Tag: health

Those Damned Little Pills

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 5 Comments

amanandpill

For the very first time since I swallowed my first 20 mg. tablet of Paxil four-and-a-half years ago, I finally understand why so many people living with mood disorders stop or want to stop ingesting those damned little pills. Those little pills, like slap-happy lovers, amend their  promises of change immediately after they’ve failed you once again.  One more chance?  One more try?  We’re narrowing the field; one day we’ll strike the right chord, just have patience.  Patience?  What patience?  NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) reported that adults who live with serious mental illness die 25 years earlier than other Americans . . .

Imagine yourself standing next to the Greyhound bus to say good-bye to Hope as she takes a window seat, looking at you detached and hopeless2indifferent.  Your worst fear is happening: That Greyhound bus is leaving you utterly Hopeless.  Hopelessness is a loaded .38 in the nightstand on your dad’s side of the bed; hopelessness is impressionable and interested in alternatives; hopelessness implies that the rough-housing and agonizing conflict you’ve accepted as life is all yours, pal, so grab some gloves and climb into the ring!

Eighty-sixed and cast aside, people with mood disorders are often adrift and desperately clutch to any buoyant object to preserve the credo of the awringingdowncast, that missing people like you are rescued.  But there is no rescue.  Or search.  No one even noticed you were gone.  But then serendipity zips past on her jet-ski waving and reassuring her return. Immediately you squeeze and squeeze again until every bit of blue sky is wrung from her fly by.  You weave strands of hope into bonds of promises and cling to them for their six-week trial, hoping your wholeheartedness created the perfect environment for the mood stabilizing drug to speed down your arterial on-ramp and slide into your bloodstream, easy-sneezy!

Nope.  Nothing.  Nada.  That bitch Hope and her batty cousin, Serendipity played you once again for the hapless Sad Sack, the lunatic adrugcompdesperate for clemency, the believer of broken promises in the form of a pill.  Those damned little pills!  The pharmaceutical industry’s great hoax endorsed by psychiatrist’s, dispensed by Pharmacists, and dutifully swallowed with some water and a handful of hope.  Hope that it’ll take; make a difference; do something; ease my burden; make me laugh.

At my desk 30 minutes after waking, the gravity of hopelessness, fatigue, and apathy plunge my mood underwater; the depressive side of bipolar ajetleads to chronic pleas for the manic cavalry to save the day.  Hold on, I mutter to myself, Just hold on for the pills; they’ll carry you far away from despair. Into my mind’s ground fog I wander further out on the pier when a carefully apportioned packet of dextro-amphetamine salts (think F-22 Raptor Fighter Jet in a mach-1 vertical climb); mood-stabilizer (think the F-22 Raptor running out of gas); and anti-depressant (think glider) are swallowed to ensure mood stability.  Followed by a pair of diuretics to reduce significant edema caused by heart failure and pulmonary hypertension.  At last I down two pain medications and one muscle relaxant for back and knee pain associated with recent weight gain caused by heart failure and venous insufficiency.

How did life become a scene from Soylent Green?  Not so long ago I’d lounge sleepily awaiting the skipping return to bed of my spouse.  Now mycomforter mornings are strict regimens in a very specific sequence to assure all medication has been ingested.  I too, would like nothing more than to flee from this pill-filled merry-go-round so-called Life and run back to that sanctuary of pressed sheets, downy comforters, famished pillows which swallow everything, and quiet, inside-joke laughter reserved for those blessed with wellness.

Instead, every morning I sit at our kitchen table despising those damned little pills. 

 

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Hard Truths Abolish Life’s Peripheral Pleasures (for Jean)

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 3 Comments

amaculardegeneration

Living with mental illness reminds me of the perpetual tightening of sight associated with macular degeneration.  A close friend’s mother is facing a destiny of dusk, the light of day dimming earlier and earlier like the cold and snowy late months of fall.  She’s waiting for disease to throw the switch as though she hadn’t paid her utility bill.  She asked me one afternoon during a summer visit, how dark is dark; how blind is blind; once it’s dark and I’m blind will I continue farther into the cave and deeper into its darkness; or is my blindness an unmarked dead-end?

I sat in front of her incapable of producing some quip of levity to lighten the despair.  I didn’t know how to answer.  Or, what to say.  The absence of chit-chat hung between us like humidity.  Finally I answered the only way I knew how: honest and awestruck.

