Food and Sleep

The one strategy I came away from the hospital with about this disease was that I should combat any perceived outbreaks with lots of food and lots of sleep. So it is know surprise that I am feeling much better today after I had a massive sandwich from Cesar's take out across the street (half the price of a dinner in a place half the size of my classroom). Unfortunately, I do not have many more sophisticated strategy when an episode appears to be looming.

Doctors, nurses, and social workers can't tell you too many other strategies aside from just take your medicine. Then if you get nervous about an episode and ask your doctor to check you out, they first ask if you've been taking your medicine, then they test your blood to see how much medicine is in your blood stream and compare that to all the other blood tests you've taken (just one when you first started going there), then i imagine they up your current medicine and prescribe other kinds of medicine.

It's weird how little they tell you about bipolar/manic depression aside from the fact that it is going to be a part of your day to day life, "just like diabetes." I still have the printouts from the standard internet website descriptions of the disease which are all the same in their vague dramaticism. (Click the title for a good one) The symptoms describe this whole situation of things to look out for in either a manic or a depressive episode which are very hard to judge in real life. For many of the heavily drugged weeks after I got out of the hospital I was scared to have a good day, or enjoy life because I was scared that I was on the track to a manic episode.

It also mentions the two types of the disease which I like because I am a type I. Since type I's rapidly switch from manic to depressive I can relax a little about being sad or being happy because odds are I will rapidly switch sometime soon.

A large reason why the doctor and the internet are almost useless with their lack of specifics is that the disease is very weird and elusive to treat. Doctors didn't know of any medication for the condition until halfway through the 20th century, except maybe fish oil, and before that the strategy with mental illness was to file them away in an asylum. I am very glad that we have all of the options available know, but when those tend to run thin I always fall back onto the food and sleep strategy.