First of all I gotta say that I am really proud of Rhonda Elkins for her bravery in allowing me to post the letter that she wrote shortly after her 23 year old daughter’s suicide, on my Wednesday feature “Breaking the Silence of Stigma.” That letter touched a lot of hearts and did a lot of good. And I’m proud of my readers for rallying around Rhonda with their words of support, and some frank and open discussion of their own struggles with suicidal thoughts.
And I’m really proud of ME for writing a great review for David Henry Sterry’s new book, Mort Morte. He’s honored me by using my review as the copy on his web page. Kinda makes me think about going back to copy writing. I wrote copy for an online store for a while, then ditched it because they started carrying shit stuff I didn’t like, so there went my low-paying writing job. I can’t write copy for stuff I can’t get excited about. Like “Wow, look at these tacky rhinestone-studded chartreuse earrings in the shape of a bunch of bananas. Carmen Miranda would have put them on her head! Only $1,200 on sale now!” Ugh. Now if someone would pay me to write fun stuff I’d be on it like white on rice.
That’s the good news.
And here’s the windup, now the pitch….oh come on, just get it out. Er, I mean over with. Well, I really don’t want to. I want to stay sunk in denial forever.
I had to go see my shrink yesterday to get a form filled out so that I can take Noga, my service dog, on the plane when I go to Israel twelve days from now. Eek. Time is running short, and it’s running like hell. Anyway. So I go and see Tony my shrink, and he’s a good egg. The man really loves crazy people. He’s crazy himself, freely admits it, and also admits that the reason he’s a good shrink is that he’s crazy.
Anyway. So he likes to talk for a long time, both because he likes the company of other crazy people, and because that’s how he sizes you up and figures out what brand of crazy you are and if you need your meds tweaked or anything else like that. So we’re talking and he’s really paying attention to me and not just goofing around like he normally does. So at some point I lose not just a single word, as has been happening a lot lately, but an entire phrase that I needed to have, in order to express what I was trying to, well, express. I wanted to describe something but lacked a whole phrase and was trying to find alternative ways of saying it.
“How often is this happening to you?”
“Oh, several times a day. Even when I’m writing, sometimes I can’t think of a word and just have to put a parenthesis and go back and fill it in later when I remember the word.”
He raises an eyebrow. Not a good sign. Tony is almost always upbeat and goofing around, because if he can’t make you laugh then he knows you’re really depressed. Or if he annoys the shit out of you then he knows you’re irritable and wants to know what’s up with that. But if he raises an eyebrow….that ain’t good.
“You know the meds that they’re using to preserve cognitive function in Alzheimer’s? They’re using them now to treat cognitive dysfunction in Bipolar.”
My heart fell out and hit me on the toe. I winced.
Last year I felt like my brain was misbehaving, so I had a battery of neuropsychiatric testing that showed a big hole in one part of my central information processing. I freaked on out and called Tony, who talked me down from my freakout and told me it was a known phenomenon in Bipolar, the older you get. Great.
So yesterday he gently suggested that since the cognitive issues (he did not say “dementia,” thank God) seem to be progressing, he recommended I try one of these cognitive function preserving drugs. Far fucking out.
And he also suggested that I go back on the stimulants that I hate and had previously refused to take because they make me feel like shit. He looked up what I had before and it was Adderal. He said that sometimes people who hate Adderal like plain ol’ Dexadrine. He said it might give my brain some clarity and help the cognition to cognate. So I said all right, and now I have two fucking more pill bottles in my pharmacy. Why me, Lord, why me? Oh stop with that whiny shit, Laura, you know very well there are much worse things in the world than being crazy. Don’t even go there.
