Diagnosis: Insanity

CW: Suicidal ideation, side-effects, illness, death, mention of graphic hallucinations.

It's getting late and I'm starting to get that feeling, that itch deep in my chest that means I'm probably not going to be able to sleep tonight, again.

I get so mad about sleep sometimes.  There's no happy medium for me, not even with this stupid, simple thing that's barely above breathing on the scale of basic human functions.  And yet, I can not get a fucking handle on it.  I sleep three hours, or 15.  I sleep all day and then am through the ceiling by 2am.  Even when I sleep enough, there are times I feel like I will literally pass out if I can't take a nap.  A week ago I almost left in the middle of a church service to go sleep in my car, even though I'd just slept ten hours.  The only reason I didn't is because I couldn't bear to make a noise and have people look at me (thanks social anxiety, you're a champ).  I actually looked up the diagnostic criteria for narcolepsy, because the need to sleep at odd times of the day comes so quickly and so desperately sometimes that it feels like it just can't be normal.  Then again, nothing in my life is.

In the past year or so I've started wondering if I had some weird sort of adult-onset dyslexia, but my friends who know about brains have told me that isn't a thing.  I can say it's really disconcerting to be typing a message and all of a sudden spell a word completely backward.  The first one I remember is spelling "fall" as "llaf."  I also switch the order of words in sayings or sentences sometimes; I did it today, writing "few a have" instead of "have a few."  My shrink says my brain has too many tabs open and is just glitching out.  My mom says I'm getting old.  I feel like I'm going insane.  At my last session, my psychiatrist told me that taking Xanax increases my chances of getting Alzheimer's by up to 50%.  That seems like a pretty high price to pay for the pill that I need to function, that I will need to take soon if I want to have any hope of sleeping tonight.

Alzheimer's is not even the worst disease I can get from taking my medications.  My personal favorite is a little guy called tardive dyskinesia.  If you don't want to read all that, here's an overview: "Tardive" means symptoms can (and often do) appear years after you're no longer exposed to the medication, and "dyskinesia" is a certain type of uncontrollable twitching.  That might not sound too bad, until you get to the statistics.  About 1/3 of people on high doses of antipsychotics develop some form of this.  The higher your dose, the higher your chances of getting it.  I was on 1000mg of Seroquel for over 2 years.  If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is.  It's the maximum dose that doctors will prescribe, and taking that dose without building up a tolerance could probably knock out a horse.  As for the twitching, it starts around your mouth and face, and can move throughout your whole body, causing you to lose control over your limbs and require a wheelchair.  So I have a pretty good chance of being sad, unable to walk, AND looking like this:

Even though I've been off of Seroquel for a couple of years now, the fact that I was on that insane dose and was on it for years means that I'm likely to develop tardive dyskinesia, and I think I am already experiencing it.  My PCP thinks it's too early to diagnose me, but I have had increasing facial twitches that are unlike my myoclonic jerks or my hand tremors.  (Medications are fun.)  Oh, and there's no treatment...except for taking benzos, which is the class of medication that Xanax is in.  So basically taking fire and adding just so, so much more fire.

Here's the best part of all:  One particularly torturous form of tardive dyskinesia is called tardive dystonia.  This causes, again, involuntary repetitive muscle contractions, but these guys like to get freaky with your whole entire body at once.  I mean, come on.  Look at this fucking shit:

If you think that looks like something out of a horror movie, that's because it fucking is.  Imagine having a charley horse, in your entire body, for the rest of your life.  Plus you can't move out of those painful contortions, you get cramps from swallowing, and guess what, you're still fucking sad, because now you're off your antipsychotics to keep your physical illness from getting worse, so you get to look like this, be in constant pain, and still see dead bodies hanging from the ceiling of your hospital room.  I mean, if your head is facing the ceiling at all.

Here are a few other side-effects of some of my current and past medications, in no particular order:

• Temporary deafness
• Tinnitus
• Agitation
• Suicidal thoughts
• