Opening A New Window Onto My Life
If you've noticed I've been quiet lately, there's a reason. My life has cracked open in a way I'm still getting used to. I've been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. For most of my adult life I'd simply called what I felt depression, partly because someone once told me my grandmother went through a stretch of it.
The turning point came after a strange fall a few days earlier. One night I felt off in a way I couldn't name, unnatural and unsteady, and I worried I might be having a stroke. That fear wasn't out of nowhere. My sister-in-law, nearly ten years younger than me, had recently been told she'd had a stroke when she figured she was just fighting the flu. So I called an ambulance for myself.
I was oddly weak, with an ache in my arms that I'd chalked up to the long sleeves I happened to be wearing. When the EMTs arrived I talked fast, tumbling out one thing after another because each detail felt like it mattered and I wanted them to have all of it. Lying in the hospital bed later, turning the night over before any doctor or social worker reached me, I understood that what I'd been doing had a name: pressured speech.
In an earlier era someone might have called the whole episode a mini nervous breakdown. In the emergency room I surprised my own family by crying and telling the doctors I couldn't go home. A kind of paranoia had set in. I'd convinced myself that if they hadn't agreed I needed to be there in the first place, they wouldn't want me back with open arms either. The doctor decided to hold me one more day for another brain scan, which came back clear.
The next day he spoke with me and then sent in the social worker, and that conversation is where the word bipolar entered my chart for the first time. They wanted to begin medication right there in the hospital. They were also weighing whether to place me in a swing bed on a new unit, the kind meant to rebuild the everyday skills a patient needs before going from a hospital room back to their own house. I seemed to fit that placement, because when they first settled me into my room I'd lost nearly all of my physical ability.
The strange part is that I had driven myself to and from town on the very day I was admitted. So how did those skills vanish the way they did, both then and again later when I went home for a visit and once more when I returned the following day? I was weak as a kitten, and I promise I wasn't pretending. I don't have an answer for that yet. When I know more about this diagnosis that's so new to me, I'll come back and tell you about it.