I was talking to someone at work today who’s had a serious streak of bad luck/karma/ickiness lately. I jokingly asked her if she’d clubbed a baby seal in a past life or something.  Today I’m feeling sorry for myself, like I’ve had my own baby seal mass clubbing genocidal rampage in my previous life.

It’s such a cliché to say that life isn’t fair.  You can be a very bad person, make very bad decisions, hurt people, leave wreckage behind for someone else to clean up and yet, you still may come out ahead.

It isn’t fair that you can work your ass off and have someone take your hard-earned results just because they can.

It isn’t fair that you can be the cause of so much pain and turmoil, and still expect the person you hurt to continue to give to you.

It isn’t fair that children are stuck in the middle, desperate for some stability and sanity with the adults in their lives.

And it certainly isn’t fair that greed and poor moral fiber and a general sense of entitlement affects the lives of those who never wanted to be involved with you in the first place.

Never have I felt so completely beaten down and frustrated with a situation over which I have no control.  It seems to drag on endlessly.  Most unfortunate, there is no good outcome for anyone involved.

Sometimes I kick myself for decisions I made a while back.  Based on the information I had at the time, they seemed sound enough.  I wonder if all the hell and frustration I’m feeling now is my own personal penance, my punishment, for my own transgressions in my actions against other people.  Maybe watching the suffering of my friend is appropriate and just desserts for the pain I have put others through.  Maybe it’s just life and there is no reason why things happen or don’t happen.

I keep thinking about my parents, and all the years they owned a business.  It never seemed to matter what the situation was – whenever the law was involved, they always ended up on the losing side.  Try to run a business honestly, you pay.  Try to reward your employees, you pay.  Work hard, be a good father, a good husband – you’re going to pay too.

The dark, niggling fear that consumes me late at night:  am I witnessing my significant other’s hell up close and personal because I did the very same thing to my ex?

Then I become rational, reasonable, and begin to list out the ways in which my situation was so different, from the reasons why I got married in the first place, to having children, to our finances, to the way we ended things, to the way we communicate now.

No matter how I seem to look at it, though, turning it this way and that in my head, I feel almost as though I personally deserve this, and that this form of limbo is closer to the Catholic concept of hell than it is to being stuck in the middle, between good and bad.

I had a really crappy day today.  My patience is shot, and I am not patient to begin with.  The day was so crappy I don’t even want to write about it, because then maybe it will have just been my imagination. 

Work wasn’t good.  It was a vivid reminder that I am not firing on all cylinders (if I were a car, I’d be a Gremlin, with two cylinders), in any part of my life.  My personal life feels like someone is alternately standing on the brakes, so to speak, or spinning me in a vortex.  I’ve been in varying degrees of chaos since 2009, and this woman wants off the rollercoaster.  I have never felt so powerless in my life.  The changes that need to happen are mostly outside of myself, and up to other people.  I can only sit by, biting my nails, waiting for it to end.  I feel like I’m under-performing as a mother, a coworker, a friend and sometimes, a girlfriend. 

You can imagine my delight when, after today, I came home finally at 7.30 at night.  I left the house at 7 am.  Thora decided to pull a bottle of sesame seed oil off my pantry shelf.  She ate it.  In the middle of the living room.  Again.  My house now smells like a dirty Chinese restaurant, and two treatments with the steam cleaner has now made it smell like a febreezed Chinese restaurant.  Glorious. 

Patience.  I want it so badly, but instead, I’ll settle for this picture instead. 

**This is a long post.  I apologize but after editing it and editing it, this is as concise as I can be**

I used to work with a guy who was prone to fits of rage.  If he’d been around 3-4 years old, we would have called them temper tantrums.  He’d get so mad at a client, he’d scream obscenities and slam his door so hard the ceiling tiles would fly out of place. 

I found out a few months into that job that he suffered from diabetes, and didn’t do a very good job managing his condition.  When his blood sugar would drop, he’d become irritable to an extreme.  Unfortunately, some of his clients got the brunt of it and equally unfortunate that his coworkers got more than their fair share. 

Many of us excused his behavior because oh, he had diabetes.  And he did.  When he managed his condition properly, he was a normal human being. 

