Support Group Anxiety

We have had to deal with bipolar disorder for over 10 years. My wife in all likelihood would be institutionalized had she not had the support of her friends and family. We love her dearly.

When she was first diagnosed, we would literally spend 3 to 4 nights a week in outpatient care waiting for a general practitioner to give a shot of the pain killer of the day to get her through the night. She would literally have 20 plus bad days each month. It was both horrific and time consuming for us as a support netwok but worse for her as the patient. Finally after a bitter argument in a hospital waiting room, she was sent to see a psychaitrist where diagnosis could finally be made.

This man would take us on a very long journey that continues to this day. He was open and honest about the diagnosis ~ something not very common in the psychological field, let me tell you. He told us that my beautiful wife would have to endure pain that would rival some of the worst chronic pain known to mankind (something that we would later learn is called Para-fibromyalgia) and that no matter how many tests or procedures, there would be no cause discovered and no relief given beyond the notion that this too will pass as part of our monthly roller coaster ride. The only relief from the pain is sleep and it becomes the craving of most bipolar patients.

Sadly with the brain chemistry associated with bipolar disorder, insomnia is oten a side effect... Thus, endure she must.

We have been told over and over again that there is no cure and that the best we could ever hope for is to minimuze the amount of days in the down period. We have gone from 20 to 25 days in 30 down to a much more manageable 4 to 7 days. Though difficult, this is a monumental improvement.

We have seen the dark side of mood stabilizers. Some of the more powerful ones left my loving wife a zombie who wandered aimlessly through the days and who would fall asleep in the restaurant during coffee. This is not something we want to return to and never dreamed it would be a possibility.

The sad part of the struggles of bipolar disorder is that pain and tension can be unbareable and for the last few years, this has been the down period. My lovely wife would become sickly and sad. She would become overtired and grumpy but we all understood the reasoning and the cause and we could deal with it. The down period was only going to last a few days and we could help her through her struggles. We would hold each other. We would cry a little. We would even fight a little but we would survive and build a strength that would prepare us for the next round.

This is a burden on the support group and we would all like to voice our displeasure with being asked to do this over and over again but what we often forget is it a greater burden on the patient. She must endure the pain of bipolar. She must endure the loneliness and feelings of being a burden deep within her spirit.

We have been told by the experts that this is why the support group fails. People, even the most sane and rational, cannot bare to keep jumping into the emotional blender each and every month. They finally have to cut loose leaving the patient to face these wilds alone. When the support group fails, the patient becomes institutionalized or worse suicidal.

So we stand guard, protecting her against the dangers of a world she can never understand or can never see from within ~ and worse yet, from the medication necessary to maintain her life does not remember. We have all promised to do this for all eternity and then something new crops up...

What if the down period choses another negative emotion... For the past few years, it has chosen sadness and depression ~ horrible in their own right but since June of 2012, the emotion has become rage. This is not the perils of a psychotic episode... She is not about to kill herself or others. Instead, this is an amplification of everything negative in her life... A complaint about not getting a present on her birthday becomes a noboby loves me thing and everyone needs to pay for that. The sad part if the complaint is real (I did not get her a birthday present ~ although later I did get her a movie), the response is very over the top.

This lashing out has been described before... It is part of the disorder but until recently, it has not been accompanied by rage...

We are told my people in the field of psychology that the support group breaks down. The people around the patient cannot handle the stresses that are required to get the patient through the down period. I do not want to be a part of this norm. This is not who I am or who I believe the support group is. We will get through this like we get through all the other struggles. We love her too much to fail.

Medical Malpractice

In 2002, my beautiful wife suffered a stroke that left her with a difficut brain injury and a bipolar personality disorder.


This has made her life very erratic. She is a beacon of light one moment and a sickly child the next, but I love her too death.

Because of her sensitivities, she is often sick and has to seek medical attention. Because she is a high functioning mental patient, the doctors claim to know the cause is predominantly mental in nature.

I understand that. Because of this fact, she is often left waiting for hours at the hospital. I am not a fool. I understand triage medicine but using stalling tactics to make some sort of statement about outpatient care use on a mental patient is just plain stupid. She wont learn that lesson and all it does is show the flaws in our medical system.

** This was from a couple of weeks ago but I did not have time to add it to the Blog.