Month: July 2022

A Sinister Manicure

The inky shine of my DIY manicure is pathognomonic of a manic episode.

As is my daily step count doubling – not intentionally, not because of some romanticised elation of mania, but because my short term memory is so poor I have been constantly retracing my steps, wandering from room to room driven by a purpose that evaporates as soon as I arrive where I think I’m meant to be. Constantly. Not just the odd moment of forgetfulness everyone encounters.

My inner life speeds up. Thoughts, speech.  When I glance at my watch it is always half an hour earlier than I anticipate it will be.

I scrunch up, frustrated at the snail’s pace of the rest of the world. 

In the early years of this illness I didn’t register that scrunching, and would inflict bruises and scratches  on myself in these frustrated moments. A day or two later, I’d stare at the violent discolouration and scabs on my skin, and be completely unable to recall how they got there.

The pressure of mania feels like my own adaptation of the fairy tale ‘the red shoes’ by Hans Christian Andersen. Instead of being cursed to dance until I die or my feet are cut off, I feel cursed to keep moving and doing. The further it drags me into its clutches the harder it becomes to stop and rest. Ironically exhaustion fuels mania. At its worst I am lucky to get an hour or two with a generous handful of sedating antipsychotics, sleeping tablets, anxiolytics, and sedating antidepressants on board.

Restoring sleep helps chase mania away. To be clear (for me) insomnia borne of mania is not something that can be alleviated with chamomile tea, lavender oil, or good sleep hygiene. I need the handfuls of medication. I need an environment conducive not just to rest, but an environment so controlled it feels like a bandage around my brain when the rest of the world acts like sandpaper on it.

You may say: ‘Just stop doing stuff and rest at home.’

That would be like me saying to you the next time you come down with gastro: ‘Just stop vomiting.’

As for my handfuls of heavy duty psychiatric medications – I learnt a long time ago I experience minimal side effects from most of them. I learnt that, in the midst of a manic vortex, those medications don’t cure me, but they make the sand-papered-brain feeling bearable. I learnt that the old wives tale of psychiatric medications stealing your creativity is bullshit for me.

My creativity is devoured by my symptoms of Bipolar 1 Disorder. I expect this post won’t be as concise as I’d like. Maybe a bit clunky. There may be typos that escape me because I don’t have the capacity to run it through my usual editing loops. But one thing is certain: If I were currently unmedicated, this piece of writing either wouldn’t exist, or it would be almost incomprehensible.

And that is why I am in hospital, swallowing medication by the handful and painting my nails midnight blue.

You may also be interested in reading these posts:

Misunderstood Mania

Psychiatric Medication And Stigma

A Lack Of Cats

Our kittens, Lily and Lucy, came before the children. Quiet purrers and beautiful blinkers. Velvet furred links to another lifetime. They came before my Bipolar Disorder.

In my chaotic first few months of motherhood, on a visit home from the psychiatric hospital with my baby, the cats were not impressed. The baby startled and squawked in her rocker, and the cats stalked around the noise and movement, with twitching tails and wide suspicious eyes.

Their suspicion was justified about three years later when that baby – now a toddler – ‘posted’ Lucy through my bedroom louvres out into the garden via a drop of several metres. When I found her meowing on the lawn Lucy was unimpressed, but thankfully uninjured. I sat my toddler down for a talk about treating pets kindly and keeping our indoor cats indoors.

The Easter long weekend the year the cats were eight years old I was mid prep for a family lunch when my now seven-year-old daughter called:

‘Mum, there’s vomit in the cat’s room.’

I abandoned the sprawl of recipe books and followed my daughter’s voice to clarify whose vomit it was. There were patches of it dotting the floor, and the smell of partly digested cat biscuits and bile hung in the air. Cat vomit. And Lily looked flat. I lifted her up and palpated her painful, tense abdomen.

A couple of days before, I had caught her chewing something, but she had shot away when I’d approached. By the time I’d caught her, her empty mouth had concerned me, but I decided to wait and see.

I’d waited and now I was seeing.

The time frame and signs were textbook for whatever she had probably swallowed being stuck somewhere in her gut now. She’d need surgery.

I rang around for a nurse who was free to help me, arranged to meet at the veterinary clinic we both worked at, and loaded a very unhappy Lily into the car.

The incision for an exploratory laparotomy is long. From the bottom end of the sternum to the pubic bone. The exploratory part is methodical. You start with the stomach and visually and manually examine your way down the lengths of intestines. As I worked my way down Lily’s normal looking gut I began to doubt my decision to go in without an X-ray.

And then there it was. A lump. I exteriorised it and exhaled, relieved. The affected intestine was inflamed but not perforated and confined to five centimetres. One simple incision to retrieve…a scrunched-up length of metallic gift-wrapping ribbon.

Lily recovered fully from her surgery, but both cats were mostly confined to their room and cat run, if unsupervised, after that. They were both string, hair tie and ribbon obsessed, and I could not guarantee a house free of these items with a seven and a four year old in the house.

My cat ladies grew into elderly and then old ladies. Of the two, Lucy was always more outgoing and friendly. Lily formed relationships on her own terms and was more skittish. But when we lost Lucy last year, Lily became cuddly.

My now fifteen-year-old daughter, grew into one of Lily’s favourite people. She brought her into her bed and hand fed her morsels of chicken, tuna, or steak. In return Lily was a quietly purring source of warmth, love, and comfort.

Two weeks ago Lily declined rapidly, looking all of her seventeen years, within twenty four hours. Suddenly her bones stood out. Her coat morphed from meticulously groomed to dull. She no longer looked like herself.

I took her to one of the large veterinary emergency centres, requested blood and urine tests, and waited with a deep aching knowledge. In the end she made the decision to let her go – not easy – but black and white. Her blood test results were disastrous. Kidney parameters and blood glucose levels through the roof. I’d have thought twice about tackling both of these issues in a cat half her age.

We gathered to stroke her soft head and thank her for being part of our family for so long. And I whispered my love into her beautiful ears as she slipped gently out of my life.

That night I sat next to the empty cat bed and sobbed my way past midnight.

Two weeks later, I still startle sharply when I enter the cats’ room and am met with absence.  

And when the grief hits my children in great stormy waves, I remind them that there is only one way to avoid this feeling, and that is never to have the love of a pet in your life.

You may also like to check out these:

Goodbye My Thought Food Cover Girl

Veterinary Work And Bipolar Disorder: A Podcast Interview

Our Vets Are Dying For Your Pets