Barriers to medication compliance

If you want to see a generally "normal" mentally ill person snap, ask this question: "Are you off your meds?"

It's the stuff that sitcom jokes are made of and the kind of thing that people say when they want to be particularly insulting. It's the kind of thing, that when said, reinforces our deepest cultural attitude about those who take medication for the mind: You are strange. You do not merit credibility or respect.

The reasons why lack of medication compliance is so widespread vary, but generally fall into two categories: Money and side-effects.

Many of the medications I take align my behavior more toward the center of the normal spectrum, but it's like cropping a photograph to get to the good part--No matter how good that picture looks when you've finished, you probably had to cut out some things you didn't want to in order to get a satisfactory result. My medications work well at making me socially acceptable. They also do a great job of dulling my sense of humor, slowing my thinking, drying out my mouth, and compromising my speech. I have learned to live with it.

More potent medications cause some truly terrible side-effects, many that I, if given the choice, would not accept. I've seen people with tics and shakes and stutters, and tongue-thrusting, and gut disturbances, blurred vision, hair loss, and worse. Still, patients are expected to adjust and accept these side-effects in the interest of social propriety. That's really what the meds are about--making people like me less distasteful to everyone else. My meds do stabilize my mood, but they still ain't all that.

I am currently reminded of my early struggles to succumb to the power of medication. It's all coming back to me now. The urologist prescribed three medications for me, and all three share one side-effect. All three medications make me drowsy and slow. It's like being on large doses of benadryl all the time. It's a little hard to take gracefully right now, since the drugs haven't yet started healing anything or diminishing any pain. That's how it is with the other meds--the side-effects are instant, but it takes a really long time before any benefits become evident.

I hate this feeling. It's like I'm seeing the world from somewhere much deeper inside of my head than my eyes can account for. Everything is in slow motion. I can't think of words or names. I want to sleep. Elmiron gives me terrible headaches. I'm so damn tired.

Only three months to go.

May is in a vile mood. Do not look at me wrong if you cross my path or I just might kick you. Of course, then I'll have fits of self-loathing because I don't really want anyone to feel bad because of me.

Could it be a result of mixing eight prescription medications?

I've been having suicide ideation since I woke up. I'm not sure why. I'm never sure why. Sometimes it just pops into my head like a bingo ball and rolls around all day. Again, I ask: Could it be a result of mixing eight prescription medications? Could it be depression? If I have to put up with this bipolar shit, then where is my occasional expansive mood and feelings of grandiosity? Huh? Why must it always be paranoia, insecurity, sadness, and irritability. Memo to brain...Variety is the spice of life.

There's nothing in particular that's setting me off, but it seems like everything imaginable is getting to me. I take things personally that can't even be personal. How sad is that??

Oh! Could it be from chronic pain??

Paranoia is definitely a bit of an issue today. Maybe it's not that serious and I'm just a garden-variety neurotic. I don't know. I feel distressed because I haven't been very productive lately. It makes me worry that I can't keep up with the rest of the world, everyone is onto me, and I am a total loser, loser, loser.

Every spring, my employer hosts a large cultural event for the community. It's A Big Deal. Over the years, I have designed invitations and posters, written press releases, created promotional materials, program brochures and a public-area display, and more. It occurred to me that this year, I seem to be in a weird position of being asked to give other people my files/samples/copies of these things because those other people have been assigned to do all of those tasks. Each department employee oversees an area of the building on event day, usually in teams of two. This year, a third person was added to my area. It occurred to me that the event is coming up very, very soon, but the other two people have "taken care of everything." I know I'm neurotic, paranoid, and insecure, but still, I'm starting to take this personally. I feel like I've been unceremoniously dumped from my previous roles, and it must be a reflection on me.

I can only conclude that my work on this project, although always prolific, has been deemed unacceptable. That makes me sad. It makes me sad because it just proves that all of my fears about my place in the world are absolutely valid. Tattoo that big L on my forehead, will you please?

Really, it makes me want to kill myself. God knows, I have enough pill-power on hand to knock out a small village, Or cure a smaller village of its mood problems, neuralgia, and pelvic pain.

I hate myself. Always have, always will. Why can't I think and process feelings like a rational, relatively normal person? Why can't my brain keep itself on track? WTF???

I decided that if and when I kill myself (probably to save my long-suffering husband from any more drama), I will post an ad on the Internet and possibly the newspaper before I go. Right before I go. People should know why other people die. My will clearly states there is to be no funeral, so this would be the means to providing closure for those nosey people who need to know what happened. those would be the out-of-touch people.