I said, I’m not living with an insensitive eventuality; my conditions (serious mental health and cardio-pulmonary compromise) are likely to flatten me, like being crushed by an immense breaking ocean wave, or belly flopping into the speeding approach of pasture, absent of any canopy of resistance my last minutes hopelessly free-falling like aimless snowflakes.  Then it happened.  Stopped.  Quiet and conscious while the tiniest pieces of life clung to daylight, right before it too, daylight, stopped.

acandystoreYou and I are the little boy and little girl whose noses are pressed flat against the confectionary store window.  Our yearning is painfully apparent to the plumply indulgent chocolatiers who’s moving each bit of life with the careful determination of a chess master to capitalize on each enticing, heavenly, and scrumptious creation.  We’re accustomed to forfeiting the peripheral pleasures which adorn life for those unscathed by physical mutiny.  We’re weary of the world’s pace, gaining speed to get anyplace but right here on this bench.  And we’re disinterested in watching a generation plow through a banal life ignoring its dangers and instead pursuing schedules chock full of unwieldily opportunities and difficult-to-deny distractions, especially those who’ve never stared into the intense and stoic countenance of a doctor about to tell you the most incomprehensible truth.

To wonder and inquire about your predetermination is natural and reserved for the courageous.  To have courage in light of the truth you must’ve stopped pursuing distractions, stopped running away from things, and stopped denying your mortality.  And life’s hard truths can only be understood by the courageous.

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Finally Understanding Life As Mani A.

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 5 Comments

manny-young

I first met Mani A. a few months after my father died when I was fifteen.  He appeared from around a blind corner where Wong-Su restaurant and Teddy’s Tavern meet like a knife’s edge.  He was a restless, sinewy, no-nonsense blond wearing his older-brother’s-hand-me-downs.  I apologized and excused myself immediately, but he roared to life like a freshly started chainsaw and lunged at me with a ferocious diatribe about a blokes right-of-way and his unalienable rights, to which I chimed in, “But you are an alien!”  He paused, his idling mind wafting the blue smoke of burning oil, when suddenly he hit the throttle baring his teeth and chortled that he wasn’t a bloody martian, see, so piss off with the alien bullocks; crikey, he has the right to use public property as a thoroughfare without being gobsmacked by some daft wanker! until, I think, he heard himself running-on about some kind of whack job hyper-speech at which time he slowed, eventually landing softly on a patch of green peckhamengland-1grass.  I sat next to Mani A. who opened up like a teenagers compact, and divulged his personal life in Peckham, England (just outside of London), which, by the way he described it, was a tortuous place; a hometown without a home, a chilling place that nobody admitted coming from, everybody just shows up one day, street-smart and dodgy, showed up-growed up because nobody ever had a childhood.  You were either born a teen-ager or plain old smeg.  Nobody was ever just a kid; and nobody ever saw a kid.  We were around the same age and dreamt of similar things, but whereas I knew mine were silly fantasies, Mani A. was certain that whatever he wanted he could have.  No kidding.  Without the slightest doubt or reservation, whatever Mani A. wanted, Mani A. could get.  Period.  Mani A. had balls.  Whether Peckham beat them into him or he developed that confidence on his own, the strength of his conviction, no matter the degree of unlikelihood, you had to think, hey, it just might happen.  I’ve never met anyone in my entire life that expressed the depth of fortitude that Mani A. did.  I said my life must seem like a cartoon compared to yours: I was two-steps west of being white trash, and while our home lives seemed oddly similar, I never learned how to survive; I just wait.  For what, he asked leaning his elbow onto the grass.  For anything.  Anything besides this shit hole I can’t get myself out from.  At which Mani A. leapt to his feet, extended his hand and said, come on mate, I’ll show you the dog’s dinner that’ll make your life now look like a wee bit of the hard lines.  Your going to get a crash course in Peckham Survival Know-How.  First, you learn about being borne:  In Peckham you didn’t cut your teeth; you growled and snapped!  We learn to bite before there’s anything to bite.  Being ahead, that’s tickety-boo; getting ahead never happens, especially in Peckham.  And so started six months of juvenile delinquency including assault (knife-school-teacher), battery (brother), truancy, and one stern lecture from a juvenile judge away from living in a home for dangerous boys.

It wasn’t until Mani A. left town did I get my head screwed back on tight.  I toed the line, straightened out school, became popular, played sports each season, acted, sang, even led student government.  Counselor’s referred to me as the idyllic example of reform.  But in the back of my head I could still hear Mani and all the things he said and showed and prompted me to do.  Being “ways” by choice, not by reaction.  Mani didn’t show me how to live,chubbyseniorportrait Mani showed me how to survive.  Mani and I have maintained our friendship for over forty years.  One of the things I admired about Mani was his bond of friendship.  Or should I say degree of bond of friendship.  Whenever he helped take care of something cagey, I’d ask him why he’d get involved?  His answer has always been the same: friendship.  He said all other relationships have their own bloody baggage and demands and expectations, and ways to screw you in the end.  But friends are simply friends.  Easy, like looking in the mirror.  I see a wee bit of my bloody self in you.

