Since being diagnosed in my early twenties with Bipolar Disorder, ADHD,and also with severe Migraine headaches. I have run a course of different medications to try and treat all of my myriad different symptoms that came along with the diagnosis. Uncontrollable anger at times being the most worriesome one for most of my family and myself. The second symptom that my doctors were trying to treat was the uncontrollable mood swings that I was invariably going through on a constant daily basis for me.
Constantly having your internal pendulum swinging from happy for the world, and then the next second huddled in a ball under the covers of my bed balling my eyes out because I was suddenly so depressed that I just didn’t feel like I could possibly deal with the weight of it even one more second, was taking such a toll on my life that I was starting to honestly wonder if I wasn’t going just the littlest bit insane.
Not a pleasant feeling if you have ever had that niggling little feeling in the back of your head. That little suspicion in the back of your mind that everything that you know, trust, and have built the foundation of your adult life on may all be a figment of your very active imagination. All made possible by those over-reactive litle nerve receptors in the smoking little gray matter in your head. In other words, your life is all just make believe and you have done it just to survive the disordered choas of your mind.
My Bipolar manifests itself in the forms of rapid cycling. This is laymens terms for major swings in between moods such as I can go from being a normal happy individual at noon and by 1P.M. I can be so depressed that you would think that my favorite pet has died. When in all actuallity nothing has happened in that space of time that would warrant that type of response from something with a normally functioning brain. To put it even simpler, I way overreact to most situations and stresses that are in everyones everday life.
If say I was in the middle of a down swing in a manic cycle so to speak, I could spill a glass of juice and in my mind this would be cause to cry, yell, and would be just short of a major catastrophe in my little world. I know somewhere in my rational mind that this is just something very minor that is occured, but I am basically without any control over my body and functions to control how I react to the situation. Everything I say and do at this time is overexaggerated.
If this save event were to happen when I was in the middle of an up-swing in my manic cycle, there could be a hundred different ways that I would react to this very same glass being spilled. I could laugh and just clean it up; I could get a little mad that it was spilled, but clean it up anyway; sometimes when in the grip of an intense euphoria I could even find this small even so hysterically funny that I would fall on the couch laughing at how clumsy I am and forget about even cleaning up the spill for hours or until I stepped on the soggy mess and therefor later send myself into a downward spiral again.
After finally running through a couple of different medications that did nothing for me, or did way to much for me. I did not like feeling like a zombie walking through my day. My doctor and I agreed on Effexor XR for my Bipolar Disorder. This medication treats the Seratonin in your body and helps your body to produce more of it. It helps with the rapid mood swings and helps with the depression side of the Bipolar Disorder also. So with this medication I finally found something that levels out the moods, but does deafen them. The only bad thing with Effexor is that once you start taking this medication it is almost impossible, if not dangerous, to get back off of it. Your body will protest so vigorously that you will wonder if it isn’t going in 5 different directions at once. I for one find that it is worth the pill everyday to have the piece of mind.
The ADHD aspect of my personality does not make help me cope with myself any easier. I perpetually have to be doing something with my hands or my feet. My brain seems like it is constantly on a oval track that never stops to refuel. I have over the years suffered with severe insomnia from time to time. The older that I grow in age the harder it seems to keep my attention focused on one main task.
I have to picture the word SLEEP to actually force my mind to shut down for the night so that I can get some sleep. If I had not learned this exercise when I was 15 years old from a counselor that was clever enough to see through the tough rebellious exterior to the frightened little girl lurking underneath, I would probably still be struggling with nightly insomnia, instead of occassion insomnia. Visual techniques work wonders for all sorts of different ailments that I have battled over the years and seem to work very aggressively for both my Bipolar and ADHD symptoms.
Migraine headaches have always been the bain of my existence in between all of the rest of my days that I have not been battling Bipolar and ADHD. I cannot name any other thing in the world that will disrupt your life more than a migraine will. I am not talking about a headache that lingers with you and nags at you even for a couple of days. I am talking about the type of migraines that require IV Fluids, medications, hospital visits, and that feel like someone is driving a wedge the size of the Grand Canyon through your forehead, that will literally last for the span of two weeks time without relenting.
When a migraine with this intensity is upon you there is no respite, you do not eat, you do not think, and when the medication does not work, you lay there and hope to die. It hurts that bad and there is nothing to do for it. All you wish is for it to end. When it finally does you want to get down on the ground and kiss it. But, there is a constant fear that it will come back and seize hold of you again. Your life is governed by your migraines. I tried several different medications along with over the counter ibuprofen until my doctor told me that I was slowly eating away the lining of my stomach, because I was taking to many of them to fight off my headaches.
I finally found a medication that seems to take the edge off of most of my migraines and prevents the worst of them and I will never quite taking it as long as it works for me. It is called Topomax. It is the only medication that has actually prevented the migraines in the first place. That is something that I can’t say thank you enough for. I just wish they had made it a few years earlier.
I have run the course of several different drug therapies and counselors and have found that Effexor XR and Topomax combined seems to be the best solution for me. I have tried other medications in between these and with them, but find that I don’t really like taking medication if I don’t have to. I like to concentrate more on trying to used more physical means of controlling my various little ‘quirks’ as I like to call my Bipolar and ADHD. The medications make it possible to control the worst of the symptoms and to make it possible to take hold of the smaller symptoms to make the patient, myself, more able to handle dealing with the other little ‘quirks’ in my system.
I don’t recommend that anyone just go out and take Effexor, Effexor XR, or Topomax without the approval of your Liscensed Physicians approval. These drugs are very powerful and should not be taken unless you actually need them. The brain and your body and very delicately balanced machine and when you deliberately put them out of balance you are just asking for trouble. Don’t make it even harder for those of us that actually have a medical condition to get the medications that we need by abusing the ones that you don’t.
