Day 52

Here I sit, down, withdrawn, angry, and confused. Yes, confused. I had therapy yesterday - finally - and I left emotionally drained and confused. The talk centered around my suicidal ideation and, lets be honest, I never realized how exhausting talking about suicide can be.

I should throw in a quick bit of background info: I talked to my psychiatrist last week before ECT about my suicidal ideation and he told me something that I really didn't want to hear. "Lynn, you're stable. You are considered stable. You're still going to cycle when you're stable and sometimes these cycles can be severe. The key to stability is that the cycles are shorter - maybe 2-3 days instead of 2-3 weeks or months." How horrible is that? He's basically telling me, hey, I know you're suicidal but it'll pass in a few days so just suck it up and deal with it. He doesn't like to do med changes outside of his office (I don't see him in office until July 5th) so he said he'd see me again in a couple weeks for ECT, in 3 in office, so we'd just see how I do and that would better dictate our next course of action.

Okay.

I've sat with that for a week now and it's still a tough pill to swallow. I told my therapist as much yesterday and he agreed with me . . . but also with my psychiatrist. Although he thinks we can do a better job managing it and that we should be able to get the suicidality under control.

The joys of being treatment resistant.

My therapist tried to come up with ideas of things I could do do help manage my moods, things I'm not already doing. I tried helping. We didn't come up with many because I'm already doing so much. So I need to continue doing what I'm doing and not allow myself to falter.

One thing I need to do is work on accepting this as my lot in life. I mean truly accepting the chronicity and severity of my bipolar disorder. Truly accepting that I may wake up any given morning desperately wanting to die, so depressed and miserable that I can't even pull myself out of bed to shower . . . only to wake up the next morning hypomanic, giddy with racing thoughts, having to watch everything I say, knowing that I can fly into a rage at the drop of a hat. And still have that be considered stable as long as I have a day or two with more mild symptoms.

My problem with this, besides the obvious, is that I like control in my life. I like stability. So I need something to control. I'm going to try and be healthy with this and work on my diet. Eating healthier and more natural. Working out more regularly. Maybe that will help. Hopefully that will help.

I have ECT and therapy next week, my in office appointment the next . . . we'll see how things go. A day at a time is all I can do.