When I went to the urologist last week, I overheard an unsettling conversation. It was unsettling because it underscored the lack of understanding people have about suicide.

I was waiting for one of the two receptionists to set up a follow-up appointment for me. Next to me, another women was checking in. In a loud whisper, she asked the receptionist, "Is it true? Dr. Ruben died?" The receptionist nodded, and in a conspiratorial tone, the women leaned in a little closer and whispered, "Did he really kill himself? He committed suicide?" I wasn't about to turn and look at her or the receptionist, but they definitely had my attention. Again, the receptionist confirmed the news. The patient shook her head, put her hand on her breast, and said, "But he had everything to live for."

I know I was making that face. It's that face I make when I'm annoyed and trying not to say anything. I get that sort of closed mouth, crooked-jaw, Melanie Griffith thing going on. My first impulse was to blurt out, "How the hell do you know what he had or didn't have to live for? How do you know what he valued? What makes you think that you can even begin to understand--let alone judge--what he did?"

Of course I kept my mouth shut. I took my appointment card and barged out the door into the snowy, wet spring morning.

People just bug the shit out of me lately.

366 days

One more lap around the sun.
Made it through another one.

The female fire

There's a reason I won't see male doctors anymore. They don't get it. Even those who are by nature quite sympathetic, will only grasp women's health issues in the abstract. There's the biology--that's pretty straightforward--but they have no real understanding of what it means to be unable to function as a woman because your body seems to physically block out sexual contact. How our pain affects us in our day-to-day life is not taken all that seriously by those of the opposite sex. For them, it's just another icky thing somehow connected to that monthly inconvenience women are always bitching about.

Not all women doctors get it, either, but at least they're able to conceptualize the problem on a personal level. I said not all, though. Sometime in the 1990s, my mother sent me a book. The author was making the rounds on public television where she was espousing Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: Creating physical and emotional health and healing by Christiane Northrup, MD.

My mother sent me the book and said it was just what I needed. Two other people had recommended it as insightful and empowering. On a Saturday night in the summer, I sat on my back porch and started to read. I read Northrup's case studies of women who suffered with undiagnosable abdominal ailments, periods out of control, and recurring infections. We have the power to make it stop was her message. Oh, really? Obviously, I had been trying, so what was Northrup going to tell me that was new? What, indeed.

In the case studies, Northrup pointed out again and again that we just had to want to get better. Our maladies were really just the result of our own out-of-balance lives, our deepest intuition we were choosing to ignore. Break up with the boyfriend who doesn't support you and the menstrual pain will stop; bring your life back down to size and abdominal pain will follow suit; address your inner demons/trauma/career choices and your body will stop expressing its distress through your reproductive system.

The message was clear. Despite my lifestyle change, avowed singlehood, ambition, and attempts to get answers, Northrup was telling me that my pain was my fault. It was the result of my subconscious attempts to sabotage myself. My pain was there because I wasn't trying hard enough to address my deepest emotional pain.

Fuck that. Anecdotal case studies without solid science just pissed me off. It seemed like Northrup had found people whose situations proved her point instead of finding people and then finding out what the point was. I closed the book and threw it in a box, where it still sits today, more than a decade later. It is not my fault. I've been known to achieve some formidable accomplishments, but not even I can spontaneously conjure up parasites in my vagina. I wouldn't even know where to start.

Here is the first paragraph from Amazon.com's summary: Quite possibly every female over the age of 12 will find this huge book enlightening, pain saving, and perhaps even lifesaving. Think of it as a much more empowering and holistic Our Bodies, Ourselves...In Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, she covers the treatment of many physical concerns--among them PMS, menstrual cramps, breast cancer, fibroids, endometriosis, infertility, depression, childbirth, abortion, cystitis, and menopause--explaining how many of these physical problems have roots in emotional upsets. For example, a woman who is unhappy with her marriage may be infertile because deep down, she knows that her husband is not the right man to have children with; a teenager who has cramps may be having problems accepting society's expectations of her as a woman.

A woman with chronic pelvic pain may actually be of sound mind and have a medical condition, Christiane.

I can only imagine what she'd have to say about bipolar disorder. Maybe she's a Christian Scientist. Maybe she's a Scientologist. I wonder if she knows Tom Cruise?

I digress. All these years have passed, and my pelvic pain has never gone away. I don't remember what intimacy is, because my husband and I gave up on it quite some time ago. If you were counting in days, it would be in the many thousands.

