I talk pretty freely about what goes on in my life. All the good stuff. all the bad stuff. So much so that my mom had to stop reading my blog a year ago.
There are few things that I hold back on. But the next few posts that you'll read are actually very tough for me to write about. In fact, I've been *not writing* about this for more than a month. I don't keep secrets well and writing is one of my outlets so this has been stewing for a while.
And I'm scared. Damn scared. About what I'm going to say and what it means for my life. And the perception of me.
It started when I met with my new nurse-practitioner psychiatrist. We went through all the normal stuff when you meet with a new doctor and all the normal stuff when you meet with a new psychiatrist.
That first day I was feeling pretty crappy mentally. It was easy to talk to her and she reacted to what I told her the way I expected she would. I figured that my mental case was kind of text book: just plain old depression.
We talked about how I had recently changed doses of medicines then changed medicines then changed doses on that medicine. We talked about how I still wasn't feeling 100% and agreed that we should bump up my prescription another 50 mg.
And then there was this: "When your moods more or less roller coaster and you temporarily feel better on a higher dose and then start feeling worse that can be an indication of bipolar."
I was pretty shaken. I think I had an image of what a person with bipolar was like and that image was of *crazy* and nonfunctioning and cutting off ears and just plain *crazy*. And I knew that wasn't me.
I read recently (if I remember where I'll let you know) that there's several types of bipolar. I think it was one of the medical information doctor kind of web sites.
That helped me understand my diagnosis of it a liitle better. Not everyone is way out there only at either extreme end of the emotional swings. Some of us cycle mildly between levels of "normal" and depressed or "normal" and hyper thoughts and activities.
For me, the moods cycle somewhat in relation to how much comfort food I eat and what that does to my blood sugars. I also cycle with the amount of outdoor daylight I get. Maybe that has an effect on how much walking I get in everyday too. I feel better and eat more balanced if I walk outside during daylight. But I also need to remember to take my depression meds every nite or I get some irritable just because of chemical imbalance if I forget too many days in a row.
Often it's a cycle for me of activitity, food, diabetic meds and vitamins/minerals along with the depression meds. And how much or quickly I cycle depends on what I've done in all these areas. As though we need one more area to monitor to stay healthy, but I'm finding when I do the work, I feel better "normal."