So I wonder how different mental illness is from his diabetes. 

I myself have tired of hearing professionals and those of us who suffer from various forms of it say, “_____(insert condition here) is the same as diabetes or hypothyroidism or any other kind of medical problem.  It needs to be treated, and no one looks down on someone taking medication for a heart problem.” 

This is true, but the words sound hollow to me because let’s face it, telling someone I suffer from high cholesterol and take meds to manage it is very different than telling someone I’m bipolar II (always important to stress the ‘II’ part!  Because that means I’m half as crazy! It’s SOFT bipolar, dammit!) and “need” medication to “be normal”. 

The fact is, for many years I was misdiagnosed with simple depression.  No one, and there were plenty of people who knew, connected my eating disorder with my true issue.  An even bigger fact:  most people who knew me would have never known I was sick or suffering. I became a master at keeping my crazy all to myself.  It helped that back then, I was a “writer” and I was “artsy” because hell, all of us creative types were prone to moodiness and tears.  My eating disorder was also an excellent form of medication to keep the true symptoms buried deep. Some people compulsively shop, gamble, or engage in very unhealthy behaviors.  These are the regular types of self-medication. Mine worked very well for many years. 

It is not an understatement to express how grateful I am that I came undone at the end of my marriage.  It took me being able to realize how bizarre my internal thoughts were to also make me realize that something much bigger was going on.  Although I would rather poke hot needles into my nail beds than go through those things again, I am truly the healthiest I have been because of them. 

I’ve said all of this before. Why say it again? 

Because when I first decided to come forward publicly with my story, I spent a lot of time analyzing the pros and cons of it.  I knew that someday someone might try to use my words against me, call me crazy, fling insults, and just simply feel superior to me.  More than that, I worried my kids would somehow suffer from other people knowing about it.  At the end of my deliberations, I decided to write as openly as I could about it while still maintaining some semblance of privacy and hopefully, dignity.  All the others before me who had written honestly about their own journey had helped me so much on my own.  I felt I owed it to the people in my life and, in a weird way, people that didn’t know me, an insider’s guide to living with mental illness.  I still don’t regret that decision.

Honestly, my fears about coming out with it have come true on a number of occasions.  I’ve had to accept the fact that I can’t explain myself to those unwilling to listen.  I can’t control how others view me.  I just have to be okay with myself and the steps I’ve taken (and there have been many!) to be the person I am today. 

I think what’s frustrated me the most is that it’s so much more taboo to discuss mental illness and own it than it is to just live with depression or other things silently, all the while pretending you’re okay.  Because I’ve had years of therapy, a great psychiatrist and done tons of personally agonizing and difficult work on myself, I’m somehow “less than” a person who just chooses to ignore their poor life decisions, erratic behavior, self-destructive personality, etc. 

WARNING to FAMILY MEMBERS who FREAK OUT THAT I POSTED ABOUT IT IN THE FIRST PLACE:  You MIGHT want to STOP READING because OMG SOMETHING POTENTIALLY NEGATIVE HAS HAPPENED!  SOMEONE HAS JUDGED ME!  WARNING!!!!

(I do get the fact that those in my family who were concerned about me acknowledging what happened just can’t stand the thought of others judging me or potentially penalizing me)

It happened recently that someone found out about my (gasp) illness and was questioning Running Boy about it.  Did he know?  Was he aware? Was I on medication?  In a way, I was amused.  Did he know?  Come on, seriously? I may not wear a t-shirt that says “Kiss me, I’m Soft Bipolar”, but everyone close to me knows the truth and also knows how hard I work to be the best person I can. 

Actually, maybe I DO wear a t-shirt that says this!

I was okay with that part, but the niggling fear under my conversation with RB was, “Is this going to be used against me? Or him?  Is my presence in his life going to cause him more trouble than he deserves?”  The answer is yes, we could go through some crap.  However, I have people lined up to talk about who I am today – including the aforementioned therapy/psych people – and at the end of the day, I’d venture to say I’m more self-aware and stable than the majority of people at the grocery store in any given day. 

