Mania

Yes, I'm manic. Nobody doubts this anymore. It took a double dose (allowed, of course) of my anti-anxiety med last night to go to sleep. I did eventually sleep. But it is definetely there. Noises are painful, the thoughts won't stop, etc.

The good thing is that so far I've done what I've spent the last year of therapy learning to do better, and everything is in place to get better. I've done the 2 things I'm supposed to do: react immediately and don't panic. I have a tendency to want to not admit a cycle has started until it is fairly severe because of intense fear that it will be the next bad one. I know in my head that I'll have more mild cycles, but they still frighten me.

I used to think I was reacting as fast as possible, but I wasn't. I was waiting for substantial symptoms. My general guideline is 2-3 days of insomnia=time to do something drastic but if I'm careful I can stop it sooner. I get that now. This particular time was really tricky to catch because it looked weird. I knew on Monday that I might well be starting to cycle. I would have been certain it was depression though because of all the sleeping.

I was also correct that my depakote level was high. This makes it official that 3000 mg is it for me probably, which was pretty much going to be true anyway because it's about the most sedation I can handle from one drug.

That leaves me even more glad to be reacting fast; we're going to try something different: a few days of Risperdal then stopping it. Risperdal makes me feel really good; it's a favorite med in fact. The problem is that if I take as little as 1 mg (not much) my blood pressure skyrockets and my feet and legs swell immensely. This is sad because it's likely it would make a large difference if I could take it routinely. So hopefully getting it in and out quickly will allow me to get better fast without having to buy new shoes. I hate the extra-wide width shoes that were the only ones to comfortably fit and which had enough support to make my 12 hours/day use bearable.

This leaves me with 2 things. One is that I wish I just had the capacity to tolerate atypicals. That would just be so much simpler; I'd take it constantly and hate it and never believe I'd wish for the ability to take it. (Isn't life funny?) The second is that this is going to require me to trust my doctor very, very much. Trust is not my best feature even when I'm not feeling paranoid.

So we'll see what happens. I think I wanted to say more, but writing is hard when I'm manic, the big old dose of sedation I took a while ago is kicking in, and I'm afraid this makes no sense.

More later. Hopefully not tonight though!