11/28/11 Steps in a New Direction

Posted by on Dec 2, 2011 in Chris' Blog | 2 comments

11/28/11 Steps in a New Direction
During this visit I learned that my DHEA was quite low, and there may be some kind of a problem with my thyroid. That doesn’t mean much to me. If the remedies work, great, but I feel kind of lost when doctor Z starts talking about the physiological problems that may exist within my brain and body.
The problem with my bipolar symptoms is that I can be just fine for a period of time, and then within days I can cycle and have a full blown episode. I remember the last time I was in the hospital- I felt just fine when they checked me in, though I had been starting to get hyper religious and talk to a lot of people about God. But within several weeks of being in the hospital, I had stopped taking my medication, was fasting, and I was trying to form a church within the hospital. I was even trying to interfere when nurses were attempting to get one of the patients to take his medication. I was healed by Jesus Christ I thought and no longer needed meds. And these other people could get healing for their mental illnesses as well- they just needed the Lord. It’s always about God with me. I don’t think that a single one of my episodes has come about without my obsession with God coming out before hand. It’s almost enough to make a person try atheism on for size. 12 years in and out of hospitals. Over 20 hospitalizations, each one precluded by religious delusions of grandeur, thoughts of being a prophet, even God himself. I somehow need to figure out a way to get my mind “unstuck” on God.
is there a happy medium where I can have a fruitful faith without going overboard, a love for God that runs deep but without it dominating my thoughts to the point where I think everything has to be about God or else it is pointless. Can regulating the DHEA in my body and fixing my thyroid help with this devastating pattern? Right now I’m feeling OK. Not manic, not depressed, but right in the middle. My energy is a little low, but not enough to complain about.
I have been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend, and we always laugh a lot. It makes me feel good to be around her. She is young, only 21, but then so am I, at heart. I’ve always dated younger women, and maybe this is because I never feel emotionally mature enough to handle a woman my own age. Most women by the time they are 36 either have children, are married, in a long term relationship with another man, or are in a steady career. I feel a bit unprepared to have the responsibility of children, although several of the women I have dated previously had children, and I’m at least a few years from having a career that I can be proud of. Speaking of careers, I’m hoping to get a job locally through the Dept. of Rehab in California, which helps people with mental illnesses and other problems find jobs. I think if I could work steady for 2 or 3 years, staying out of the hospital, I could build up the confidence to really try and make something of my life.
In the meantime, I’ll try and prevent my lucid dreams from taking over my waking life. I’m not sure if I will ever truly be over my God Elijah delusions because they still happen to me when I am asleep. As a matter of fact, the last 3 or 4 nights I’ve been having recurring dreams that once again I am a prophet, and need to make changes in my life to get “right” with God. The dream seems to be telling me that when I am right with God I will become a prophetic leader and people will listen to me and be inspired by me. Of course I wake up from these dreams and eventually realize they are just dreams, and in reality I shouldn’t even desire to be a prophetic leader before all the people because it will just take me down the path of insanity once again. I guess my mind gravitates towards this alluring insanity because then I don’t have to deal with facing reality, and I can change reality just by changing my mind- that is until the manic phase is over and I come crashing back down to the “world’s” reality. Well, I think that about sums up what I wanted to say in this blog entry. I know I didn’t write much about the doctor’s visit, but like I said, there is not much I can remember that was noteworthy except my DHEA (whatever that is!) levels are low and my thyroid might need some tweaking.
I’m willing to take whatever reasonable measures I can to assure I stay out of the hospital and stay healthy, so that I can start building a life for myself, finding a career and eventually starting a family. I am a bit skeptical that this will do any more than the regular meds do, but I am willing to try.

2 Comments

  1. Dear Chris, I hear you loud and clear! I have been working with Bartonella and Lyme and seizures and brain rehabilitation for many years. It would be fair to say that my training started in early childhood….with my father’s seizures. Although you are not seizing, he clearly had issues with his temporal lobe and Bartonella and Lyme do impact the temporal lobe profoundly. Maybe our role in life is to be prophets about how to work with these conditions and educate the world about how the brain works. Until recently there really was no good way to understand the intimate workings of the brain and especially the temporal lobe. Just so you know, if you look up temporal lobe or epilepsy and geniuses, you will find many prophets and mystics, from Mohammed to Dostoyefsky had seizures. This is no coincidence. And if you look at their lives and when they started to develop and which direction, you will see that hyperreligiousness and religiousness in general as well as mystical experiences, are deeply connected to the temporal lobe. If you look at Dr. Daniel Amen’s website, they might be there, or research by just googling, into the brain and the temporal lobe especially, you will learn all about what this part of the brain is responsible for, and what can go wrong if it is suffering from an infection or any other form of trauma. I notice here that you say that you are overwhelmed by all the information at the doctor’s office and I don’t want to do that here either…The temporal lobe is responsible for connecting us to our bodies and our souls it seems…to other people and to logical thinking…but more later…let’s keep the dialogue up though…I think this could be rather an interesting one….by the way….are you sensitive to sounds? Do you notice before you go to sleep or when you had your driving incident recently that it was preceeded by any prodromes, like did you perceive that you were hearing anything? Since the temporal lobe is next to the ears, the circuits for hearing sometimes get triggered and what for those of us have as a voice of intuition or our thinking to ourselves about a problem turns into a louder voice or even music. With one person I worked with they would hear Led Zeppelin or the Who before a temporal lobe seizure was set off. You may not be having those big seizures but instead little episodes where the temporal lobe disconnects a bit and then your brain and perhaps most specifically your temporal lobe, veers offtrack preceded by sounds that are amplified because of the bartonella and other infections. What are your prodromes do you think? I think the hyperreligiousness is one as you identified. They often occur before sleep as well. The brain has a really hard time sleeping when it has an infection. It has to shift gears a lot during sleep and since it’s not shifting well at all because of the infection, it sort of dreads going to sleep. Are there any sounds that are soothing to you? Any really annoying?

  2. I truly think that mental illness can be linked to more than one underlining issue than just a specific disorder that one is diagnosed with. For instance, I experienced a huge amount of abuse and neglect from my own biological parents and I think a lot of that is now affecting my mental health. Five years ago, when i was 18, i experienced my first “episode” and I heard voices and had hallucinations, but i havent had a single problem or hospital visit since. In fact, most people do not even realize that I have a mental disability until I reveal it to them. In my case, when i had my first episode, i was diagnosed by my doctor to have schizophrenia. Since that time i have faithfully listened to what my doctors have told me and since i have never gone off my meds since i have been diagnosed and i have remained out of the hospital as a result. However, I have been struggling significantly with school since that time, because of all the med changes i have gone through and how cloudy and sedating they can be. It has taken me five years of working with the doctors and having them find the right dosage that is right for me before i felt i could finally graduate from the junior college i have been going to and get my associates degree finally. I am a fighter and i did not want my symptoms with whatever was wrong with me to take control of my life so i learned to eat healthier, be more active, and be attentive to changes in my body so that i can prevent any future problems i could have and stop things that could endanger me or anyone else.

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