What’s truly sad is that you’d think from what I’ve said that I was some raving lunatic in my previous life.  I wasn’t.  Unfortunately, by being so “normal”, I went undiagnosed for years and years and years – which meant that by outsider’s standards, I was fine – but internally I suffered in various ways. 

I have a medical condition.  I am on two medications, at low doses, to manage it.  I spent many years looking at my internal thought processes and my various crutches that enabled me to live with it.  As I hiked Sunday with a good friend, she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this happy.”  I’m not sure I’d call it happiness as I don’t trust that word.  I would say I feel the strongest and most calm I’ve ever felt in my life, and this feeling has been with me for the last two years.  I still have good days and bad days like the rest of the population, and I still have to really manage my sleep patterns and make sure the people in my life are healthy people themselves.  But honestly?  Judging me because I’ve taken major steps to be a better mother, a better person?  That thought process makes me tired. 

I’m curious.  Delurk, even if anonymously.  Tell me how many people in your life have suffered from mental illness. Share what you can.  Have I helped you?  Hurt you?  What do you think the best way to combat this stigma is? 

Hey guess what?  Patience has never been my virtue.  Not sure if you’ve noticed, but this Type A personality doesn’t like sitting around waiting for things.  I especially don’t like sitting around being sick, especially when nothing I can do but give my body time is the only remedy. 

I decided to just test out my lungs today, so I did a lap around my driveway.  Nope, my lungs can’t breathe, the coughing fit that followed left my head feeling like it was going to explode, and my neighbor probably wanted to dial 911 because I sounded like I was in the death throes of some heinous respiratory thing. 

Pneumonia sucks.  I’ve had respiratory infections and bronchitis - yeah, those were bad, but this thing is kicking my ASS. 

It’s like my breathing has been narrowed from a fire hose-sized tube down to a kiddie straw.  Air doesn’t flow right, and when it does, my chest rattles and wheezes and as Running Boy so kindly pointed out, I sound like an old person with emphysema.  (and my brain isn’t working right either; i would normally be able to spell emphysema in my sleep, but i actually had to look it up after spelling it emphesema, emphsyma, and empasema)

On an entirely different note, Running Boy can laugh at my coughing fits, but he’s the one who consistently calls cicadas (of which we have many, here in Virginia) quesadillas.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at the tortilla version the same way again. 

So, it looks like one more week until I can attempt a run again.  I might throw caution to the wind and try to catch up with my training team on Saturday; I have to play it by ear. I don’t really trust my ear, because my “ear” is what got me in this mess in the first place.

I was talking to Meg earlier today contemplating why I got so sick.  This is honestly the most sick I’ve been since I don’t know when.  Part of my promise to myself, way back when my life came off the rails, was to take care of myself.  This meant mitigating my stress, managing my food intake, prioritizing exercise, and taking time for myself.  A big part of it was making sure I got enough sleep.  Throughout the past two years, periods of insomnia have caused me major issues. 

Looking back at the past month, it’s easy to see why I got sick.  Some of it was truly out of my control (I hadn’t planned for my mother’s stroke; she hadn’t either for that matter, and I underestimated the emotional impact it would have on me).  Some of it was just unfortunate - I didn’t really think about the fact that my triathlon training would overlap with the start of half marathon training, and instead of trying to just focus on the tri training, I insisted on keeping up with both.  I wasn’t sleeping much and I was going through a period of stress with the Boy.  My vacation that I’d looked forward to for so long had blown up into a million tiny pieces.  I was interviewing for jobs (again), and trying to figure out how to manage my internet site’s busy season at the same time as my part time job’s busy season.  I was eating poorly and working out in a manner that wasn’t healthy, either.  Too much of a good thing ends up in plantar fasciitis, inflamed hip bursitis and shin splints. 

Still, I was thinking my body could have sent me a slightly more subtle message than full-blown pneumonia.  In one week, we had an earthquake, a hurricane, and I got pneumonia.  I felt a little overwhelmed. 

