Mental illness has been the worst of my diseases since Christmas 2011. My depression forced me to take an eight month leave of absence from my blog in 2012 so I did not mark my third year anniversary of blogging. I took about a two month break this year. Depression leaves me uninspired to write and my mind so dull that technically putting up a post is almost impossible.

Currently I am coming out of a depression. I have had two depressive episodes this year and one manic episode, and have been hospitalized twice. It’s been quite a year and we are only in May.

Despite therapy and medication, I feel very unsure about what the future holds for me. Planning for a vacation is impossible; what if I am feeling too unwell to handle a trip?

How am I going to be feeling next month or even next week?

How will my bipolar disorder affect Tyler in the long term?

I wonder, where could this blog have gone if I had not had mental illness? Perhaps I could have written that book that has been floating around in my head, or made some money with advertising, enough to supplement my income? How many people could I have reached with my message if I were not sick?

I feel very angry at my mental illness as I begin my fifth year of Mama Sick. I am not so enthusiastic about being a spokesperson this time around.

I do want to thank you. Even though I had a huge break in writing last year and a two month gap this year you have stuck with me. You never forgot about Mama Sick and last year I came back better than ever.

I will not let Mental Illness win and I hope you will not let your illnesses win either.

I will keep fighting and writing.

And I hope you will keep reading and sharing.

Thank you.

Four candles plus one for good luck. Chocolate, my favorite.

The post My 4th Blogiversary first appeared on Mama Sick.

I was (and still am) on medication and in therapy, and about three weeks ago my mood finally started lifting. I bought make-up, I colored my hair for the first time and I bought new clothes. I started to come out of my fog. I do not think I am 100% yet, but I keep getting better every day.

For all of you who are depressed, who’s depression is lasting many months, please do not give up hope. You WILL come out of it, I know it is hard to believe from where you are sitting, but BELIEVE me, it will happen.

This roller coaster they call Bipolar Disorder sure sucks the big one.

I am stable right now, but of course I wonder when or if I will be ever pulled down again or become manic to the point of paranoia.

Right now, I am counting my blessings that I feel well. I am taking my medicine and seeing my therapist and will continue to do so for the rest of my life, and I urge all of you who are bipolar or depressed to do the same.

Here are a few highlights of what you missed in the two months that I have been away:

Tyler lost his first tooth!:

Tyler and I at Easter dinner:

At the Cleveland Great Lakes Science Center’s Egyptian exhibition:

I hope you will welcome me back, I have missed you all and am so happy that I feel well enough to start posting again! Hope you are all as well as you can be!

The post Back! first appeared on Mama Sick.

I have fallen into a deep depression, not just a depression, a kind of stupefying of my brain, where for sure my writing is not flowing, nor is my thinking.

Toward the end of this year, many people around me as well as some healthcare professionals believed I was in the throes of mania. I will be honest, to me I did not seem manic, I felt smart, I was prolific in everything I did, especially when it came to writing. Maybe some mania but I was getting things done.

I had a medication adjustment, no, a complete med change where I was put on mood stabilizers. I had not been on mood stabilizers for a while, as my doctors in Massachusetts believed that since I was stable I did not need to be on stabilizers. I guess this is a controversial way to think but it was fine by me.

Now, I feel I must blame the medicines, they have worked too well, have thrown me in to this depressive state and a “dumbed down” feeling. I see my psychiatrist on Thursday. I know I have to be on medication, I just wonder why there is so much experimentation on bipolar people? I pray the psychiatrist will change my med regimen, so that I once again can find a happy medium.

Everything is telling me to put this in drafts, to get to bed and try to sleep, but I thought it might be interesting for my readers to see me at my worst, when the words don’t come, when inspiration is ruined by depression.

I sometimes feel as though I am moving through molasses. Normally these are the times I do not write; I did not write for eight months the last time around, and I do not want that to happen again.

Please pray or think good thoughts, that my fog will lift. I don’t want to ever go through something like that again…but am I already in that? Or is their still a spark of life in “medium to manic” Emily?

I will try to keep publishing; that is healthy. I know this post is not scintillating but it is honest. I hope you will stay with me as I try to claw my way back to some type of normal, for me anyway, and I hope you will check back in from time to time if I find it too difficult to publish. I have a large fan base, you, my wonderful readers, and I would hate to lose you.

