Edge of madness

First, some annoying minutia. Matt was in Utah on business for three days and nights, returning very early Saturday morning. In the time that he was gone, I was still recovering from the flu-like virus he'd shared with me, so I did not leave the house much. On Thursday it became apparent that I had another problem: I had developed oral thrush. (That's a yeast infection in your mouth, for those uninitiated.) This morning, I woke up with a lazy eye. Really weird. So, Matt took me to the doctor. The doctor on-call was not my regular doctor, and the nurse on-call wasn't a nurse I'd ever seen before. The nurse took my blood pressure with the wrong-sized cuff, and of course it came up high. The doctor re-checked it (only after I pointed it out to him, mind you) and it was still "borderline high." Of course it was. By that point I was freaked out by the previous reading. He told me to buy a blood pressure cuff and check it three times a week and gave me the standard "lose weight and exercise more" song-and-dance, which irritated me, but you know, whatever. He'd never seen me before, and did not know my history of chronic pain. He pretty much ignored the thing about my eye, suggesting it was somehow related to my allergies. (Really?) It seems to be getting better, so maybe I was just being paranoid, which is entirely possible. And now that I've spent an entire  paragraph saying essentially nothing, I'll get down to brass tacks.

While Matt was gone and I was sick, I started to lose my mind a little bit. Being without any in-person human contact for more than 48 hours is never a good thing for my psyche, and being ill exacerbates things. My mind starts creating new symptoms and making the symptoms I'm having worse. My heart starts to pound and I can hear my pulse in my ears. I start to question whether I am awake or dreaming, and I am not sure how to answer. And when I really start losing it, I start having auditory hallucinations. They are never voices telling me to do stuff, or anything like that. Just weird noises, like a clock chiming. We do not have a clock that chimes. The one I always "hear" when this happens is a clock that still hangs in the living room of my mother's house. It has an octagonal face and was the inspiration for my first word, which was "clock." Well, "gock," but infants can't do dipthongs. Other sounds I "hear" in this state include a knock on my bedroom door when no one is home (always three times), or strange music coming out of my air conditioner or another source of white noise.

If I close my eyes, I see unpleasant things flashing before my eyes. Brief, but incredibly detailed images of destruction and decay, or people screaming, or hands reaching toward my face. That's when I know I need to put my mind to something, and quick. So I go online, and I play a game, or read a story, or even just look at funny pictures. I play loud music, I sing, I pinch myself, I scream into a pillow. Anything to get myself out of my head and back into some semblance of ordinary thought. Yes, I realise this would be the perfect time to meditate, to ground and centre myself, but you try centring with all of that noise. No, I don't want to know where those images came from. No, I don't want to analyse why they have been the same kinds of images ever since I had night terrors as a child. No, I don't want to know whose hands those were. It's all just the product of anxiety, nudging me over the line between genius and insanity. I say that with my tongue firmly wedged against my cheek; I am certainly no genius, despite what the tests used to say.

I digress. What I'm trying to say is that, despite medication and therapy and support, I still do not do well alone. Though the episodes are shorter and less severe, I still have these instances of psychosis. They are completely different from when I "hear" my spirit guides, and rather than being constructive, they lead me to want to just stop. Stop creating, stop talking, stop writing, stop loving, stop hating, stop crying, stop laughing, stop breathing. It is the polar opposite of the manic creativity that I experience at times. Frankly, I love my manic. I wish it would drop by more often. I am certainly saner when I'm manic than I am when I'm depressed or anxious, and the depression and anxiety does not necessarily follow, especially not since I've been medicated. But whatever... manic is bad. Manic is bad. Manic is bad. That's what everyone has always told me, despite the fact that I have never done anything "crazy" while being manic, yet I have done scary things when depressed.

So ... yeah. This entry ended up being about something entirely different than I thought I was going to write about. I guess I will write about that other thing later. In the meantime, I really, really need a cigarette.