Saturday

Well, isn’t this just grand.

I gained 10 pounds this week. Now, I ate too much, absolutely. But, I didn’t eat “gain 10 pounds” worth. This morning, I was in the shower and looked down and realized that my left foot, ankle and leg were swollen. I’d say that it was too much for the beginning of the day, but I’d been up since 1:00 am so I’d been moving around for about 6 hours or so by then. So, apparently there is a water retention problem somewhere from something. Ok. Plus, (this is probably TMI but I’m not totally truthful of my “bipolar experience” if I don’t share it) Remeron made me constipated and I haven’t gone properly in a couple weeks. Normally, my problem is the other way around so this has been weird.

Anyway, I took a Lasix (Furosemide) which meant that I had to take to Pyridium which is for my Interstitial Cystitis. The IC, in a nutshell, is a problem with the bladder. For some reason, no one really knows why, the lining is slowly shedding and it causes pain and difficulty peeing. So, if I take Lasix I have to take Pyridium.

Now, in the meantime I just stopped the Remeron and started Seroquel XR. So, with luck the constipation thing will clear up. The leg swelling actually seems to be getting worse even with the Lasix, so I guess I’ll have to take another (I took a small dose at first hoping that would do it).

So, since I have all this swelling, I should be laying down with my feet up. But, don’t you know it, my mood today is peppy and ready to get stuff done. Really. I’m ready to bake. I’m doing laundry. I put together menstrual supply bags for the homeless and poor for charity and I’m chopping at the bit to get started. I. Want. To. Get. Shit. Done.

But, if I do, my swelling won’t clear up. It could get worse. And my legs already hurt. My hands are a little tingly.

I have to lay down. There’s no real choice.

How much you wanna bet that tomorrow I’m depressed and unmotivated?

I’m up

I’m always up anymore. I keep track of my sleep on my Fitbit. It’s not perfect to the minute, but it’s within an hour or so as far as I can tell. Last night my sleep went thusly:

6:55 pm – 8:09 pm and 1:03 am – 2:35 am. That’s it. There was a small amount of fitful dozing from around 10 till around 11 but it wasn’t deep enough or steady enough for the Fitbit to track.

Y’all, that’s not enough sleep, I don’t care who you are.

The one thing I have going for me right now is that my husband can actually see me not getting sleep. So, he’s super understanding of what’s going on and is being sweet and cutting me slack all over the place. It’s harder when it’s just my brain and my mind fighting one another and he can’t actually SEE it. But, this is obvious. He’s giving me a break.

Today I have an appointment with my regular primary provider to get my yearly checkup. Maybe she’ll give me some knock out drugs! After that the trainer comes for the dog.

I’m living for this dog trainer appointment. My sweet puppy that is supposed to help me with my emotional issues is so completely not trained. And he really needs to be. He’ll be one next month and he knows a lot, but it’s all the wrong stuff! Trainer today will evaluate him and then give me a price to get him trained up to my goals for him. Right now, those goals are obedience. Sometime later I may do more with him, but for right now, I need him to listen and do what I ask. Dogs are people pleasers and they’re happiest when they are being praised and petted. To get there, they need to know what the rules are so they can follow them. I’ve done a poor job of teaching Ilio the rules and now we need professional help. Thank goodness we got our tax refund so I can do this.

I am getting some amusement out of my high school reunion Facebook page. They are still debating Trump vs. Biden and people are getting all kinds of feisty. I had maintained friendships with some of them up through very recently. But, just as they were poor winners, they are even worse losers and I’ve had to walk away from them. When you have bipolar disorder, you can’t afford “as long as you agree with me” friends. You need the real deal and the last four years has really shown that some folks just aren’t the real deal.

Anywho, have a lovely day everyone, I’m gonna try for a nap.

Long Nights

A normal night of sleep would be so great right now.

My insomnia got a little bit better for a few days and lulled me into a state of confidence. I started getting depressed and my pdoc put me on Remeron, which has to be one of the few medications that I’ve never been on before. And it helped with the depression AND the sleep. Instead of 5 hours, I was getting around 8. In a row. I need 10, but I was happy to take what I was getting.