I try to write the words, the sentences I want to write, but my brain is like someone has dropped a rock in a pond and my thoughts scatter like ripples.

I fear I have become redundant and so I will close. Thank you for reading, for staying with me, and I do hope you will continue with me on the latest part of my journey.

The post From My Very Depths first appeared on Mama Sick.

I thought when I moved to Ohio, to the Midwest, that maybe my allergy would go away.  Instead it got worse.  The worst was at night, although it would happen during the day too.  I would wake up coughing and choking on my saliva.  I couldn’t stop coughing.  I took to having cough drops, something to drink and tissues to spit up in at my bedside.  It would affect my sleep because it would happen more than once a night.  It flared my Costocondritis.

So many other things were going on with me; my Lupus, Fibromyalgia, Myofascial Pain Sydrome and Interstitial Cystitis were flaring.  Who could worry about a cough, although it was very disruptive.

On the suggestion of my mother-in-law, I started sleeping sitting up, thinking it was a post-nasal drip sort of thing.  It was very hard to sleep like this and it would take me a while to go to sleep.  It didn’t work, I was still having coughing and choking fits and I went back to my bed.

After seeing my Primary Care Doctor many times at the clinic on the East side of Cleveland for my ailments, I finally came in last week just for the cough.  I made the mistake of telling him it probably was allergies.  Never tell a doctor you think you know what your diagnosis is.  They are either going to get right on board with you if it is something easy like allergies, or think you are a hypochondriac if you say you have cancer. 

First I saw the Nurse Practitioner.  She said, “Well you probably have GERD. Do you have a sour taste in your mouth?”  I told her I did not and said I did not have the other symptoms she listed.

The doctor listened to my chest and said my lungs were clear and gave me an OTC medicine similar to Claritin and a prescription for a generic nose spray if that failed.

I started taking the tablets.  Two days went by and no relief.  That didn’t seem right to me so I called the manufacturer’s drug information line and asked how long I should be on the medication, when would I feel some relief?  “Well, you are supposed to feel some relief within six hours!”, she said.  I dropped the tablets and tried the nose spray with the same results.

In the meantime, sometimes when I would start to speak all that would come out would be coughing.  I would have “attacks” during my daily life, always having to carry cough drops or needing people to get me water to stop my cough.

One day I even coughed up a trace amount of blood as I spit into the sink.  My voice is hoarse.

This week I vowed to see my doctor again.  This was crazy, I wanted to say ‘Where do we go with this next?!’

On Friday I came in as a walk-in, since a large part of their appointments are walk-in.  I usually come in as a walk-in because it sometimes can take two weeks to see the doctor.  The receptionist told me that they didn’t have walk-in hours until noon and it was 8:30.  I had always thought it was walk-in every day, I guess I had never tried to come on a Friday morning.  I could see if my therapist was free at any point this morning, I thought, then I could come back around 11:30.

I told the receptionist that’s what I would do and she said, “Well the doctor has a very busy schedule.  You are not guaranteed to be seen.”  “What if I come in at 11:00 or even at 10:30 and I am the first person on the walk-in sign-up list.  Surely he would be able to see the first person on the walk-in list.”  This logic seemed to baffle her and she replied that she still could not guarantee it.  When I told her I had had a cough since August, she became a bit alarmed and said that she would make me the next person to see the Nurse Practitioner, and that she would make the determination whether I would be able to see the doctor in the afternoon.

While I waited I started talking with a couple of older women.  They were both disabled, they told me, both turned down by the court and both awaiting appeals.  Ohio is one of the hardest states to be awarded disability.  I told them why I was here and one of them said, “Girl, you could have lung cancer.  My friend had a cough for a long time, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and she dead now.”

I also told them I had Lupus.  The other woman said, “Oh yeah, Lupus is very serious, you can definitely get cancer with Lupus.  My friend has Lupus and now he has prostate cancer too.”

I wanted to thank them for their encouraging words but decided to go back to my iPhone.