We tried to make the best of the vacation week.  I left town for a few days with Running Boy and his kids - we headed to his hometown for some fun.  I was already going downhill by the time we arrived last Sunday night.  I spent the better part of the evening in a run-down ER full of people who, god bless them, looked either like viable contenders for the upcoming season of “Teen Mom” or extras on the set of a 1984 Whitesnake video.  After the diagnosis and a purse full of pills, I managed two days in my Oscar-winning role of “heavy burden girlfriend coughing germs all over my parent’s house” before I called Nicole and begged her to come pick me up.

Two days in Christiansburg with Dan and Nicole was great; I got to catch up with them, kick them out of their bed, and spread my germs all over a new town.  Nicole let me do nothing and we watched hours of Style and HGTV.  It was awesome.  I knew I was truly emotional and still sick when Jerry Maguire’s “You Complete Me” speech reduced me to tears. 

(I hate Tom Cruise)

Back in Richmond, I am making the best of my recuperation time while waiting for my kids to return from their vacation with their father.  I’ve never gone this long without seeing them, so I’m a bit keyed up.  Add to this nearly 2 weeks without any exercise and minimal time with the Boy and I’ve got some seriously stored energy.  I’ve been catching up on long-lost DVR programming and doing a lot of laundry.  I’ve slept a bunch, too, and tomorrow I’ll attempt to process payroll without falling asleep on it or blowing pneumo-germs all over the time sheets. 

I say all this humorously, or at least I try to.  The truth is, I’m so annoyed that I’m sick and that it’s taking THIS LONG to get over it.  I’ve got a 4th (and please god let it be the final) interview on Wednesday, my kids start school on Tuesday, and I have a freakin’ half marathon to train for.  I do NOT have time to be sick and this is frustrating me.  I go back to the old tried and true sayings of therapists around the world and “look for the lesson” in all of this.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the lesson is that if I had taken MORE time to take care of myself, I might have avoided this . . . or maybe not.  Maybe it was just my turn to take the bullet and spend 3 weeks moaning and coughing and wheezing. 

I do know one thing - I cannot wait to get off this couch and back to living.

I had one of the most frightening experiences of my life yesterday. 

Over the weekend in Southwest Virginia, I’d picked up a couple of things for my parents. I called my mom around noon to see if she wanted to meet me for lunch.  She’d already eaten, but we decided to get together around 1.15 to exchange some things and she could watch me hoover up something for my own lunch.  She was perfectly normal when I talked to her.

I arrived in the restaurant parking lot around 1.10 pm.  I saw her car, and her silhouette.  I wasn’t sure why she was waiting in the heat, so I walked over to the car and called her name.  No answer.  I called her name more loudly (and impatiently, because good lord, let’s eat already).  No response.  I walked up to the driver’s side door and noticed the window was down; she was sitting in the car, sort of leaning back and forth in the seat.  I told her I was there, and as soon as she made eye contact I knew something was wrong. 

Her eyes were barely open and her speech sounded like she’d been on an all-night bender in Vegas.  When she tried to get out of the car, she pitched forward immediately and I was able to catch her.  She was unable to walk without falling, and although my mom is petite, she sure felt heavy as I dragged her - literally dragged her - to the other side of the car where I got her to lie down.  Through her thick, slurred speech, she told me she was “just tired” and assured me she hadn’t been taking any medication. 

Internally I was panicking.  I thought she was having some life or death reaction to a medication from the surgery she recently had; the other part of me was idly considering how in the HELL she had driven 20 minutes in the condition she was in without killing herself or someone else.  She was mostly incoherent, making half-hearted hand gestures and mumbling the same sentence in a strange, strangled tone I’d never heard her use before.  Occasionally saliva would bubble out of her mouth, causing me to internally panic and wonder how much I could fake my way through CPR. 

After 2 or 3 minutes of trying to wrap my mind around this person who didn’t resemble my mother in the slightest, I finally began to react.  I called my father first, irrationally asking him why he let mom leave the house in this condition and what medication had she taken?  He said she’d been fine when she left and that she hadn’t taken anything this morning.  I told him to get there as soon as possible. 

In the silence that came after hanging up the phone with him, I began to shake.  My mother kept trying to get up and move around in the car; I kept telling her to stay still and stop talking (the stop talking part was for my benefit, because every time she tried to communicate with me, it scared me even more).  I realized that she wasn’t getting better and I also realized that I needed to make a decision. 

