Wonderland, anxiety, bipolar, Fairytale, family, Fear, health, Klonopin, Lamictal, Life, mania, manic, Medication, Psychiatrist, suicidal, Trileptal, Xanax
I hope that everyone hasn’t given up on myself and my blog. I have had a really tough go of things over the last 6-8 months. As many of you know 2013 did not get off to a great start. I had major surgery last February and my brothers drug addiction is completely out of control. I actually haven’t heard from him since just before Christmas. It’s sad but it is what it is. I haven’t been able to keep up with my blog because my head has been a mess and I have spun completely out of control.
In late August, I had to change psychiatrist due to insurance and for whatever reason this new doctor didn’t believe that Lamictal was an effective mood stabiliser. It seemed to work well for me since 2007 but, since I’m not a doctor, I went with his opinion. *Since this whole fiasco I have had many psychiatrists disagree with his opinion and, in fact have told me that Lamictal is one of the leading mood stabalisers on the market for people who can’t or refuse to take Lithium or Depakote. I am bipolar and do have the occasional dips and rises but nothing too extreme to consider an episode. The psychiatrist decided to take me off the Lamictal and replace it with Trileptal. I wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating right, became manic (fun at first) and then I began to isolated myself. I knew I wasn’t in a great place when I began to go “inside” my head because the reality of life was just too scary. I have always referred to this behaviour as “Going into Wonderland” because of my love for all things Alice.
I deteriorated to the point of being unpredictable and my eldest son never knew what to expect when he came home from school. Would I be happy, irate, depressed or hallucinating that there were dragons in the kitchen. Let’s also not forget the paranoia that kicked in. I was paranoid that I was followed every time I left the house.
I was able to hide it, for the most part, from my husband because he works extremely long hours and because he hates to see me like that he will turn a blind eye to my symptoms. He will often downplay them in his own mind. By October it was becoming more difficult to hide or ignore my mental state due to my public outbursts, fear of leaving the house and the fact I was popping Xanax like they were candy.
I’m not sure what exactly happened the day it all came crashing down. It was late October and we had met up with my family for my sister’s birthday. It started as an ordinary day. They all went to a pumpkin patch, which we declined because I just couldn’t face an outdoor excursion and we met up with them later that day for lunch. We had a really nice lunch and I was even talking to them about hosting a Bonfire Night party in a couple of weeks. My brother wasn’t at lunch but he was never around anymore.
Later that evening I felt a bit distant but nothing out of the “new” ordinary that had become my life. I went upstairs to take a bath and relax with some music. I’m still not sure why but I became extremely melancholy about life in general and how I couldn’t remember the last time I felt like I was able to be the mother and wife I wanted to be. I suddenly couldn’t remember the last time my life felt “normal” and less of a disaster zone. It was then that I got out the bath, dried off and took an entire bottle of Xanax and half a bottle of Klonopin. I remember simply laying down and thinking to myself that I would just go to sleep and have it all be over. The disaster that was me would be no more.
My husband, for some strange reason, had thought to come check on me. He says that he just had a sense that something wasn’t right. It had been too long from the time the bath drained. When he came upstairs I was already passed out with the empty bottles of pills in the bathroom. What happened next is a complete blank. My husband told me that he rushed me to our local ER and they immediately went to work on flushing everything out. Unfortunately they couldn’t give me a shot of something needed to reverse some of the damage due to the other medications I am on. They told him that it would cause a seizure. They also felt that “pumping my stomach” wouldn’t do much good because the pills were already absorbed. Basically they continued to flush my system with saline and something else while my poor husband had some of the worse hours of his life. All he could do was sit by my side and hope that I woke up. My blood pressure was barely there and it took hours before they were able to get any signs that I might come back.
It took me almost 24 hours to come back and open my eyes. Even then it was brief and I was out again. As I mentioned before, I don’t remember any of this. My husband told me some of the details and the rest came from the hospital report. Needless to say my next stop was the Psychiatric Hospital.
More about that to come in my next blog. I promise to not leave it so long.