The nurse-practitioner called me in.  “You were here last week, what do you want now?”  “I came back for the same thing I was in for last week,” I said.  She walked me back to the office.  “Did you even try the medicines the doctor gave you?”  “Yes, of course, I tried both of them and they did not work so that is why I am back.”  “I told you last week you had GERD, you probably have GERD.”  “Ma’am, with all due respect I know what GERD is and I do not have GERD.”

She was putting my symptoms in her computer to see what might pop up.  I said, “I don’t think you will be able to diagnose me like that.”  “You’re right.  Ma’am you are too sick to come in as a walk-in!  Walk-ins are for emergencies only, people who have run out of their medication, who might have the flu or pneumonia.”  I apologized to her, said no one had ever told me that, but didn’t having any undiagnosed cough since August count as an emergency?

While we were speaking she was looking at my chart, at my medicines.  An anti-depressant, anti-anxiety medication, a sedative when needed, and something for sleep.

“Wait, are you anxious?”

“No, I am not anxious, I have had a cough that has not gone away since August.  Look, just because I am bipolar does not mean I have not had a cough since August.”

And then, doo, doo, doo, doo, the radar had hit it’s mark and focused right there.

“Oh, so you’re bipolar.”

This has been happening in every doctor’s office since I have moved to Ohio.  As soon as they learn I am bipolar, all thought of the possibility of me having Lupus or Interstitial Cystitis goes out the window.  I have offered them medical records of my diagnoses, but they won’t even look at them!

Grant had had a good idea.  If they will not look at my medical records, why not bring the judge’s decision on my disability case?  Which addressed all of my diagnoses and said that yes, my bipolar was a part of what went into me winning my case but I mostly won because I had Lupus and other physical illnesses that prevented me from working. It was the government, you have to believe the government, right?

I offered them to her and she said, “I don’t want to see those!”

She asked me when was the last time I had worked and what did I do?  I am not sure what this has to do with my cough but I told her that eight years prior to being disabled in 2008, I had been a Recruiter for the pharmaceutical industry where I recruited in Phases I-IV clinical research, recruiting from the Associate to the V.P. level, people who were doctors, nurses, scientist, people like herself.

She said, “Well, you’re very smart!  I have hard that some bipolar are smart.”

As if I was in a vegetative start and some scientist has just discovered that there was some spark of life in the old girl.  I was too stunned to even reply.

“How is your sleep?”

“It is very poor due to my cough and my pain that no one around here will treat.”  I told her about the horrendous experiences I had had at their beloved Cleveland Clinic.

“Well the Cleveland Clinic is a for-profit hospital.  I’m just telling you like it is.  They don’t have to treat you.”

“I know they don’t, but since they are a hospital dedicated to helping sick people, and this is America, I think the decent thing is that they should. ”

“Well you are MANIC!”

“Ma-am, unless you have a degree in Psychiatry or in Psychology, you can not pronounce me manic.”

“I was a psychiatric nurse for 10 years!”

Oh my God, you were??  For 10 years, and you are just learned in your meeting with me that people with Bipolar can be smart???  God help the poor in-patient souls when you were caring for them!

She said, “Well the only thing I can offer you is cough medicine and cough drops, do you want that?”

Why not?

When I got home and read the label on the bottle it said, “Ask a doctor before using if you have had a cough that won’t go away.”  There were no instructions as to how to take it.  In addition it is possibly dangerous for people with Fibromyalgia to take products with Guaifenesin.  But since the nurse only looked at my one diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder it is safe to say she did not read that I had Fibro. I also feel pretty confident in saying that even if she had know I had Fibro, that she would not have ever heard of the controversial Guaifenesin Protocol.

I made an appointment to see the doctor on Monday, still baffled. All it would have taken was five minutes of the doctor’s time to say, “Holy crap, I cannot handle you here.  I can not X-ray your lungs, I don’t have the equipment to diagnose you with anything.  Here is a referral to see a Pulmonologist!”

I could have possibly been seeing a Pulmonologist this upcoming week.  Instead I have to see a Primary Care Doctor and who knows when a Pulmonologist can see me now with the holidays?

Rich or poor, insured or not, “sane” or Mentally Ill, to me it just seems a shame.

How about you?

The post Too Sick to Be Seen? first appeared on Mama Sick.