Life is often a dance over here.
A dance of emotions. One day up, the next day down. Normally for us this dance is manageable. Up and down, yes, but manageable. This dance, however, is exaggerated and heightened by change. What are normally reasonable swells of emotions can become consuming, larger than life, dramatic, powerful, intense crashing bursts of energy. This was where we were last night.
The over stimulation and anxiety of the school change had built to a roaring crescendo in Rye. Like a tea kettle that builds with steam, last night was his blast off.
And man was it tiring.
Tiring to the point that I told him we might need to look into Lithium, medication beyond the supplements and Benadryl we currently use. He wants to wait though. He says it’s the change that is affecting him so much and he will adjust. And he does not want to medicate his emotions away (his words). We agreed we would wait and see if we could get this rollercoaster under control in the next few weeks. And then we will reevaluate.
I, too, don’t want to medicate his emotions away. But I also don’t want him to be controlled by them.
I will honor his request and hope that with him having adequate down time, getting used to the new environment and getting on a reliable routine, things will calm down again. We’ll see how it goes.
2 Comments
Thanks for the black and white art images. I had not seen them before. I am a fan of pure black and white images.
It is not my experience that lithium makes the emotions go away. It just puts a cap on the how low the depression goes and how high the mania goes.
When you aren’t spending so much time and energy struggling with the emotional craziness, then there is more energy to focus on just being your best, whether it’s at school, work, or at home.
I know some people have described lithium as causing an emotional flatness and I don’t know if that’s because they are on too high of a dose, or whether is just effects them differently.
It would be nice if someday they could just check your genes to find out which drug is most likely going to work for you!
I was also prescribed a couple of anti seizure drugs like Depakote and Topamax which didn’t work for me at all. Topomax actually caused a small seizure – who would have guessed?
Seroquel worked for me for awhile, when my bipolar was really bad, but the long term side effects are not good. When Seroquel was working, I was thankful for it… But I do have blood sugar issues now and I don’t know if it was the Seroquel, but it is a possibility. Seroquel is a powerful sleep inducer (as you know!) and the therapeutic dose has such a large variance.. Less then 25mg works for some people, up to several hundred mg. When not taking seroquel regularly, just a half or a quarter of that 25mg pill, works for sleep. When taking it regularly, I think the effect of seroquel changes. The very first day I took it, I felt some hallucination-like effects, which I never felt thereafter. That makes me think that it really permanently changes the brain – but that’s just a guess.
HB