To my benefit, I have a good gynecologist. Actually, she's nurse midwife, and I chose her for just that reason. Nurse midwives are excellent listeners who have a certain appreciation for a woman's pain. They have a refreshing philosophy about women's health, and they do not believe that any degree of pain is normal or should go unacknowledged.

Jessie the nurse midwife has been trying to get me to go to a urologist for years. I never went because I felt that after so may times being told there was nothing wrong with me, it wasn't worth the embarrassment or the money to see a specialist--especially a specialist whose specialty I didn't really understand.

Jessie and I talked a long time about my pain. She asked about my bipolar and inquired as to why I had decided to pursue treatment. I told her that I wanted to stop the pain, the discomfort, the arduous climb each day had become. I also said I wanted to stop being a burden to those I loved and a nuisance to everyone else. After my last heart-to-heart with Jessie, I made the appointment with the urologist.

The doctor is a woman and she is consistently voted by her peers as an outstanding practitioner--top three in the city--year after year. She is in her 50s, crisp, business-like, and full of information. She is a teacher and it shows. As she performed the most vigorous pelvic exam of my entire life, she talked nonstop about what she was poking around for. At one point, I cried out and said, "You know, that's gonna hurt for days." She told me that wasn't normal, but she knew why and what we were going to do about it.

"May, you have three things going on, and any one would have had most people in here a long time ago. You're right that when this started, docs didn't know what it was, and even if they did, there was no treatment. Most of what I know about this I've learned in the last 12 years."

"First, you have Interstitial Cystitis, what we now call Painful Bladder Syndrome. You very likely have a lot of scarring in your bladder wall, which causes pain and stops the wall from expanding properly. This is triggering another condition called Pelvic Muscle Floor Spasm. This condition is not widely understood, but we know it's painful and once it's been activated, it becomes easier and easier to trigger. Now, the third condition is actually quite rare, but you've done an excellent job of documenting your symptoms and the course of your disease. This is something that usually comes about as the result of a difficult childbirth, or injury to the lower back, pelvis, hips, or legs. I know you said you've never had an injury like that, but this condition is also seen in people who are or were high mileage cyclists. We do know for sure that you have to have a genetic predisposition for it. Do you have Irritable Bowel Syndrome?"
"Yes."
"Do you get migraines?"
"Yes."
"Hmmm. We know there is a connection. People with your condition almost always have migraines and IBS, but we don't know why. Nobody has figured out the link, only that there is one. It's all part of a big mystery wrapped up in the central nervous system. Even your shingles outbreak came from your central nervous system."

I was trying to follow along despite the now flaming pain in my female area. Damn that central nervous system. "Does my condition have a name?" I asked. "Yes. It's called pudendal neuralgia. It's going to take a while, but it can be treated." (Note: My brother also has this condition. He's a cyclist.)

So, here I am with three diagnoses and three more prescriptions to my name. First, Lyrica, an anticonvulsant used for neuralgia. It is advertised as a treatment for fibromyalgia, but it was actually developed to treat diabetic neuralgia and....tad dum! Shingles pain! I have nothing to lose by taking this one.

The second medication is called Elmiron, and its sole purpose is to recondition the bladder wall in patients who suffer from Interstitial Cystitis.

The third medication is hydroxyzine, an antihistamine that calms the bladder's reaction to irritation. Perhaps it will address my springtime allergies, too.

I also need to undergo physical therapy. This will be a type of trigger point therapy performed by a specialist. I looked it up and this therapy is...internal. For a moment, I envisioned a scene from the movie, The Road to Wellville, wherein women shed their malaise after "internal manipulation" at the hands (literally) of Dr. Spitzvogel. I can't explain more; you'd just have to see it.

The last thing I mentioned to the doctor was that I was going home to sit on an icepack. She handed me some photocopies and said, "There's a better way. Read this and take care of yourself."

One of the handouts included instructions for dealing with post-exam pain. Advil...blah, blah, blah...no caffeine...blah, blah, blah...condom, KY, freezer...What??? I went over that part again: Fill a condom with KY jelly, tie it off and freeze it. Insert the frozen condom into the vagina to ice and soothe the sore area. Oh. Oh.

Oh, it was brilliant. Of course. It would be much more effective to use this item than an external ice pack. But what was it called? Jelly ice? Cool condom? Crotch-cicle? Twatcicle? Somebody needs to perfect this and patent it. I wish I had thought of it--or at least heard of it much sooner.
This latest bout of health news has me dragging. More drugs. Therapy. More doctor appointments. No real immediate relief. Continued chronic pain. Drowsiness from medication side-effects. Enough already.

