29. Would You Like Salt With Your Salt?

Today I’m feeling vaguely victorious and vaguely petrified in equal measure. I told you about my diet, right? The one 0where I have to cut out everything but air, acorns and, if I’ve been really good, I might get to sniff the fridge? Well, when I said that diet and exercise wasn’t good for you, I wasn’t kidding. It turns out that the type of diet I’m on is low in salt as well as low sugar, low fat and low flavour.

Now, I started on lithium 2 years ago. I read the little pamphlet that came with it stating what to do with the little white tablets, when to take them, how many to take and what to do if I accidentally start snorting them like cocaine. But after that I kind of forgot about the little pamphlet and got on with my life. So when I started this diet it didn’t occur to me that the odd symptoms I started getting about 2 weeks in were anything more than dietary pains or the effects of a lifetime of living on sugar.

Last week my lips went numb. Just once and just for about ten minutes and I didn’t really think much of it other than ‘that’s odd and I hope that doesn’t happen again’. But it did happen again. And I was tired all the time. Exhausted to my core kind of tired. And then my right hand went numb which, to my dismay, didn’t stop me being able to go to work and type (I mean, what is the POINT of being poisoned slowly if you can’t get a day off out of it?). And my concentration has been awful. All these things I’ve put down to other issues but it turns out that a low salt diet can really affect your lithium levels, raising them to the point where they become toxic. Yet again I ask you, if you suddenly turned radioactive, you’d want a day off work, right?!

Apparently, what happens is your kidneys process both sodium chloride (common table salt) and lithium chloride (not to be confused with table salt. Doesn’t taste nice on your chips… apparently) in the same way. Ie, if you’re dehydrated or don’t have enough salt in your system your kidneys will hold onto what it has got, and invariably that will mean holding on to the lithium too. Your body doesn’t flush these things away in your urine like it normally would and you end up building up a little store. One thing is relatively harmless although again, wouldn’t recommend you put it on your chips after extraction from said kidneys, while the other thing starts to build up to toxic levels. You notice it most when you get the shakes, numb bits of your body, your concentration goes, etc etc. (there’s a much better explanation here: http://bipolarworld.net/Phelps/ph_2005/ph1350.htm).

You’re supposed to speak to your GP before you go on a diet of any kind when taking lithium but this is where things fell down for me. Neither myself, nor the GP or nurse put two and two together and that’s how I’ve ended up with lips like Mick Jagger and no feeling down my right side. Ok, I exaggerate, but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.

For those of you in the same position as me (not walking around like one of the undead, just considering dieting is what I mean by that) you might like to read the following guidelines from the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center:


These diet guidelines will help you keep your lithium blood level stable:

• Drink 8 to 10 glasses of water or other liquids every day.
Drinking plenty of fluids is important while you are taking lithium. Not drinking enough liquids may cause lithium levels to rise. You may need even more liquids during hot weather and during exercise when you sweat heavily. To avoid weight gain, select water and other non-caloric beverages.

• Keep your salt intake about the same.
Do not begin a low salt diet without first talking with your doctor or pharmacist. Do not suddenly increase the salt in your diet either. Less salt may cause your lithium level to rise. More salt may cause your lithium level to fall.
Try to keep your intake of these salty foods about the same from day to day: luncheon meats, ham, sausage; canned or processed meats and fish; packaged mixes; most frozen entrees and meals; soups and broths; processed cheeses like American; salted snack foods; soy sauce; smoked foods; olives, pickles; tomato juice; most fast foods; salt, salt containing seasonings and condiments like ketchup and meat sauces.

• Keep your caffeine intake about the same.
Keep amounts of coffee, tea, cola, and other soft drinks with caffeine about the same from day to day. Less caffeine can cause your lithium level to increase; more caffeine can cause your lithium level to decrease.

• Avoid alcoholic beverages.
Check with your doctor or pharmacist about this issue and any questions you have.

