September 29, 2013: You will find at the very end of Chapter 11 of my autobiography a section entitled, “My Ordeal.” On January 30, 2009 – after cutting down on my pills since the previous November – I stopped taking my pills entirely. Hence, for my ordeal, which began on August 22, 2009, I had not been taking any pills at all for almost seven months. Near the beginning of that May I started having delusions and hallucinating. My ordeal started when I decided a particular man I was passing on the street was doing something wrong. And I felt it my duty to talk to him about it. About half an hour earlier I started to realize something was terribly wrong with me that needed addressing. When I came across the man, I was on my way home to carefully address the problem. I wanted to deal with it without pills. Of course, we will never know what might have happened. Would I have been able to successfully deal with it or not. If not, would I have gone to see Dr. Pankratz, as I had told him I might? Chapter 12 describes the result. Essentially, when I intercepted the man on the street, it’s like I was out to save the World. It’s like I was going to make sure everything in the World was going well, or correctly. I did not get all the way home so that I might begin to address my problem. It’s like I had to make sure everything else was going OK so that I would be able to deal with the problem. I did not want anything to get in my way of “getting better,” which is what I finally had come to the conclusion needed addressing. There was something wrong. Things were not right. As I wrote just above, I was hallucinating and delusional, but I had finally come to the conclusion things were not right. Up to that point I thought things were going very well, in spite of the upsets I had been experiencing for many months. At least I had figured that much out. We will never know what might have happened, will we? I thought the man was doing something wrong, and as mentioned before in this tome, today and for some years now, I have figured out that what he was doing was perfectly normal and there was nothing wrong with it. I won’t explain the source of my confusion again. In the end it was just me and my thinking and an opinion I had formed when I was not feeling well. I can make excuses like – the pills were making me feel drugged up and less able to reason; maybe I hadn’t been taking them long enough yet to enable me to reason better. I know, today, that the interim period has cleared up my reasoning. I don’t know how much it was my time in the hospital that helped me get here from there. I do remember that I was focusing on getting my doctor to cut down on my valproate. In the end today it is the Seroquel that has been cut down from 800 mg per day to 600 mg per day now. And I am stable. My original guess to cut down on the Seroquel myself was the correct one. But maybe if I had been under a doctor’s supervision in a more timely way, my ordeal may never have happened. All I know is that, now, I am stable, if unable to sleep regular hours such that I could get a job. Any kind of job I would be able to do would have to be determined at least in part by the hours I sleep. I am active, busy so much of the time. A lot of that time is taken up in walking, which is certainly good for my physical health at my age now of 65. But it’s hard to do only that to keep myself well. My poetry writing continues. Many people seem to like it. The only problem is my being unable to read it well in public. I could blame that on my schooling, where I never got up in front of the class to speak in any way, shape or form. I was never given that education, experience and opportunity. The one time Mom tried to get me to take a public speaking course, I embarrassed myself out of continuing past the first class. We had been asked, as a starter, to one by one get up in front of the class and say a little bit about ourselves, such as what we wanted to be in the future. There were girls and guys before me, but it was only the girls who spoke about acting. They said they wanted to be an actress, which suited me fine, too. So, when it was my turn, I got up in front of the class, said a little about myself, and how I wanted to be an actress. The whole class laughed. But I knew no different. That was the end of my public speaking education. Nowadays in my poetry, I try to make little funnies to lighten up the seriousness of what otherwise might be dry poetry. People seem to like it. I am always asked back. It is only up to me to embarrass myself out of it or to continue. I hope I continue.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 01:13:35 +0000
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