Diagnosis in Doubt

by Marcia Purse

October 20, 1999 - Five Months After Diagnosis

To tell the truth - I'm not sure I am bipolar.

I have been feeling more energized the last couple of weeks, but that might not be due to being without a mood stabilizer. Going to the About.com convention, and meeting Kim in person for the first time (want to see?), provided me with a lot of inspiration.

I have been off Depakote for several weeks now, and have been feeling better without it in some ways - less draggy. My current medication is 150 mg of Wellbutrin SR in the morning, and at bedtime 50 mg Zoloft, 2.5 mg Zyprexa (for sleep), and 20 mg Zocor (for cholesterol). Decreasing the amount of Wellbutrin has taken care of the hot flashes; now the main problem is the persistent bloating in my hands, which is driving me batty. To see whether Wellbutrin is the culprit here, we are going to cut the dosage down to 100 mg - but doggone it, I have almost a full pill bottle of Wellbutrin SR 150s, and I hate like hell not to use them up. Prescriptions aren't free, after all!

When I think that this whole carnival-ride-from-hell started because I wanted to lose the weight I had gained from Prozac and quitting smoking, without going into depression - I could cry. And I still have not lost any weight - in spite of all the walking I did over the summer, I've gained. Why does it have to be so complicated?

Reading back over what I've written during the past five months, I don't know whether to call my experience a roller-coaster, an out-of-control carousel - maybe a Tilt-A-Whirl is closest. I've spun around in small circles while going round in a larger high-low circle at the same time.

It's the pits.

But I've been in blacker pits before.

Depression

Five years and a few months ago, I was coming home from work each day, sitting down, and staring at the television all evening, blank-eyed. The room got messy around me, and I didn't care. I'd make a casserole of some kind and eat some every night till it was gone; that was dinner.

Depression has always been there. Over the years I have come up with mind-games to get myself out of a chair and into activity:

• Put a record on (yes, a record; I don't own a CD player) and pick up the mess (I live in a perpetual state of chaos) until the record's over;
• Turn on the timer and clean for ten minutes; then read or watch TV for 20 minutes; then clean for another ten minutes;
• Start in one corner of a room and JUST CLEAN;

Housecleaning, you see, was all I could think of to do that was active, as opposed to passively sitting in a chair. (AND - this was before I had a computer! Now the mess is ten times worse.) The way I knew my depression was becoming dangerous, at that time, was that all the mind-games had stopped working.

Now, with my weight staying 45-50 pounds over where it needs to be, with my fingers feeling like sausages as I type, having no idea what more I can do to get rid of this TOXIC excess weight - I have an uneasy sense that depression is just around the corner again. So I guess I had better get up and do some housecleaning (she said sarcastically).

Next: On the Medication Carousel