I have enough health messes going on iin my one body for an entire village to bear. I have far more illness and health-related quirks than one person should ever have to handle. There definitely needs to be a new policy, and I vote for a one-person-one-illness world. That seems fair to me.

Excuse me now while I fetch my very special frozen treat.

More than you ever wanted to know

If really personal discussions about the female reproductive system make you squeamish or bored, you can flip the URL channel now. Yeah, it's going to be like that.

It seems to me that with almost seven billion people on the planet, it is flat-out unfair for any one person to be afflicted with more than one major illness. I vote for even distribution of malady. We would all cope better and perhaps even cultivate some compassion within ourselves. It would also prevent people like me from having to manage multiple health issues, especially when there is no energy left for even just one more thing.

How I came to this train of thought is actually a twenty-two year journey. As I look back, I can see how the problem I am dealing with now has affected my life and emotional health in ways I never could have imagined. It took having shingles to make me realize that I just don't want treatable pain to be part of my life anymore.

I tried to get help. I tried for twenty years, unsuccessfully. It was frustrating and humiliating.

Let's go back to the 1980s. When I was in my twenties, I had a healthy sexual appetite. I liked sex, I just didn't have much luck finding the right people to have sex with. When I was sexually active, there were long periods of downtime because I got hit repeatedly with an onslaught of yeast infections, urinary tract infections, bladder infections, and vaginal irritation. I felt like I had my own regular schedule at Planned Parenthood, which was my version of a primary care physician.

I found that over time, it took less and less sexual activity to make my girly parts go to war with the rest of my body.

Eventually, I started getting hit with infections for no apparent reason whatsoever, even when I was not sexually active. I eventually had a steady boyfriend who knew about my situation and was somewhat tolerant. He had a BS in biology, so he understood that different people had different tolerances for physical contact with substances not produced by their own bodies.

That tolerance started to wear thin, especially when I came down with Trichomoniasis--not once, but twice. This tested our relationship because when my doctor made the diagnosis the first time (and let me look in the microscope to see for myself), he also told me my boyfriend had to be treated, too. He told me Trichomoniasis was transmitted sexually, and the only way I could have come down with it was through sexual contact. I was appalled. My boyfriend wouldn't cheat on me. He wouldn't.

My boyfriend was not pleased. He wasn't mad at me, but he was indignant when I suggested I had contracted the parasite from him. We worked through it, took the medication, and moved on. And then it happened again. I was suspicious.

I had changed doctors by then, and this time, the new doctor was deaf to my protestations regarding my boyfriend's fidelity. No matter how fervently I insisted my boyfriend wasn't sleeping around (and I'm still sure he wasn't), the doctor just shrugged it off and wrote a prescription. The boyfriend was furious that he had to take medication again. He felt that I had somehow brought this down on both of us.

After we broke up, I had one brief relationship, and then took a break. Some might call it a dry spell. Some might say I was a born again virgin. I didn't have sex again for almost four years. About a year into my celibacy, I started getting infections again. Bacterial vaginosis and gardnerella were among the worst, but it was the recurring bladder infection issue that was driving me into a deep depression.

I started to be depressed all the time. Triggered by my age, life stress, and chronic, inexplicable pain, my first notable bipolar symptoms began to present themselves, and it was frightening. I saw a gynecologist and he told me to change my laundry detergent, change my soap, wear loose clothes, wear skirts, avoid sugar, alcohol ,and caffeine, pee after sex and rinse/pat dry, exercise, lose weight, manage my stress, consider therapy. His thinking was that I was just so neurotic, I was knocking my body's stasis out of whack. Ah, it was my fault.

I found a different doctor in the same practice who got to know me, and I think he even believed that I was not doing anything to bring the wrath of the crotch gods down upon me. Eventually, though, he had to admit he couldn't figure out how to stop what was happening to me. Very sympathetically he said, "I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with you; I'm just saying that medical science hasn't caught up to where you are, so there's no way to diagnose or treat you at this time." Kudos to him for being able to admit being stumped and to do it without blaming the patient for her problem.

I didn't go to a doctor again for years, and only then because, after having been infection-free for some time, I woke up one morning with my reproductive system on fire. That afternoon, I saw a gynecologist who immediately diagnosed me with Trichomoniasis, gardnerella, and bacterial vaginosis. She said, "This is really bad. You must be very uncomfortable, if not in agony." She said my partner would need to be treated, too. I blinked, thought, and said, "There is no partner."