• Take lithium with food or milk.
This will reduce possible digestive side effects like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain.

28. From One Extreme to Another

This week I’m a lot more up and down than I expected to be. This is obviously not one of those periods of remission that I’ve read about! In this week’s blog I’m going to talk to you about some upsetting things so be warned. If you’re not feeling up to it, skip this blog and either come back to it another time or just pretend it never existed. I won’t be offended.

Last Friday I worked from home (that’s not the upsetting bit. Hold your horses!) and as I’ve explained to you previously, I don’t do well with being on my own for long periods. Even half an hour can be a bit of a stretch if I’m in one of those moods. Anyway, I noticed that as the day went on my thoughts became more and more dark and irrational. At the time they didn’t seem irrational, they seemed like valid worries that might affect the rest of my life, but looking back on them now, I can see that if I’d been able to anchor them just a little bit more in reality it’s possible I might not have got in such a state.

What I mean is, I was thinking about my marriage. Often when I’m down everything that I don’t have in life, everything I want but can’t reach and every reason for not being able to progress with my life falls to restrictions caused by my marriage. I don’t know why this is particularly or even whether there is any validity in it at all, but that’s how I feel when I’m down.

For example, I want to earn a bit more so we can go on holiday and travel. My hubby wants to give up work and start a business which I know we’ll struggle with. It will be stressful and there will be no money for years, if ever. We very rarely want the same things in life. So I think about what life would be like if we weren’t together. I think about moving out. How would I cope? I’d be exhausted, life wouldn’t be good, but then life’s not good now. The more I think about it the more depressed I become. So what’s the alternative? And that’s usually when I think to myself that there is no alternative and I may as well end it all now. You see. Not a very rational argument seeing as lots of people have split or got divorced and they manage somehow. But this is the thinking of someone for whom logic isn’t high on the agenda right now.

You know what scares me most about a suicide attempt? The thought of surviving.

I don’t want to have to go through years more counselling, justifying to everyone why life was just too tiring and altogether too much in that moment and probably always will be. I don’t want to have to explain to anyone I love why they weren’t enough to keep me here when in reality nothing could keep me here. For some of us suicide is an option only in as far as when it will happen, not if it will happen. And I think that’s because for some of us the disorder we carry around in our heads is priming us to self-destruct.

I don’t mean all this to be doom and gloom. It’s hard to discuss this subject without upsetting someone in some way. I‘m just telling you how I see things for me. You may agree, you may not.

Then yesterday I was listening to a lesson run by a life coach. She was very inspiring and I always feel uplifted after such talks. But she said something which made me think about my stance on suicide. She was talking about people’s pasts, saying that your past should not hold you back or stop you from trying again and making a success of things in the future. She then said that you have to align your frequency to the plan the universe has set out for you. Now this bit does sound a bit Star Trek but nevertheless her point was valid.

She continued to say that each of us is made happier when we align our actions with our desires, ie, if you want to become a vet, you don’t go to accountancy classes. If you do you’ll be miserable because you’ll be ignoring your inner desire and never allow yourself to work towards that goal. However, if you make the decision to follow the path that has been set out for you, ie, enhance your own abilities in areas you are naturally drawn towards, it will lead to you contributing something worthwhile to the world. If you align your frequency to the path the universe has assigned you, you will be happier.

Then she said that in essence everything is dictated by the universe. None of us would be here if the universe hadn’t allowed it, if life hadn’t been breathed into you. I know this is all a little hairy-fairy but it made me think that perhaps suicide is not my decision to make after all. I’ve been given this life by something else out there. For some that might be god, for others the universe. I have always assumed it is my life force to take and do with as I please, but she made me wonder whether I really have a right to fling it back at the universe when I’m done with it?