I told her firmly to stay put and ran to the restaurant, grabbed a manager and told him to call 911.  I ran back to the parking lot and stayed with my mother while we waited; the cliche is that minutes seem to take forever when waiting.  In this case, the fire department rescue squad was right around the corner and within 30 seconds of the call being made, I could hear the sirens.  A minute after that, I could hear the ambulance.

Many things happened in the minutes and hours after I made the decision to call 911.  They included a ride to the hospital with my mother in the back and me in the front seat, next to an incredibly buff and sexy EMT (high point of the day), a dawning realization that my mom was probably having a stroke right in front of me, the amazing ability to communicate to large groups of people via mediums like Facebook and texting, and many interactions with a superb, if not overworked, ER staff.

A few minutes after my mother reached the ER, she was assessed for stroke symptoms.  The doctor and nurse both agreed that she was probably having one and activated the stroke team.  Since she was getting better on her own, they didn’t use some of the new medication they have for severe strokes but gave her aspirin immediately and began a long process of CT scans, x-rays, blood work, carotid ultrasounds, swallowing tests and echocardiograms.  A few hours later, we were told that she probably had experienced a transient ischemic attack (TIA) or in layman’s terms, a “mild stroke”. 

I wasn’t familiar enough with the symptoms of a stroke to know that it was urgent to get medical help for my mother.  I didn’t realize that she was smiling and the right side of her face wasn’t the same as her left.  All I knew was that she was completely out of her mind and going downhill; it was that fear of waiting in a parking lot and watching my mother die in an Arby’s parking lot that propelled me to risk the wrath of her later, healthy self about ER copays and ambulance costs to dial 911.  (Really, who wants to pass on to the next fabulous plane of existence with a giant cowboy hat in the background and the smell of greasy fries in the air?  It doesn’t bode well for the next life)

Without wanting to sound too much like a Public Service Announcement, strokes really aren’t that difficult to spot. I’m sure these same symptoms can appear in other situations, but it’s not worth taking a risk.  I’ve pasted some information below from the National Stroke Association about recognizing and reacting to stroke symptoms:

-Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg, especially on one side of the body

- Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding

- Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes

- Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination,

- Sudden, severe headache with no known cause

Immediately call 9-1-1 or the emergency medical services (EMS) number so an ambulance (ideally with advanced life support) can be sent for you.

Also, check the time so you’ll know when the first symptoms appeared. It’s very important to take immediate action. If given within 3 hours of the start of symptoms, a clot-busting drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) may reduce long-term disability for the most common type of stroke.

tPA is the only FDA-approved medication for the treatment of stroke within three hours of stroke symptom onset.

A TIA or transient ischemic attack is a “warning stroke” or “mini-stroke” that produces stroke-like symptoms but no lasting damage. Recognizing and treating TIAs can reduce your risk of a major stroke.

The usual TIA symptoms are the same as those of stroke, only temporary. The short duration of these symptoms and lack of permanent brain injury is the main difference between TIA and stroke.

Now that I’ve done the most basic of research, I’d recognize a stroke from miles away.  It’s plainly obvious if you know what to look for.  I’m posting my story of yesterday in the hopes that others will read this and be able to react quickly if they are ever (and I hope you’re not) in this situation.

In the meantime, my mom is doing much better today.  She will probably stay in the hospital another day while they finish running her through the gamut of tests and using her as a human pincushion, but I’m thankful for a couple of things.  First, I’m grateful it happened when she had stopped driving and I was there to see it happen.  Second, I’m grateful I stopped worrying about how it would look if I overreacted and called an ambulance, and just did it.  Third, I learned a bunch from the experience - both about the signs of stroke and how I react when put in a situation like that. 

I stayed in “competent daughter” mode until 10 pm last night, when I finally got home.  I then reverted to “freaked out daughter who saw her mother having a stroke” mode and let all the pent up emotions from the day spill out.  After a long night of not sleeping, I’m still a bit of a mess but feeling much better today - just like my mom.