The whole damn thing has backfired on me now. For the last several nights I’ve fallen asleep between 7 and 8. No problem. Hubby is up at 3:30am for work so we go to bed early. But, NOW I’m waking up around 11 or 12 and can’t get back to sleep. Tonight, I actually took 1.5 mg of Klonopin and got high. And fell back asleep. For 20 minutes. Twenty whole minutes.

So I’m up. It’s 3:11 am, I’m on my second cup of coffee and have no intention of trying to go back to sleep. I’m running the dishwasher and when that’s done, I’ll start laundry. This way, when I want to try to take a nap around 3, I won’t feel bad about it. And hubby is on a liquid diet tomorrow (today) for his colonoscopy on Monday, so I don’t even have to cook dinner.

The problem here, of course, is that my insomnia has been going on so long that my circadian rhythm is completely out of whack. I don’t have a job, so I guess it’s not that big a deal. But, I’d rather be snuggled in bed with hubby then watching Young Sheldon on Nick at Nite and being assaulted by my dog’s farts which are really awful tonight.

Pdoc is at the end of her rope with my insomnia. None of the meds are working the way they should. She gave me something (I can’t remember the name) that was supposed to put me down hard. She only gave me 7 days worth to fix things up. But, it didn’t put me to sleep. It made me wired. I was up for more then 24 hours in a row.

Now the Remeron did a good job at lifting my depression, but my anxiety is roaring back. We’re not sure if the depression has been hiding the anxiety and now that the depression is pretty well gone the anxiety is back. Or is the Remeron causing me to be anxious. Who knows. I can barely keep track of this stuff anymore.

I’m going for more coffee. And possibly a butt plug for the dog.

I don’t understand

TRIGGER WARNING for active suicidal thoughts.

It’s 4:30 in the morning as I write this, and I’m worried. I’ve been up since around 1:00 am and when Joe got up at 3:00, I stayed up a little longer to hang out with him. But then, tired, I decided to go lay back down. Big mistake. My rambling mind started to ramble which usually isn’t a great thing.

To be clear, I live in a world of passive suicidal ideation. For those unfamiliar with the lingo, it basically means that suicide is something that is on my mind, but there is no real desire to go through with it and there is no plan. I have this a lot. A LOT a lot. In fact, way more often for my comfort.

Tonight though, as I lay in bed, watching “Mom”, I started thinking that maybe if I took another milligram of Klonopin (I had already had 1 mg about an hour before), that might help me go back to sleep. The insomnia thing has been going on for months and I’ve really about had it. Now, I think my circadian rhythm is messed up, so it’s going to be even harder to deal with. But, I digress.

If 1 mg of Klonopin was good, surely 2 mg would be better. And suddenly I felt ready to take everything I have. I started thinking that this time, I would surely do it right. This time, I would surely take enough, because I planned on taking it all. All of it. The Klonopin, the mood stabilizers, the OCD pills, hell even the blood thinners and cholesterol medicine. That should do it.

I still have the presence of mind though to realize that these thoughts are lies my brain (mind?) are telling me. I certainly don’t feel very depressed. I mean, I’m depressed but it certainly doesn’t feel like I’m depressed enough to be contemplating suicide with any degree of seriousness. But, there I was, doing it anyway.

So, I used what was left of my clarity and got up. Went out to the garage (too cold to smoke outside) and admitted to Joe what was going on. That was HARD. I don’t like to admit that weakness, I’m sure no one does. And honestly, I didn’t want to upset him, but I did. He’s not acting upset, but he’s not talking either and that’s a sure sign. I certainly can’t blame him. If he told me he was contemplating suicide, I would be devastated. But, I really felt it was in both of our best interests for him to know what was going on.

So, now, here I sit in the living room. Lights and TV on. Pills in the other room. I’m hiding from my meds. I’m hiding from the only thing that keeps my chemical imbalance relatively controlled, because it is also the only thing that can give me a relatively painless exit from this life. It’s really a shame when the thing you probably need the most is also the thing that holds the most danger for you.

