its 3 am do YOU know where your children are ?

So ya know how bipolar is also commonly called Manic Depression (because those are the 2 most common, and extreme, states) well someone should rename it to WHY-ARE-MY-FAMILY-MEMBERS-STILL-FREAKING-AWAKE-AND-SCREAMING-AT-EACH-OTHER-AT-3-FREAKING-AM syndrome.

Yes because that is my life. The ONLY time everyone is asleep in my house is between the hours of 4-4:30 am. On a good day, everyone is dead to the world then.

Here's our sleeping schedule
Dad 8pm-6am (that lucky little bast... (no, only use nice words) ...duck )
Brother 3am-5 or 6am
Mom on a good day 4am-4:30 or 5am
Me whenever I get the chance, heck last night I finally got to sleep at 7:30 am

As you can see, its like living with a newborn baby. Oh plus the fact that we have enough sleeping pills in this house to knock out a herd or elephants. But does anyone use them OF COURSE NOT!!!!!

Bipolar people are notorious for being able to function on 2 or less hours of sleep and not being sleep deprived even though they can continue this pattern for months at a time. Why my mother informed me the other day that she only gets 20 minutes of REM sleep a night and hasn't had a dream in over 3 years. (how that woman hasn't died from exhaustion, don't ask me, I guess its just another mystical gift of the disease)

So lets recap here its now almost 3am, my mother isn't home, my father has been out cold for hours and what is my brother doing? Why watching Jerry Springer of course! I mean WHAT ELSE DO PEOPLE DO AT 3 AM? SLEEP? PSHHHH SLEEP IS FOR WIMPS!

Isn't my 'normal' routine pleasant ?

Drive with Caution

So I mentioned briefly that my meds have been changed. Its not usually a big thing but this time one of my benzos is being taken away, it was a fairly low dose and its been replaced with another one and yea Ive been through med with drawl like 25 times in my life. Even been through the worst one to get off of, effexor... ughhhh. So I had to just cut this one ( adivan ) cold turkey and it takes a little while for me to notice so its been 24 hours and ive already had a few doses of the new one tranxene. Ive heard its a good med but all it makes me do is sleep. No joke I have never fallen asleep in class before but today I fell asleep in each and every single class I had, and for lunch I sat in a chair, curled up in a ball, covered myself with my jacket and slept for 40 minutes until my next class. I wanted to be awake more than anything but I have to wait this med out a week before my psych md will change anything.

Either way I thought that I should tell a few of my teachers whats going on so they don't think I'm just slacking off or anything, I mean I have a medical reason I mean heck its written on the side of the bottle to be warned of this ( safety while driving heavy machinery) so I told my 1st pd teacher this and she shrugged at me and said that she didn't care what was happening as long as I did my work. Real compassion in that one Hun? I didn't want to tell my next 2 teachers in anticipation of the same response, however when i told her she didn't give the apathetic response I had been getting but she truly cared. See she has been struggling with depression ( as am I ) for several years and she is the sweetest outspoken loud perky person i have ever met and honestly it was mind boggling to hear her say that she was suffering with it. I love that woman, shes a fantastic teacher and now I feel like I have someone who actually gets it. Someone who may of had the worst night in history but still drags themselves out of bed, gets dressed pops their daily pills and drags themselves out the door. All the car ride putting their cement smile on for the day and telling themselves that no matter how you feel you will laugh and be goofy and have fun today and then as soon as you go home you can lay in bed all afternoon and fall asleep and repeat the whole thing again and again and again and again. Someone who will be there for me ( now dint get me wrong I have my best friend who truly understands this and helps me out at moment's notice ) But finally someone who knows first hand what its like.

Therapists may try to understand but its one thing to study a behavior and read about it in a book and a completely different thing to have to deal with it on a every day basis.

Prayers PLUUHHHHEEASSSSSSS!!!!

My 4 year old cousin has H1N1 which is horrible on its own but she ALSO has Shingles ( a form of chickenpox ) At the rate she is going she is going straight to the hospital. Do not pass go do not collect 200 dollars. She tends to spike extremley high fevers so with all of this she could end up with a 104 fever easily. She cant keep anything down including water so that just screams "GIVE ME AN IV!!!" She is the only cousin I have and she is such a wonderful, spirited child who loves everyone she meets. Camille and I are so close we dont even say " oh hey theres cousun Camille" its more of " hey look its my sister Kathryn" I pray she is better before halloween because she was looking forward to that so much she is going as a queen her mom is a witch and i dont know what my uncle is going as


At her age with her fever and her previous health conditions, I ask all of you praying folks to drop to your knees in prayer for her. If you dont do praying, could you atleast hope the best or give kind thoughts to her?


Thank you all!
<3 Kathryn

I Passed!!

So today was my day to go to the psych MD and see how my medicines are going. Were making a few changes on mine just to lessen anxiety. Out of the 3 major anxiety disorders, I guess Im just lucky because I have them all! YAY! no, not really. What really bothered me was when my Dr and I were talking about my anxiety attacks and he turned to me and said something similar to " its ONLY adrenaline..." Now that bothered me. It made me feel like he doesn't care or understand. It was an extremely insensitive thing to say and I don't think he realizes how much that bothered me and I know that he didn't mean to hurt me but still. Just because he didn't mean it, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.