I know from my own experiences and how debilitating depression can be that there are those people out there who really can’t hold on any longer. For whom life is just too painful. I also know from a lot of years’ experience that if you hold on for just a bit longer you can often find something worth holding on for. My psychiatrist told me once that these desperate thoughts and feelings are a symptom of bipolar disorder and I will always get better if I give it time. As a symptom of an illness it’s pretty extreme, but he’s right. You get a cold, you’re going to experience the symptoms, that doesn’t mean the cold has to define your actual thoughts and feelings about life. If you’re going through a similar state to the one I’ve described then have faith that in another day or two you will have come through the worst of it.

This is one of those subjects I didn’t really know whether to broach in a blog. I certainly don’t want anyone thinking I advocate the idea, despite me saying I don’t judge those who must be in so much pain they feel they have no choice in the matter. However, it is a subject that, as bipolar sufferers, I suspect we’ve all faced in the past and possibly will do again. I hope that knowing there is someone out there who knows what you’re going through will help at least, and I’d like you to know that having you guys to share with helps me too.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/us/suicide-prevention-sheds-a-longstanding-taboo-talking-about-attempts.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=US_SPS_20140414&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1388552400000&bicmet=1420088400000&_r=3

27. Darth And The Deathstar

Last week I talked about needing attention to feel loved and this week I was reminded why, in the world of adults, this is just not something any of us can expect. Firstly, I tried an experiment on Facebook. Each night that I rode home on the train I posted that I was feeling lonely. I wanted to see how many people would respond and to what extent. A bit of a mean experiment, I realise, but I thought that describing myself as lonely was an emotion that implied I was down but not so down that people should worry. On the first day I got no response. I left it a day and then posted the same thing again. Nowt! Not even my sister asked if I was ok. On the third attempt someone ‘liked’ my status! Then I threw a Facebook hissy fit and declared that despite posting three times that I was feeling lonely, I’d had no response and that they were all bastards. I was off to Twitter, I announced. And suddenly there was an outpouring. But not of sympathy or care, mostly a steady stream of sarcasm followed friendly insults. I think I was told to ‘suck it up, Princess’ as well as getting a few ‘What’s up with you?’ comments.

I hoped that perhaps this was a one off but I witnessed the same thing this week in work. My colleague Sandra came back from a few days off sick. She’d had a chest infection and was still struggling with it to the point she was wheezing heavily all the time. At one point in the day she got up to talk to our boss and could only walk very slowly. He watched her coming before commenting ‘Cor, blimey, you couldn’t sneak up on someone, could you? It sounds like Darth Vader’s coming to get me! Are you my father?’ The resulting laughter left her in a worse state and she spent the entire conversation whispering between wheezes. At the end of their short meeting he pointed to her desk and said ‘Off you go. Back to the Deathstar!’ So it would appear I’m not the only one who isn’t getting any sympathy in this world. And I can breathe, so bonus!

26. It's ALL about ME!

I’ve been feeling sorry for myself the last few days, I can tell you. It’s partly to do with this story I’m writing and all the stuff it’s kicking up from my past and partly because I’m still feeling very shaky about things in my personal life and relationship. I’m one of those people who is always looking for the next thing that will make me happy. And that next thing never turns out to be enough. I blame my childhood.

In fact, the more I look back at my past the more I realise just how often I was having episodes which could be attributed to bipolar (although mild, I think they were definitely there, and my husband agrees). I wonder now whether I always had it. This is a big deal for me. I was only diagnosed in my thirties and was happier thinking that it was brought on by my nervous breakdown than I was thinking that I was always a bit defective.

I was a very sensitive child. I could over-empathise to the point of driving myself into a worse state that the person I was empathising with. The thought of global warming turned me into a nervous wreck from the age of 8 onward. I even had suicidal thoughts then. What was the point of carrying on, it seemed, if we were all going to drown, freeze to death or perish under a fireball from the sun?