Thankfully, I have therapy at 8:00am this morning. It’s a special session because I was so depressed last week. I felt it would be better to see her an extra day than risk a problem that ended up cropping up anyway.

I just wish I could understand why this had to happen today. Usually, suicidal thoughts crop up when I’m extremely depressed, and I’m just not. I’m not lying to myself either, at least I don’t think so.

Y’all, what the actual fuck. This day is going to suck.

Waiting to exhale

Who knew that’s what I was doing? I sure didn’t. I wrote a post in October about my insomnia and at the time I blamed it on my obsessive thoughts, which is my primary OCD symptom.

Turns out, it very well may have been Trump’s fault. Now, I’m not going to go off on another political post here. I don’t like writing them in this space. This space is mine, not the politician’s, and they’ve crept in enough thank you very much. But, I knew this was the answer when I slept 7 hours the night before the inauguration.

SEVEN HOURS! I haven’t slept more then 6 hours in months and those are never all in a row. Seven hours was like a beautiful gift and I couldn’t have been more satisfied.

Until last night.

I dozed off watching inauguration stuff around 6 and I never woke up until 4 am. TEN HOURS!!! That’s the amount of sleep that is perfect for me. My bipolar requires it, has for years. My mother swears it’s too much, but it’s where I function best. Let’s face it, fighting your brain every single day is exhausting. Working to appear normal takes a lot of energy, a lot of spoons, and that needs replenishing. It’s part of why, when you get admitted to a psych ward, they immediately start working on your sleep.

The fact that I managed to avoid the psych ward during this latest stretch of insomnia is nothing short of a miracle as far as I’m concerned. It’s been the result of all of my bouts of insomnia and this was, by far, the worst. I’ve switched sleep meds 8 times, even taking on a stint of the dreaded seroquel, just to get some sleep.

Turns out, all I needed to do was make it to Inauguration. All I needed was a Trump free life.

Of course, I’m declaring myself cured after two nights of sleep, so we’ll see what happens.

But, I’m hoping for the best.

Insomniac

Tags

bipolar, bipolar blog, insomnia, Obsession

I can’t remember the last time I got 8 hours of sleep, straight through. Let alone the 9 or 10 hours that my mind needs to keep the crazy part of my Bipolar at bay. My therapist and I have talked through this multiple times. I have looked back over old journals and old blog posts. Whenever I start to get less then 9 or 10 hours per night, for a sustained period of time, things start to fall apart.

I’ve talked with my psychiatrist (Dr. M) several times. My Trazadone and Ambien ER were already maxed. So she took me off Ambien and started on Seroquel 25 mg along with the Trazadone. She gave instructions to bump it to 50 mg if 25mg didn’t work, which it didn’t. But, 50mg didn’t cut it either. I gave each of these doses a few days to work, even though I don’t think that was really necessary. So, I called her again, and she bumped it to 75mg. And, that’s not working either. But, when she bumped it to 75mg, she asked a question I didn’t expect. Am I taking my Anafranil?

For those of you not familiar with Anafranil, it’s used for obsessive thoughts and has formed the core treatment for my OCD. My obsessive thoughts, a relatively new symptom for me, formed the basis for suicide attempt last year. Mania was a huge factor, don’t get me wrong, but when you are obsessing about the mania, things get pretty dicey pretty fast. And I’ve been taking it religiously. I was having trouble with my sleeping when it was first prescribed to me. It works fast and the second night, I slept like a baby.

I’ve been thinking about this question since she asked it yesterday morning. You may say I’ve been obsessing about it. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why it mattered. For starters, I take it in the morning and I don’t see how that could possibly be affecting my sleep. But, she didn’t ask when I was taking it, only if I was taking it. Second, it’s not for sleep, so what did the question have to do with anything anyway?

Around 2:30 this morning as I was sitting on the front porch with a cigarette and my coffee it hit me that I’d been obsessing about this question. I thought about it all day yesterday and it was the first thing that hit my brain as soon as I was awake today.