The doctor looked puzzled. She asked, "What do you mean?"

"There is no partner. Not only am I not in a relationship, I haven't had sex in years. I just woke up with this today. Maybe you can explain to me how one gets an STD when there is absolutely no S and no T. At all."

She looked skeptical. She didn't say anything for a long time, and then she said that there had been some documented cases of nuns who had been diagnosed with Trich. She wrote a prescription and that was it--it was like an alien abduction. There had been reports, but as to their validity...

I decided to stop going to doctors. My moods were erratic, and I started to cry under normal stress. I ate too little and drank too much. I loved to be drunk because when I drank a lot, I didn't feel bad anymore. During the day, I was hardworking, very busy, bright, professional. I was also profoundly sad. My friendships took a hit and my personal life started to unravel. I was very lonely.

It seemed to me then that the only solution was to adopt a policy of clean living. I cleaned out my kitchen and reloaded with fresh, healthy, crap-free food. Everything I ate was weighed and measured. There was no alcohol, no sugar, very little fat, no junk. Exercise. I had a nice bicycle that I had not ridden more than five miles in the four years I had owned it. My daily rides grew to be the highlight of my day, and I racked up hundreds of miles per month. They were hard miles, too, ridden in the steep, hilly terrain along the New York/New Jersey border and west to Port Jervis.

I lost 25 pounds in four months.

Eight months later, I had crippling abdominal pain every day. It was time to see a doctor again. This time, I was diagnosed with two things: Ovarian cysts and interstitial cystitis. I was alone in a new city, in a much bigger job, and I was scared. My doctor told me to stop with the cranberry juice--it was making things worse. She put me on the Pill to control the cysts, and said there was no treatment for interstitial cystitis. Even celibacy wouldn't necessarily keep it away. Was I doomed to be in pain the rest of my life? It certainly was starting to look that way.

More later.

Like those surveyors in the mall

Hmmm. I'm worried about my poll. Maybe I needed more answer options. Or maybe there really are only 3 people reading my blog. That's cool.

All creeped out

There are news stories, and then there are news stories. There are things that happen that, if they were to be presented in a book or movie prior to being a news event, would be scoffed at as implausible or too disturbing. Despite this, horror stories come to light--quite literally--all the time.

There was the case in the Pacific Northwest wherein the parents of adopted disabled children kept them in kennels and underfed them. There was the story about the girl in Austria who was held captive for eight years in a secret room under a well-manicured suburban home. In Texas, Arizona, and Utah, a polygamist religious group with cult-like beliefs has been engaging in widespread acts of what can only be described as wholesale incestuous fornication with children.

What is wrong with these people? How in the world do they pull off these horrors of human manipulation while family members claim to have been oblivious?

The latest story is also out of Austria and it so creepy, so wrong, so warped, it seems impossible, and yet, it's not. Josef Fritzl kidnapped his own daughter, kept her prisoner underneath the house she grew up in, and fathered seven children with her. And nobody caught on for 23 years. Either this guy in one hell of a sociopathic liar, or the rest of his family lives deep in denial. Or they're stupid. Fritzl has reacted as nonplussed, arrogant, and unapologetic. He said he felt he had the right to abuse his daughter.

This story is so sick, it makes my skin crawl. Fritzl is just too twisted to be real. I hope his stay in prison is painful, humiliating, and brief (as in, he gets smacked, packed, and whacked). There is something very, very wrong with humanity.

The Brainucopia leaks

On Saturday, someone marveled at how organized I am. We were at a picnic, and I had thought of everything. I'm sure this appears as organization to someone looking on, but it's really just the result of good list making. It might take me a week to make a list for an event like this. I've been known to get out of bed in the middle of the night to jot down another item on the list or to slap a Post-It note onto my purse.

My goal isn't to be organized. No, my goal is always the same: To avoid discomfort. Some people say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I contend that discomfort avoidance is doing the true heavy lifting.

I am that person. You know, that person at work who has what you need: A safety pin, tampon, toothpaste, Advil, paper plate, dish soap, antacid, fork, paper towel, plastic bag, floss, mint, hem tape, hair pin, eyeglass cleaner, air freshener, thank-you note cards, chocolate, band-aids...