Mani continued to visit at irregular intervals, all of which were concurrent with troubling, impossible, or unavoidable circumstances.  For example, he swung into town when my junior year in high school devolved into adolescent chaos: ducking senior hazing, sidestepping discussions highlighting my grim blue-collared, unionized, married and fatherly fate; derailing any parochial collision between varsity lettermen and my shadowy shine for Mitchell, an underclassman; and my obesity targeted by jeering and loathsome bullies.  He arrived shortly after Stokowski and I went to Union Drop Forge hoping to snag summer work which leads to full time after graduation.  Our bus drove through the “Blue Mile,” a one mile corridor of heavy, eye-reddening, cough-inducing, toxin-saturated manufacturing exhaust.  We nicknamed that part of oldermani2town the “Blue Mile” because of that solar eclipsing blue haze belched from fifty-foot smoke stacks every minute of every day.  I took my application home where it still remains blank.  I wanted my future to be unexpected.  To be a lifetime removed from the cadence of the dead-end-man: a union job, a wife, a stuffy upper flat, kids we can’t afford, dependence on two incomes, kids dumped with objecting in-laws, hate and regret pitched at the other, and some place my hope tumbled out of my greasy coveralls pocket while reaching for my lighter which I never missed until I reached for it, right after she left with the kids flanked by her objectionable parents.  That tableau was the only life option offered to kids like me.  It was expected, and you were expected to follow the guy ahead of you.  But I dreamt of the unexpected, the unpredictable chaos of life beyond the “Blue Mile.”  College required good grades, but demanded money.  The costs were way beyond my family’s reach; so far afield that going to college became a family gag.  And then, when my avenues and alleyways around the tuition hurdle went bust Mani stopped by on his way back to Peckham.  His first words were, You look like a sorry sod, chum!  causing me to expunge my year of hopelessness and depression.  He waited until I stopped crying before he said, Sometimes you’ve got to be bonkers, your mates marching to a paycheck will call you a mug, but remember life is horses for courses!  And you’ve got to be bold!  You’ve got to be; because being bold and senseless and relentless are the only way out.  Back in Peckham if you’re pegged a nesh or are sussed acting naff the rest of life in Peckham is going to be piss poor.  You and your chums go about blagging tough, and sometimes it goes fist-to-cuffs.  In Peckham it ain’t about violence because violence there is like your factory here.  In Peckham it’s about surviving life, about tomorrow.

In 2008 Mani broke all the rules.  Rather than subtle clues that he’s a stones throw away, he decided that my end game was near, so he ruptured my barrier of sanity, perforated my character, elbowed out reality, and declared chubyoldermaniautonomy.  Mani was finally emancipated; freed from the crushing compliance of decency and propriety, he ignored laws, took chilling risks, discovered a steady stream of opiates which he washed down with lethal liters of alcohol, ignored vows, ruined friendships, tossed out of jobs, denied benefits, and finally barricaded himself in the office of a psychiatrist who eventually evicted him, and reinstated my authority over the dominion of my life.

I’ve never faulted Mani for his insurgency.  He was simply providing the bravado to traverse the craggy cliffs of life, and of which I was ill-prepared to navigate.  But as Mani A. learned, freedom from consequence isn’t freedom at all.  It’s destruction, it’s disregard, it’s vengeful and dangerous and hateful and lethal   But Mani did have a knack for getting the job done which he introduced, tutored, and polished in me, providing the backbone for a career.  I think that’s how he survived: Mani and I got hired by gentlemen to take care of things quietly and cleanly.  Not that we ever broke the law, but we definitely broke the rules.  Mani recited many adages over the years, but the single-most poignant he shared with me was:  You can’t quit; every bloody cry-baby “says” they want “it,” but quit the second they’ve got to act like a chancer.  There are just two times you can quit: when you take the biscuit or hop the twig. 

 

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Life: A la Carte or Prix Fixe?

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 2 Comments

I live life à la carte; by à la carte I mean by choice, especially my choice.  My brother for instance, abdicated his causative influence on life, and welcomes whatever life serves at whatever life costs.  In other words I enjoy the risk of tasting uncertainty while my brother prefers a routine cuisine.

When life is à la carte you can select depending on what’s offered, or you can request what you want and risk denial.  There are many people who anticipate rejection and therefore never make the request.  Are they ducking rejection or avoiding the chagrin of wonder.

Part of living life à la carte is the opportunity of choice; to determine things you like and things you don’t like.  For instance:

EXAMPLES OF THINGS I DON’T LIKE (but others of influence intervened)

  1. I don’t like fresh tomatoes; I do like most everything made with tomatoes because 1) It doesn’t look like tomatoes; and, 2) It doesn’t taste like tomatoes.  During the first decade of our relationship, I drove my partner home for the holidays and slept for a few hours before leaving by 5:00 am.  I reluctantly slid from beneath the warmth of the down comforter like a young dawdling duckling suspicious of life outside the nest.  Being atomatounfamiliar with the layout of their home, I was quiet as a church mouse on roller skates in a dark china shop chaperoned by a cat whose moniker was MouseOust.  I felt like a fighter lolling on the ropes desperate to get his footing; my intention of a tippy-toe takeoff was aborted when his mother’s voice encouraged me to eat before departure.  An encouraging mother-in-law at 4:30 a.m. motivated me like a drill Sargeant at boot camp.  She puttered about the kitchen when my partner shuffled to the kitchen table and sat at my side. Your mother insisted I stay for breakfast at which time he leapt from his seat like a cricket and raced to the kitchen.  I could hear them intensely talking in German when my partner walked to the table and whispered, I’m sorry, I tried everything including allergies, but she insisted!  Did you make a lot of noise to wake her?  I made some noise I sheepishly admitted at the exact moment his mother served me a piping hot, dense, and practically impossible to swallow without chewing cup of German Kaffe and a plate covered by a dozen rolling cherry tomatoes.  And then she sat next to me like a demanding nurse hovering over a boy, a tablespoon, and cod liver oil.  The first one exploded in my mouth when bit down; the second I tried to swallow like a gum ball; my partner quickly ate three and the other seven I tucked high inside my cheeks like chipmunks.  I was little more than five feet out the door when the tomato and coffee breakfast reappeared.  Right down the fender of their Plymouth Wagon.
  2. I don’t like dentists; I used to not like the sort of things dentists do, until I realized that dentists chose to do these things like an interrogator and his “talking tools.”  Actually, I’ve never liked dentists sin
    dentistce the age of three when I recall my father dragging me through the front door of Dr. Olson’s Dentistry Office and it’s tagline etched into the front window: “You’ll be happy to talk after just one visit!”  Every adult within a thousand feet knew that I didn’t want to be there; my father had to lift me, then hold me while Dr. Olson wrapped nylon-webbed belts around my shoulders and stomach.  Once I was trussed and couldn’t squirm, Dr. Olson slowly approached with that tiny mirror and that double-ended pick with which he digs cavities to fill.  “Open wide” the doctor ordered.  Nope.  Then came the first of three slaps to the back of my he
    ad, each one harder than the last; the last one produced a prickly feeling inside my head and polka-dots wandered about in front of me.  My father, his Pabst/E&J brandy breath, and the unstable, intimidating tone of his threat, said so close to my ear dampening it, made sure I understood what and how he’d express the embarrassment he’d suffer because of my shenanigans.  Well, I don’t fault my father because I was only three, and intimidation followed by threats of brutality was how he’d handle anyone threatening his authority, even three olds.  He told me to open my mouth followed by another whack.  I complied and the two men actually seemed proud that they’d broken the colt.  Sort of.  My father told me to open my mouth, but he never told me what to do next.  So I waited patiently for Dr. Olson’s right index finger to worm inside my mouth then WHAM!  My jaw snapped shut on Dr. Olson’s finger and the melee that followed can only be described as a fumbled football during the fourth quarter of the Superbowl.  We all know what happened to me, but it was peanuts compared to Dr. Olson who received five stitches in his finger and told my father that I was not welcomed at his practice muttering, “damn little mongrel.”
  3. I don’t care for urologists.  No, that’s not true.  I don’t like a urologist’s index finger every six months.  But enough about that.
  4. I detest liver.  I’ve tried it at my partners prompting but the peculiar gritty texture and the overpowering smell of a dank basement doused any desire.  Perhaps I was a child in a family of cannibals in a past life, and while waiting at the dinner table Mother Cannibal served a steaming platter of liver, to which I exclaimed, “What, Liver again?”
  5. I have an absolute phobia of physical therapists.  Do I doubt their degree of success in eliminating my excruciating pain, or have I become accustomed to Western Medicine‘s preferred method of treatment: Prbackpainescriptions designed to mask the symptoms yet never correcting the reason for my discomfort; I’ve become dependent on prescriptions for that simple reason:  They manipulate your reasoning of treatment asserting that the absence of symptoms infers successful intervention, when it’s really sleight of hand and our assumption that doctors cure our ailments.  Disappear and cure are 
    not synonyms, no matter how persuasive your physician may be.
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. . .