But, what has been going on during the waking hours? Thinking about not sleeping, of course. I usually wake up around 3 or so. Wide awake. I hate laying there wide awake and possible disturbing my husband, so I get up and make a cup of coffee. I sit on the front porch and look at Facebook, play a game, drink my coffee and smoke. I chat with hubby when he gets up and then I’m usually back in bed by 5am or so pleading exhaustion. I stay in bed for 1-2 hours, usually 1, listen to Cartoon Network on low low volume and drift in and out. I finally get up around 6 or 7, pissed that I didn’t sleep more. I check my Fitbit until the hours slept finally pops up mid-morning. I muddle through my day, cursing my inability to sleep properly, cook something simple for dinner (because I’m too tired to do much) and roll back into bed around 8, where I lay tossing and turning until 10 or so. And thinking about not sleeping.

The thing is, it’s really hard to tell someone they are being obsessive. It’s really easy to point out the compulsive parts of OCD. For me, I am obsessive about the organization of the dishes in the dishwasher and the placement of mugs in the cabinet. But, there are more glaring and obvious things about compulsion that are so easy to point out. Obsessive thoughts on the other hand are slightly trickier. Last year, my obsession was over my step-son’s girlfriend and the mother of their child. She had cut us out of their lives (long story) while blaming me and I could not let it go. I was devastated, pissed and hurting for my husband. No one could tell me that was obsessive. It was a HUGE deal. I was eventually led to the revelation, but it was too late. What was Dr. M going to say to me? That I was obsessing about my sleep? Well of course I am. It’s a HUGE deal! But, she led me to it with the question. She knows me well enough to know that I will wonder why she brought up Anafranil. She knows me well enough to know that I know what each med I am on does. And if she suspects obsessive thinking, she knows I’ll obsess.

And she’s right. I did. And I’ll be calling her office for an immediate appointment as soon as the office opens.

Pharmacy Tangent

Tags

Belsomra, CVS, insomnia, lunesta, medications, pharmacies, pharmacy, Rite-Aid, Walgreens, Walmart

Last night I thought of a great subject for a blog post.  I didn’t write it down.  I don’t remember what it was.  It’s in that mass of crap I call my brain, but at the moment it is lot to me.  If I think of what it was, I’ll get back to you.

Yesterday I called my pdoc, Dr M., and told her that the Lunesta wasn’t working.  It was doing nothing for me.  So she called in to my pharmacy a 10 day supply of Belsomra. There is a coupon online to get it for free.  I called my pharmacy two hours later to make sure that they got the Rx from Dr M. and they had.  I told them about the coupon and they said just bring it when I pick up and would 4:00 work for me.  I said sure.  I asked her if it is expensive and she said “not very.  It’s $24.47”.  That’s for 10 pills folks. That’s $2.45 per pill.  I want the income that makes that cost seem ‘not very expensive’.  I wasn’t going to print out the coupon.  I was going to leave it for folks who have worse insurance then me or no insurance.  I don’t  like to take samples at the Dr. office for the same reason.  But, damn.  That’s a lot of money!  Especially when you think to a month’s supply.  I’m hoping that she is giving me the before insurance is applied price.

So, I turned my attention to gearing up to pick up the pills.  The only thing that bummed me out was that I was going to have to get dressed, because I was going to have to go IN to the CVS to present my coupon.  Hence, I could not use the drive through which is pajama friendly.

But at 3:30 CVS called to inform me that by the time they got to my prescription they ran out of pills.  Seriously.  I called 2 hours ago.  I didn’t get in line at that point?  Or if they were already out for the day, the girl I spoke to didn’t know that?  So, here I sit at my keyboard after another night of sucko sleep.  I took the Lunesta, but I shouldn’t have bothered.  I was just hoping that it would all of a sudden start to work.  No such luck.

Supposedly, they will have my pills this afternoon.  We’ll see.

This is the time when I really miss the Mom and Pop independent pharmacies.  My dad had one.  I worked for him for years.  With the exact same conditions as I presented to CVS, the first thing my father would do after verifying receipt of the prescription would be to check to make sure that he had enough medication to fill the prescription.  Standard Operating Procedure.   And we knew our customers.  We would be pulling their bag of meds out of the bin before they even got to the counter.  Try getting someone in CVS or Walgreens or Rite-Aid or God forbid Walmart to know who you are.  I fill 10 prescriptions a month all at different times which means I’m in there at least twice a week.  And they don’t know who I am.

