In perpetuity

From Wikipedia, regarding the stages of loss:

1. Denial and isolation - The "This can't be real" stage.: "This is not happening to me." "There must be a mistake"
2. Anger - The "Why me?" stage.: "How dare you do this to me?!" (either referring to God, the late person, or themselves)
3. Bargaining - The "If I do this, you’ll do that" stage.: "Just let me live to see my son graduate."
4. Depression - The "Defeated" stage.: "I can't bear to face going through this, putting my family through this."
5. Acceptance - The "This is going to happen" stage.: "I'm ready, I don't want to struggle anymore."

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler Ross will be best remembered for the work she did in articulating the process of grief. Later researchers suggested that the process is not linear, but a spiral. There is no set length of time to experience these stages, and some may be skipped entirely.

Although Dr. Kubler-Ross was thinking about patients with terminal illness and persons who had experienced the loss of someone close, it turns out that her paradigm applies to almost any situation where the unexpected changes everything about the future, particularly in an unwelcome way.

We take as much time as we need to get through the stages. We come back and revisit the stages we struggle with most. Eventually, we give up and admit there's not a damn thing we can do to change the way things are going to be. Fight if you must; you're already defeated, though.

On December 10, 2004, a doctor told me I had bipolar disorder. The words had no sooner left his mouth when I interrupted with protests of disbelief. There was no way. Not at 43 years old and without a previous history of episodes. I wasn't buying it.

In the last five-and-a-half-year period, I've burned with anger, embraced skepticism, come to the lowest of sad lows, and followed every plan I thought would redeem me from the diagnosis, if not the illness itself.

Now, half-way through 2010, everything has changed except for one. I've seen many doctors. I've taken and stopped taking dozens of medications. In the end, I followed a hunch and proved what I believed from the beginning: The diagnosis was wrong.

These days, I question why everyone involved was so quick to accept the diagnosis, but so incredibly reluctant to consider other possibilities. This stirs up Step #2 whenever I think about it. After all of the doctors, blood tests, and differential diagnoses, the answer, quietly arrived at, is a combination of things, none of them bipolar disorder.

A neurological event, NOS. No matter what it spawned or whatever its etiology, there is evidence it was real, just as I had been saying all along. Pernicious Anemia. I will require B-12 supplements for the rest of my life. Adrenal insufficiency and Addison's symptoms are very much affecting every process in my body, including my thought processes. Over the course of the past six years, medications have helped me, and medications have caused me irreparable harm. Going back to the beginning, it was likely medications that ended my life as I knew it, and forced me to endure the end of nearly everything I valued and the thorny path back to a life I am still not convinced is worth living.

The psychiatrist has said that as far as he can tell, someone else's jump to hastily prescribe what turned out to be the worst possible medication for me triggered symptoms that were not what they first appeared. He sadly concluded that one person's egrgious and irresponsible error led to my nightmare. He agreed that no, I am not mentally ill and probably never was. But it's too late. The damage has been done.

Acceptance. It all happened. It's still happening. Despite this, my life has taken on a mundane tone and is no longer anything out of the ordinary. This should bring me comfort. I am productive. I am emotionally stable. I sleep, I work, I function as I was designed to do. I am completely different. I am cynical and cautious. I am sad and don't see that changing. I am older and wiser. So much wiser. The modified version doesn't end with acceptance, though. It ends with "Return to a meaningful life." I accept what I cannot change. I accept that my life is once again much like everyone else's.

Anger again. Bipolar disorder, mental illness, and all that went into "treating" them will forever be part of my medical history. It's all on the record. It's something I will have to bring up with every doctor I see from now until my death. There is nothing I can do to have my record expunged, to erase this mistake. Yes, I was treated for that.

I understand that mistakes happen; however, I will never understand why so many people simply took my symptoms at face value, judged me, rejected me, chastised and ostracized me, and why those at the helm continued inappropriate treatment even when it was apparent that the chosen treatments were futile.

I cannot go back and fix this. Nobody can fix this. There is no system in place to give me back the last six years as they should have been, but even more frustrating is that my medical records are rife with errors that will certainly always attract more attention than the much quieter truth.