Waiting

CW: Depression, Medication, Food, Weight

It’s been months now that I’ve been dealing with a long bout of bipolar depression. It started towards the end of November, lightened up a little around Christmas and then dove down to the depths as soon as December 26^th arrived.

I’ve tried to paint (with limited ‘success’) and tried to write (with no success other than a few blog posts the past month and a few creative writing Tweets) but my brain is stuck in low power mode and just won’t kick over into a more cooperative state.

This is especially frustrating because a med change almost three weeks ago was going to bring some improvement, or so I hoped. But nothing has gotten better, and to add insult to injury, I’ve gained back three of the pounds I’d tried so hard to lose in the past six months. Since I can’t exercise weight loss is especially difficult. With the meds I’m taking, it has felt damned near impossible. Still I managed to lose ten or so pounds (a small miracle, in my book) and was within two pounds of reaching my first small goal. Now that goal line has been moved, I’m cutting back even more on portion sizes and overall food intake, and I’m almost always hungry.

Weight loss and psych meds do not go hand in hand. The fact is they’re known to cause the kind of weight gain I’ve suffered over the past ten years. It has been almost a decade since I was finally properly diagnosed with Bipolar 1 (for decades before I was miss dx’d with major depression).

In that decade my body has become something foreign to me; a weight I have to drag along with me like some hellish personal version of Marley’s chains. Though he ‘forged his chains in life’, mine have been clamped onto me by the diseases that plague my brain; Bipolar, OCD, PTSD.

It’s gotten to the point that my doctor told me with concern that I was pre-diabetes last year. He told me he believed it’d reverse if I could lose twenty pounds. I looked at him with tears stinging my eyes, thinking he may as well have asked me to fly.

My relationship with food has never been great. Eating disorders run in my family, and I picked up destructive behaviors in my teens that have stayed with me through the years. It makes all this tracking what I eat and watching every bite nerve wracking; it feels like unhealthy behavior, and yet I don’t want to become a full-blown diabetic. I need my meds, and I need to lose weight. How am I supposed to do that?

First, I gave up the sugary drinks I shouldn’t have been drinking in the first place; gave up a lot of other things and cut severely back on even more. And after six months, it seemed to be doing something.

Then we upped one of my meds by two lousy milligrams, and that progress in weight loss seems to be going away. And for what? For no improvement in my depression?

I’m waiting to hear back from my psych doc with further instructions. Either she’ll tell me to keep going where I am and hope things improve, she’ll tell me to cut back my dose again, or she’ll tell me to increase it even more.

While my sad brain hopes she wants to increase it because I’m so sick and tired of feeling how I feel, the food-obsessed, unhealthy part of me hopes we cut it back down and that those three pounds will go back to wherever they came from.

If you’re struggling with meds and their side effects, please know you’re not alone. That’s why I’m posting this, in case anyone else out there is fighting this unending battle and needs to hear it’s not just them. From responses to tweets I’ve posted in the past few days, I know I’m not alone, even if it feels very lonely while I sit here and wait.

Sending love, love, love out into the skies…

~bru