Well, this has gone off in a direction I didn’t expect, but I’m gonna just let it be what it is.

And if I think of my great idea from last night, I’ll write another post later.

So that’s what sleep feels like

Tags

insomnia, medications, seroquel, sleep, triggers

I had nearly forgotten.

I woke once.  But, I got 7 1/4 hours (yes, I’m counting 1/4 hours, it matters) which I haven’t seen in I don’t even know how long.

Pdoc put Seroquel on board yesterday.  This is my second go-round with it, but it worked last time.  I quit it for 2 reasons.  When the new year started and I had to meet a deductible again, it was difficult to afford.  It made me gain weight.  Fast.  A lot.

But, it worked.  Mostly.

Mostly is better than what I’ve been having lately, and I’ll take it.  I’m begging for remission.  I’d pay good money for remission.  But, right now, I’ll take “mostly”, or even “some”.

I mostly just want the bliss of sleep.

Sleep matters.  It relaxes us.  It helps wipe the slate of the racing thoughts.  The hurt of pain of those who haven’t understood or have been downright rude, disrespectful or mean.

But, most of all, it relieves a trigger.  If I can sleep at night, than I don’t worry about whether or not I’ll be able to sleep at night.  I don’t lay awake in anguish wondering why oh why am I awake even though I am exhausted.  I know that the peace of sleep will be mine, if I can just push through this damnable day.

Seroquel sleep, for me, is definitely a druggy sleep.  If hubby banged pots and pans right next to me, I probably wouldn’t wake.  It’s not the sleep I prefer.  But it’s the sleep that I get.

Right now, I’ll take what I can get.

Good morning insomnia

Tags

bipolar, insomnia, medications

8:00pm Take meds.   This is an all meds on deck situation and the handful is daunting to look at.  But, I toss it in my mouth, take a swig of water and swallow the lot.  Time to get comfy and get ready for sleep.

9:00 pm Time for Bob’s Burgers on Adult Swim.  I’m still wide awake.  I have slept with the TV on since my early 20’s.  It soothes me and keeps my mind from running.  I watch/listen with the volume low during the show and then close my eyes during commercials.  My version of meditation

9:30pm Take 2 Ativan (as instructed by pdoc) because obviously Restoril needs help as I am still wide awake.

Fall asleep somewhere around 10:00 pm

1:30 Wide awake…hubby not home from work yet.  Hmmm

Fall back to sleep somewhere around 2:00 am

4:00 am Wide awake.  Start thinking about how good coffee tastes.  Hmm I’m really awake now.  I wonder if my sorority sister got the card I sent her.  How am I supposed to get anything out of therapy if I can’t ever get a good night’s sleep?  I wonder what med pdoc will put me on next.  I wonder how pdoc will react to the 3rd med failure in a row.  I wonder if my ankles will swell today.  Podiatrist appointment tomorrow. Will he do the 2nd plantar fasciitis surgery this week or next?  Toss turn toss turn. Hey, I have a new pimple on my face.  Acne at 45 almost 46. Awesome.  Wonder which med is causing that.   Wonder what time hubby got home.  I’m gonna wake him up tossing and turning like this.

4:05 am I get up.

4:30 am  I sit down with my coffee and open the computer.  The dog is still asleep

This was actually a decent night’s sleep.  5 1/2 hours of sleep with one waking incident.

I take my meds earlier because recently I have been getting up between 4 and 5 am no matter what time I go to sleep.  So, I’m trying to increase my chances of at least a few extra hours.

It’s not really working.

I don’t nap.  I’m afraid if I nap, I’ll mess up my sleep at night.  HAH!  What a freaking joke.

Pdoc is going to have to figure out this insomnia..like..today.  I’m beat.  Racing thoughts screw me up every damn time.  I need something to shut my brain off.  Even if I get 5 1/2 hours of sleep straight through, that would be better.

I’m not asking for miracles here.  Just a little sleep.