Hanging On For Dear Life

As I’ve been saying, my overall mood is very stable (or so I thought before my visit with Dr. Awesomesauce the other day), but lately I’ve been waking up in the morning in freak-out mode. I don’t like to talk about it because I have this magical thinking that if I don’t, it will go away and things will be normal again; but this has proven not to be the case.

What’s bothering me? For one thing, Will is not doing well, and I am batshit with the fear of losing him. He is on a new medication that has made him a champion at throwing up, and he has almost as many bad days as good ones now. He is obviously getting tired and I try not to see the changes in him, but it’s hard to remain positive when my clinical knowledge speaks the truth of his decline. I think he’s hanging on for the trip in December, but beyond that…well, I just don’t know.

We’re also having trouble locating his birth certificate so we can get him a passport. We’ve been chasing our tails for months already between the Colorado and California bureaus of vital statistics, because his birth name and his adoptive name are different and not much is known about his original parents. Not only that, all of the interested parties are long dead and can’t help us straighten it all out. We can’t even be sure there are adoption records because his mother gave him to her sister to raise when he was a year old. Now with time running out, we are still without a birth certificate and if we can’t get SOMETHING to prove he was born in the U.S. he won’t be able to get back into the country.

On top of that, my oldest daughter Mandy and her family are moving to Vermont, chasing the snow as it were. Mike is a snowboard instructor and hasn’t been able to make a living the past two winters because there’s been so little snow in our mountains, so now they’re packing up to move almost all the way across the country. It’s not unlike Will and me when we were their age, moving to a place a thousand miles away from everything and everyone we knew to make a fresh start. But I guess I’m being selfish, because as much as I know they have to do this, I sort of hope they hate it there and come back home.

Then, there’s the matter of Dr. A, whose clinic hours are going to be limited to Mondays and Fridays at 11 AM. He’s all but out of there, and he’s planning on leaving—period—next July when the residents he supervises at the hospital graduate. This, of course, makes me heartsick because I can’t imagine having to tell all my troubles to another psychiatrist, assuming I can find one who takes my insurance. He’s keeping only a handful of patients and there’s going to be some jockeying for those few available sessions, but I’m already booked for December after the cruise so I don’t have to worry about that for the time being.

Strangely enough, we have a difference of opinion regarding my mental state. I consider myself to be fully stable, but he says I’m only in partial remission. The anxiety has nothing to do with my bipolar, it’s due to all the crazy stuff going on in my life. What does it take to be in full remission, I wonder? And what does it look like? We didn’t even talk about changing any meds…I’d hoped I could go down a little more on the Geodon and eventually get down to one anti-psychotic, but that’s not going to happen ANYTIME soon. So be it…even if this combination of drugs keeps me only somewhat stable, it’s worth it.

That’s how things are going right now in mi vida loca. But I’m still thankful to be where I am now instead of where I was a year ago; at least I have the ability to hang on, even with the anxiety and fear and waking up in the morning in a cold sweat.

And so it goes.