4:30AM Tuesday night, Wednesday morning. Something incredibly foul just crept forth from my dog’s ass onto my bedroom carpet. Note to self: dogs are not disposals for leftover wet cat food. I should know better.
It’s not as though her movement was loud but I heard her creeping about due to the fact that I was awake. This is my second night off of Risperdal. I have slept for four out of the past 36 hours. I am tired, but my brain is still doing somersaults.
For years, this had been the way of life. When battling it, I tried all of the standard cures for insomnia. Quiet time before bed. Exercise. Meditation. No eating within X hours of bedtime. Sticking to a schedule. Useless. Useless. Useless. Over time, Ambien ceased to work. I could stay up on a pair of 25mg Benedryls and a few stiff drinks. I fought with it for all but a couple of years during which I accepted the constant fatigue and irritability that comes with constant sleep deprivation and simply slept only when I could no longer stay awake.
A blister pack of small, pink pills changed that. An antipsychotic (or neuroleptic, if you’re a diplomatic member of the mental health community) called Seroquel brought me down like an elephant gun. Hell waking up, but sleep was sleep and it was a recuperative coma after a few exceptionally difficult nights in a row.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later that my diagnosis came. Bipolar disorder and insomnia make excellent bedfellows, it turns out. My brain does somersaults not because of that slice of Havarti an hour before bed, or because I was chatting on IM until the very last moment before switching off the light — it was flopping about because of some funky business of my neurotransmitters.
During a full-tilt manic episode, I was perscribed Risperdal, another antipsychotic. The feeling was sudden and intensely calming without sedation. Twelve trains of thought were reduced to three, restlessness and talkitivity cut to above-average levels from Severely Obnoxious and Disturbing. As the episode passed, I took less and less of the drug until I was taking a modest dose at bedtime. And sleeping. And able to wake the next morning without feeling as though I were coming out of a tranquilizer dose intended for a mastodon.
Now I am attempting to quit Risperdal. It has an unpleasant side effect of weight gain that I am less than enthusiastic about. However, I am thinking now that the solution is more exercise and not giving up my sleepytime drug. Healthier, but irritating.
The idea that there is something incurable, life-threatening, and alienating living in your head is difficult to accept. Feeling your own mind turn against you, show you things no one else can see, or feeling it will you to do imaginative and bizarre things, or having it turn in dark directions and wells of fear and despair… It is a discomfort that is challenging on a good day. It’s not a disease you can excise, cure, or manage with lifestyle changes. It will be with you until you die and, often, cause the strings tying you to reality wear and warp. Denial is a huge issue for bipolar patients. We feel perfectly normal most of the time, and who wants to take medications with obnoxious-to-debilitating side effects if you don’t have to? But when you go off of those meds, you open yourself to the risk of perilous highs which are chased with dark and lingering lows. My insomnia reminds me that I am not like the rest of you and I take my Lamictal faithfully.
Worse than accepting a chronic, incurable disease is the notion that my soul is tainted. I don’t believe in a human essence, but I was conversing with someone tonight who did. He felt that humans were much like nesting dolls, each smaller shell containing darker and truer secrets until you reach the center, where we keep our “secret self.” This was discussed in the context of sexual proclivities. His main point being that you only glimpse the true nature of another in the moment of release, when each wooden doll facade is dropped and a bare person and their bare wants lie exposed under you.
That moment is a dopamine storm. This happens for drug users and the mentally ill (drugs that block dopamine, like Risperdal, are used to treat such states for schizophrenics and manic patients). What I call dopamine surge, he called the human spirit. If the state of orgasm is innately different than that of mania and cannot be reduced to its chemical components, that brings up the question “What is mental illness?” A disease of the flesh is one thing, but a sickness of soul is another.
My lack of faith brings me great comfort during times like these. I am simply sick, I am run by a series of chemical reactions, and the smell of dog feces has dissipated enough to no longer keep me away from my bed.
There’s nothing quite so tiring as moving. Physically as well as emotionally. Over the past two days, what was MY space, is returning to a room in a house that is not my home.