Mood Watch - 12

Wednesday night (September 6/7) I got about four hours of sleep, but was so bleary that by mid-morning I took a 90-minute nap. Thursday evening (September 7/8) I went to bed around 10:30 p.m. and awoke — once again feeling it must nearly be dawn — a little after 2 a.m. Which makes 3.5 hours of sleep, or about nine hours in the last twenty-four. I feel OK otherwise, but until my sleep pattern improves, there’s still some danger of, to invoke the jargon, decompensation. Well, I’ve been here too often to get alarmed. I’ll just have to keep an eye on things.

Mood Watch - 11

Last night I went to sleep at about 10:30 p.m. This morning I awoke around dawn; I figured 6 a.m. or so. It took me fifteen full minutes to realize it was barely 2 a.m. Except for a bit of clumsiness in my typing, I don’t feel tired at all.

Luckily, I don’t feel like doing anything generative or creative or audacious or whatever. I’m just making a cup of coffee and starting to get on with my day.

Mood Watch - 10

Slept an unbroken seven hours last night — always a reassuring thing in the context of an overall pleasant mood. Had a good, productive day yesterday and look forward to another today. I sure hope it’s productive; I’ve got a lot to do.

Mood Watch - 9

I’m wrapping up my trip to Washington and flying home this afternoon. I’ve had a very good time — was interviewed by a film crew making a documentary about Sherman’s March and got to visit with a couple of friends, one of them a fellow Civil War historian, also flown in to be interviewed, whom I hadn’t seen in two years.

As often occurs when I travel, I have been sleeping less than normal. Thursday night it was more or less my own fault: I stayed up late and got up early in order to be as well prepared for the interview as possible. But last night I went to bed around 2 a.m., having spent the evening chatting with my Civil War friend over several pints of Guinness, and awoke around 5 a.m. I was and remain a little bleary but no way was I going to get back to sleep. It just wasn’t in the cards.

It’s always impossible to know for sure what influences my moods — how much is biochemical, how much is existential. Often I have the feeling that, because I am depressed so much of the time, the experience of just feeling normal gets amplified into exhilaration. Thus, paradoxically, feeling normal can feel a bit like the first stirrings of hypomania. And maybe it is the first stirrings of hypomania. To repeat, it’s impossible to be sure, so one just has to be ceaselessly vigilant. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to take a klonopin tablet (an anticonvulsant that, in the Alice in Wonderland world of bipolar biochemistry, is effective as a mild mood stabilizer).

Mood Watch - 8

The night before last, I was sleeping just fine, thank you, until an excruciating muscle spasm in my calf brought me wide awake. After that, there was no chance of returning to sleep. Instead I got up and I got started on my day, having had maybe four hours of sleep.

I felt reasonably upbeat about the world — how different life seems during the “normal” times — and had a good, solid, productive day. True, I was kind of red-eyed throughout, but it was no big deal. Slept just fine last night: a full seven hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep. And when I awoke, I was glad to face the new morning. Is life routinely like this for most people?

This afternoon I fly to Washington to be interviewed tomorow for a prospective History Channel documentary on Sherman’s March. I was supposed to return tomorrow night, but asked to have the flight pushed back a day when I learned a good friend and fellow Civil War historian would also be in town. I’d like to see and catch up with her a bit. I’ll also be visiting a couple of other friends, including the Army officer with whose family I recently vacationed in the North Carolina Outer Banks. He’s back at the Pentagon now.

Mood Watch - 7

I didn’t sleep at all last night, Ambien CR notwithstanding. It’s a bit frustrating when that occurs but not, in itself, cause for alarm. I just keep an eye on how I’m doing otherwise. Do I feel tired, the way one normally would if sleep-deprived, or do I feel energetic and raring to go? Are any other symptoms present? If not, my usual practice is to work through the day without a nap, so as not to throw off my normal routine. As they say, good “sleep hygiene” is an important element in combatting the disorder.

The one downside, and it can’t really be helped, is that I’m too tired to do anything that requires serious mental creativity. I can answer email and do more or less mechanical tasks, but that’s about the extent of it. Actually, “downside” is probably the wrong word. It would be cause for alarm if my brain were anything else but sluggish.

Mood Watch - 6

People unacquainted with bipolar disorder typically think of the mood swings as being like those of a pendulum: a period of elevated mood, followed by a gradual shift to “normal,” and then eventually on to a period of depression. In fact, for many people with the disorder it isn’t like that, and in my own case I would say that the simile doesn’t apply at all. Instead I tend to drop quite suddenly into depressive spells and recover from them almost as abruptly. When I do, I generally feel a great deal of energy and a certain resistance to going to sleep. That’s how it’s been for the past few days.

The energy is, not, in and of itself, a bad thing. To some extent I think it owes to sheer relief at being part of the human race again. The things I have to look out for are along these lines: flight of ideas, pressured speech, distractibility, reduced impulse control — e.g., making a lot of sudden unplanned purchases — and so on. As long as these symptoms are absent, and especially provided I can focus on the main tasks at hand, things are more or less okay. I say “more or less” because I can never let down my guard. This is an illness that is trying to kill me, one way or another, and if it can’t kill me it wants to derail my life. I never forget that.

As for sleep: I’ve always been a night owl and the sort of person who lies awake for an hour or two before drifting off. At times such as this, when I feel a decreased need for sleep, it’s imperative to intervene with something that can reliably put me out. Historically that proved fairly hard to do. I went through quite a few medications before getting a prescription that worked — in my case Ambien CR. The previous options tended to be too clever by half; e.g., anti-seizure meds that had the side effect of causing drowsiness.

Sometimes — not at the moment, but sometimes — even the Ambien CR won’t put me down. I start feeling like a zombie in a Grade B movie: The Thing That Would Not Sleep. Luckily about a year ago my psychiatrist and I discovered, almost by accident, that Geodon is the equivalent of a headshot to that metaphorical zombie. The only problem is, when I wake up I’m groggy for hours afterward.

One final observation is in order concerning the relationship between the illness and working for long periods at the computer. Without a PC I simply could not get my work done. Even so, a hallmark of the disorder, as I have experienced it, is that working with a computer functions somewhat as catnip to the manic side of the illness. I can’t exactly dispense with it. The best I can do is walk away from it and do something else for a while.

I noticed this yesterday, for instance, while refurbishing . . . a political blog I started briefly in early 2005 before realizing I simply didn’t have time for it. For reasons I’ll get into some other time, it’s a blog I need for the next few months, so I didn’t begrudge the time. And I enjoy tweaking the templates and HTML code, etc. For me it’s like doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. But it can really suck you in. You fiddle with the code, check to see how it works, tweak it until you get it right. . . . The continuous incremental feedback seduces you to stick around for just one more fix.

The odd thing about it is, there are other times when I can scarcely stand to look at a blog, much less post an entry or do any fine-tuning.

Anyway, that’s the status for today.