Locked up, Day Nine. The Season Finale

I hope it's the series finale, but I know well enough now what it feels like to be off antidepressants and there is no changing from this to another without 2 weeks totally off, so it's not the end. While I would love Emsam to work for me forever, that's just not realistic and believing the last AD would made this time harder.

So anyway, when I woke up that morning I knew that I was firmly hypomanic (at the end I'll say I was mixed. I was mixed as that just means depressed and manic simultaneously; however I was calling it hypomanic because that was the horrible part, just as the week before the mixed had been called depression. I'm rarely having an episode that isn't mixed, so mixed isn't a very good descriptor for me). I had suspected it the night before, but now it was without a doubt. I can tell from my handwriting now that I was hypomanic; it changes drastically.

I wanted to leave. Immediately. I was so very overstimulated I couldn't tolerate it, and I knew that it would be worse to stay another day and than it would be to wait at home to see Dr. Mind. I needed quiet, I needed to get away from the lights, I needed space.

I talked to the social worker very early that day because I had wanted to know when I would be seeing Dr. Brain so I could be sure I hadn't scheduled something else that day, as I'd scheduled a bunch of therapy and a Dr. Body appointment over the next days, and a Dr. Brain appointment is pretty much an all day committment. She was irritated at me for asking and for setting up those appointments. Which is idiotic, I knew I needed to be seeing Dr. Mind twice a week and I know (and she doesn't) that he doesn't work full-time and that his appointments can fill quickly and that I needed to schedule ahead or I wouldn't see him as much as I needed to.

So that's when they decided it was time to tell me Dr. Brain was off for a month. They thought. She'd make sure, but she thought it was some medical leave. I'd be set up with someone else. I was rather horrified at the whole thought of that, but said nothing. I just hoped to be set up with Dr. Inpatient. I also wrote a resentful paragraph about how tired I was that every time I called Dr. Brain by her first name, which I've been doing for something like 7 years and which many of her patients do (and not only is this ok with her, but it's got to be remembered that I have an unusual relationship with her. I have seen her or spoken to her on the phone every month at least once, without missing one for 7 years, until this month. Plus we email a lot. It's just the nature of my illness and what I have needed. But every time I called her "Anne" I'd get a response about "DOCTOR BRAIN". Like I was wrong. It got really annoying, especially from the social worker who I was already mad at for telling me I was wrong to set up my own appointments with Dr. Mind.

I think the next paragraph of my journal says a lot:

"Want to cry. Really really really not tolerating this. It's worse to be mixed this way that to be like it was last week. Last week I was too depressed to feel the excess energy as painful, I didn't care about anything, and there was some counterbalancing. Today/yesterday I still am plenty depressed, but not so much that this doesn't have the blunting effect I had a week ago. So i'm in that lovely place where I want to move, move, move; I want to scream; I'm on the verge of tears for NO reason, and the need to leave her is almost panicky."

And that is how my hospital journal ends. I've got lots more I want to write about from that time, because I want to eventually make a blog section that is devoted to surviving hospitalization, plus I want a record of this for myself, and I want there to be a place online that tells the story of a longer psych stay, particularly one on a high functioning unit.

What happened next was the doctor came in, I explained that I NEEDED to go home despite what I'd said the day before, that I was so sorry that I was messing up scheduling but that staying would be torture, and I needed to be out of there. I can still hear how desperate I sounded. He said that was fine, that if a need had arisen I could even have left Monday and that they plan for such changes. From that point things went fast. The social worker came in and made a comment about how "oh, I guess you really ARE leaving now" and then told me that she'd call me the next day about seeing a psychiatrist. The research person came in and gave me a discharge assessment. The nurses gave me all of my things and some plastic bags for dirty clothes. A nursing student came and talked to me. I packed, and within an hour was buzzed out as if I'd never been locked in. (That was weird. It felt like they should at least CHECK that I was allowed to leave, or something).

And then the great Walgreens saga happened, and then I was finally home.