I had terrible OCDs. I couldn’t fill an ice cube tray with water and put it in the freezer if I’d been thinking about anyone I loved because it would mean their essence would be frozen and they’d be in pain because of me! I was terrified throughout most of my childhood of all the man-made issues in the world, not to mention the issues of abandonment I was dealing with when my parents divorced, the loss of people and things that meant a lot to me, a lack of love from my mother, no guidance of any kind from adults in my life and an inability to talk about my problems when there was no one there to listen anyway. Is it any wonder I turned into a little bag of nuts?

http://www.inforum.com/event/article/id/430212/group/Life/ - Half of all lifetime cases of mental illness begin by 14.

My husband says that my need to be adored and desire to be the centre of attention is due to the bipolar but I’m not so sure. I don’t want to be the centre of attention. Not in the way you’re thinking. Yes, I want to be successful and happy, but in an understated way. I want my talent and what I can do to be recognised.

I think all that stems from being a little girl with no one to give her what she needed. I’ve spent my entire adult life, and continue to spend it, fixing the problems that that life installed in me. I think what he actually means is, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of becoming a little self-absorbed when every day you have to be very aware of your own feelings, thoughts, rationale, and logic in order to assess how well you are.

This is why, when I see others suffering, I feel bad that I am this self-absorbed person, always asking that my needs be met no matter how illogical or outlandish they might be at times. I came into work this morning and my colleague is in a bad way. He seems very stressed and exhausted. Because he’s a work colleague I don’t know him well enough to probe so in a roundabout way of cheering him up I asked him to help me with the new software licensing acronyms that we’re going to add to our asset management system. I’m pleased to announce that we came up with the following, and a job well done I might add:

Ass.LicK - Assigned License Keys

U.Ass.LicK – Unassigned License Keys

SNot.LicK – Secure Notes License Keys

25. What’s Wrong With Wiping Your Nose On A Nun?

A few people have mentioned to me now how lithium has affected their weight and that they find it harder to lose that weight once it’s on. I don’t know if this is because the medication affects metabolism or perhaps makes you crave certain foods. I know I have recently been told my entire diet revolves around eating sugar. It’s in everything I drink, eat, snort… just kidding. You can’t snort Smarties. I’ve tried. And the doctor has put me on a really strict diet to help reduce my risk of diabetes and other nasty symptoms.

Oh believe me, I fought it. I argued that I get enough exercise jigging about during my manic episodes and that I suffer from rapid cycling, which sounds far too close to a form of exercise for me to want to take part voluntarily.

But I lost that argument. So I’m sitting here typing next to a bowl of something green (that can’t be natural, surely) and the prospect of a dinner of aromatic lentils which even the cat wouldn’t go near the last time I prepared them. I’ll let you know if I actually lose any weight. I’ve been on the diet for nearly 2 weeks now and I complained to my colleague yesterday that I’m sick of eating tasteless salads. He told me that dieting is a journey of discovery. That I should look at it as a way of enhancing my self-discipline (how can you enhance something you never had in the first place?). As far as a journey of discovery goes, I’m quite looking forward to discovering just how many chins nature intended for me to have.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2602630/I-pooped-like-freaking-clockwork-What-happened-one-family-went-sugar-free-diet-one-year.html - Check out this article on how one family managed to get through a year on a sugar-free diet.

I’ve also started writing a bit more lately, which is nice. I think. I’ve actually found that when I try to write from the heart I usually end up writing about childhood. I had a rough time as a kid, as do a lot of people. But it would seem that if I start to dig deep it’s always that time that pops up and grabs the pen.

It’s been emotional writing about events I had hoped I’d put behind me but in some ways the fact that I’m an emotional wreck (crying on the train, in the supermarket, on that nun, etc) is good because this time I have a reason for it. You know what it’s like, right? Being down, crying for no reason, feeling like life is just too hard sometimes. And usually that’s all down to the chemicals in your brain. So when you have a REASON for reacting that way, it’s almost comforting! I’ll let you know how it goes. It may be my big break into writing and this time next year I’ll be collecting my BAFTA (I’ve already written my speech. Hey, writer’s write).