I am not all that organized. Case in point. On Saturday morning, I left the house for the day only to get a call from my husband who had been out walking the dog when I left.
"May, did you know you left the front door wide open?"
"Huh? What? No. I mean, huh, yeah, I guess so. Sorry. If it's any comfort to you, I've only been gone about five minutes (it was actually 15. Shhhh.)."
"Oh, May. May, May. Sigh."

The next morning, I went downstairs and realized, much to my horror, that the night before I had not only left the iron plugged in, I had left it turned on. High heat. Good thing it has that auto-off feature. He he.

I got myself together and went out to the car. That's when I saw that I had left my car unlocked and the windows down all night.

Yeah, organized. Let me know what that's like. In the meantime, I live constantly muddled. Maybe it's lithium. Maybe it's middle age. Maybe my brain is full. Should I be driving?

Boogedy.

Boogedy, boogedy, boogedy.

Thpt!

And now, back to our regularly scheduled bipolar disorder

Someone recently described me as being "intense." I don't think I'm intense; I'm just a deep thinker. I don't intentionally challenge other people to think that way.

When someone says I'm intense, it's usually a euphemism for "May, you're spinning off into the stratosphere again." A hypomanic brain requires some keeping up with. From the outside, it looks chaotic: a mouth that doesn't stop, sleep that never comes, thoughts that go into new and sometimes fascinating places.

The first time my so-called intensity got totally out of control, George W.Bush had recently been elected. In the months leading up to the election, I was consumed by anxiety that the candidate who embodied everything I detested would be elected. Worse, the other candidate, Al Gore, would not be elected solely because the incumbent had an affair that, although it had absolutely nothing to do with running the country or working in service to the American people, was treated with moral judgment that was elevated to tabloid-like fervor. People actually believed that getting a blow job was akin to breaking the law. It made me stay awake at night and kept my brain spinning in a frenzy of fear related to having neo-conservative hawks massacring the Constitution and marching the country's population into something akin to a far right-wing cult.

When Bush was elected the first time, I spent hours and hours on the Internet stoking my fear by visiting Websites that spoke of conspiracy, diminishing human rights, plots to strip the American people of their privacy, conservative social control, and worse. I printed out articles and emailed these harbingers of doom to everyone I knew. Daily. At least. It was making me physically ill. I was consumed beyond reasonable involvement for even the most concerned of citizens. A lot of my fears came partially true, but since it happened when I was in a rational state, it didn't rock my world at all.

I abhor the current administration, though. I'll be relieved when it's over.

Another thing to know is that I am an avid NPR listener. Or was. Most of the last year, NPR was cranking out an overwhelming number of stories about all things Iraq-related. It was getting to be much too much, and then election issues started to crowd out the Iraq stories. The anxiety was coming back. My impatient intolerance started reaching maximum levels very early on. Now, when anything related to Barak, Hillary, or John comes in, I just turn it off. Off, off, off. I can't listen. I'm not disinterested, just anxiety stricken. I can't face the thought of getting caught up in the obsession fueled by worry and hypomanic distortion. I was out of control once, and I owe it to myself and all of the people who know me to manage my behavior appropriately this time around.

This is a very typical coping strategy for those who are faced with bipolar triggers. We tend to latch onto an issue and grow to show an unhealthy, unreasonable, and obsessive interest in things such as politics. For me, it became a tendency to want to warn everyone of the dire consequences of allowing Bush, Rove, and associates to continue unchecked. I overwhelmed myself and everyone around me.

I can't listen to the news this time around. I change the radio station. I cancelled my newspaper, I mute the TV. I am too BP to risk the emotional upheaval and triggered behavior that comes with this particular topic.

I still vote, but I find it a much more rational process if I carefully control the flow of information coming into or out of my head. And in the end, it's all about the in-and-out-of-my head that matters most. Still, it makes me feel very defective because I have a disorder that forces me to change my ability to manage everyday things, including some that I love.

Don't forget to vote

There's a poll running in the right column. Do weigh in. Here at Brainucopia, your opinion matters.

I wonder if this means something

Damn this shingles problem. The Florida trip really did some damage. I feel as bad now as I did right after I returned from New York. I'm taking Vicodin again along with Aleve. It's diminishing the pain but not eliminating it. That's right. Week four and Vicodin plus Aleve is not only necessary but not all that effective.

I still can't wear a bra, still can't wear fitted clothing, still can't sleep on my back or right side, still can't exert myself very much, still have a big puffy spot on my back.

I'm starting to get depressed.

What a cheery blog Brainucopia has turned out to be.