~ Harlan Didrickson ~ 1 Comment

“Seize the day, and put the least possible trust in tomorrow.”  – Horace

When the cease-fire had been successfully negotiated between my bombarded sanity and the merciless encroachment by mania across my poorly fortified borders, I had some time to exit the bunker of my psychiatrists office and assess the destruction caused by my determination to stave off lunacy.  The bipolar assault started with quiet discussions between my moral compass and my livelihood; I deplored my employment and the sanctions forced upon me; I despised their leadership; I spoke out against unfair wage practices.  But surrender wasn’t discussed as I was shouldering the burden of lifestyle and there was a tremendous expectation to avoid austerity measures at all costs.

“No one can confidently say that he will be living tomorrow.”  – Euripides

But as negotiations between sanity and lunacy stalled, my need for stability extinguished every extraneous characteristic strategically in order to sustain a devoted and appeased veneer.  My daily performances of a stable and sanguine employee collapsed the moment I closed my office door.  Obviously, I used to say to myself, you built your house on stilts on a steep slope overlooking a rain forest.  It’s already started to happen, the slipping, the subtle shifting of supports witnessed by numerous cracks, and one day the view will swallow your self-inflated invincibility.  I knew it was on the march, my insight gained by a nightly ritual of alcohol, opiates, and barbiturates; stilts if you will; I tried to shore them up by ingesting higher dosages knowing that an overdose was more likely than a possibility.  But then, at least, the conflict would end, not by a victor, but by a dual annihilation.

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”  – Abraham Lincoln

It took less than a month before all negotiations broke down; compromise was impossible; mania demanded that sanity unconditionally surrender immediately.  If sanity stonewalled mania would easily breach the helpless border of sanity and annihilate any vestige of reality.  Mania would speedily dispatch all disenfranchised defiance and finally overthrow sanity’s ruling party.  The occupation by an uncontrolled mania took its toll; defy authority; recent stronghold of relationships humiliated then abandoned in an irreconcilable ruin; mania marched through memory, abducting the defenseless past and drained its meaning as a form of promiscuous entertainment.  Mania’s presence transfigured my identity into a mutation; my anatomy remained intact; it was my mental state which sustained permanent damage.

“The crisis of yesterday is the joke of tomorrow.”  – H.G. Wells

Eventually mania’s corruption, lawlessness, and influential overlords devolved into civil war, fracturing mania’s resistance to the significant bombardment of sanity’s allies.  Continued sorties by way of medications, therapy, and education combined with mania’s faltering infrastructure caused their retreat.  Sanity returned and started the intense clean-up, but some things were destroyed beyond repair; some relationships were so disfigured that it was impossible to identify the missing parties; the financial sector had been sacked, sucked bone dry, leaving sanity buried under a mountain of unsecured debt which was nearly impossible to pay.  But the most significant consequence of mania’s occupation was the destruction of sanity’s history; it’s legends, it’s memories, it’s priceless, irreplaceable moments of time’s memory known as the past.  And tomorrow simply vanished along with hope, their whereabouts unknown, disassociated fragments remain, but I’ve decided that tomorrow and hope were victims of mania’s collateral damage.

“What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.”  – Goethe

It’s been four years since the siege.  I’m hardly the vibrant, entertaining, and social personality I was before the conflict.  I’m anxious at the slightest hint of crowds; I can’t tolerate aggression or hurtful behaviors (from people, dogs, television) and must remove myself immediately; my pharmaceutical therapy is a misnomer and leaves me as focused as a puppy on his first day of obedience training.  And I’ve had to forget that today will become yesterday because for me there is no yesterday; in an abstract sense, yes, I understand that there is yesterday but it and most of what it contained is lost to me.  So I practice forgetting that yesterday holds any value.  And tomorrow?  For me there is no tomorrow.  Again in an abstract sense, yes, I understand, but now I’m driven to finish everything today because I can’t think about tomorrow.

Living in the present is a spiritual lesson and if practiced can lead to enlightenment.  But that only applies to those fortunate enough to enjoy the freedom of choice.

My living in the present is just one more day absent of the bookends of time. Every day is always today.

“Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it.”  – Lucy Maud Montgomery

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