But onto good news. Because I have a long family history of bipolar and i live in bipolar land there is an insane risk that I will develop bipolar disorder one day. So about 4 times a year I have to go in and answer what seems to be 30 billion questions and talk about random things ( today we talked about school lunches ) and then, almost magically, he tells me that I don't have a mood disorder. Its always a relief when he says it because the last thing in the world I want is to be bipolar.


But that's a different story for a different time... For now im just extatic that I dont have it !

Bipolar examples

So I would like to talk today about genuine bipolar actions. Actions where it is 100% the disease talking in to you via your bipolar loved one. I came up with this idea for a post about 30 minutes ago when My mom, brother and I went to the store. I had no intentions of going to the store but by golly a 11 pm trip with the two of them and my mom in her current state? Man, I couldn't pass that up ! So there was some arguing talking in the car going there about how these pills my brother is on have a side effect of making him eat uncontrollably. Apparently his body feels like its starving all the time no matter what he eats, so he just eats and eats and eats ( add in the fact that he is a 13 year old boy too... that doesn't help ) Sure it gets bothersome, annoying, aggravating to have to live with someone who is like that but i get over it. Sure he just drank all of the milk and i wanted a glass before bed but cant now, or sure i just made 500 cookies and he ate them all without asking, etc. Yea I can brush off those little things. However the fair is here. My favorite thing in the world is available for only 2 weeks a year and I got some ! Yay I finally can eat my maple syrup cotton candy, maple syrup candies and my maple syrup lolly pop!!!

And gluttonous boy decided to chow down on all of it... not so yay anymore

Back to my original story though. So we were talking about that in the car going to the grocery store to get some milk and whatever my mother picks up and puts into the cart, chances being that we don't need it but what ever. Tonight it was only a box or 2 of nilla wafers. Considering the things we've walked out of the store with in the past, tonight was a good night.

So while they are in the store I decide to move to where my brother was sitting so I could see better. Anxiety + history of being in a robbery + night time darkness = no good

Then they came back unloaded the bags of groceries ( remember, we had only needed milk) and my mom got in the car, looked at where I was sitting and started screaming at me. It went something like this " YOU LITTLE BITCH YOU NEED TO GET YOUR BIG A-- OUT OF THAT GOD D--N SEAT WHY DINT YOU JUST GO BURN IN HELL?!?!?! " Now if I went up to a stranger and told them that my mother had just told me that, well child protective services might be called. However they are missing the 1 key point. My mother is Bipolar. My mother says mean, hurtful, flat out ugly things to me. But its not her saying them; Its her disease.

So I cant argue with her ( I have in the past and boy was it ugly, but that's another story) because I wouldn't be arguing with my nice, sweet, loving, protective mother, I would be hollering at her disease. The horrible disease that leaves me at stores and doesn't come back to pick me up, that pulls my hair and tells me that I fail at life, that had me convinced that nothing was wrong when I was younger despite the fact that I was being beaten. The disease that lurks within my mother just waiting until it can takeover her mind body and spirit and hurt those loved ones that happen to be around at that time.

So I sit there. I calmly ask her if I can remain sitting here because I believe that is a rational request. So my mom asks me if I have taken my sleeping pill yet, I respond yes. She looks at me and says that no I cannot sit there because the car wont move until I'm either out of the car or in another seat. She then informs me that she has all the time in the world but I will start to nod off soon and when I do she will drive somewhere and get my sleeping body out of the car and leave me there and drive off. I calmly remind her that doing that would be child abandonment and it is highly illegal. Oh, she didn't realize that. Forget that plan, she will just roll down the windows in the car so we can all freeze, unless I move. I ask her nicely if she would mind rolling them back up because it is 40 degrees outside and I am getting chilly. But of course, she doesn't. Finally after about 20 minutes of sitting in a parking lot in the middle of the night I turn and ask my brother what his opinion on all of this is. He said that he would love his seat back but its not a big deal to him. Since he and I were both freezing and we knew that the only way for us to go home was for us to switch seats, we did and we finally got to go home.

Yay! We were finally leaving! After a long 3 minute car ride I get out and go into the house and walk away from them. I will spare you from having to hear about the conversations in the car coming back but I walked away and I apparently have a borderline personality disorder wonderfully diagnosed by my mother, a writer.

But Kathryn? Wait! Inform us please!
Has she studied psych ? no.
Has she tried to diagnose you with things before? yes.
Does she have any idea what she is doing? nopee
Do your doctors think she is wrong 100% of the time? yeppers
Does anyone actually take her seriously? that's a big negative there buddy

Either way tonight was a good night. Sure we almost froze to death and I almost got abandoned in a parking lot. But despite all of that it was a good night. No one was hurt! And for us, that is a huge step!

See things like tonight could of been taken in the opposite direction, I was lucky to of recognized that I wasn't talking to my mother but her disease. If that hadn't happened my brother and I would of probably ended up beaten and abandoned somewhere. Or something like that.

Point is, there are people these days that say they are bipolar but have never been confirmed by a Dr as such, and there are those people who look it up on Web MD and say " BY GOLLY I FIT THOSE 4 SYMPTOMS I MUST BE BIPOLAR TOO!!!" But what those people are missing are when the bipolar monster takes over and controls the loved one.

Ha ha on a side note here I have been watching this amazing show Fringe. Its kinda si-fi so that may of come through in this post. lol whoops!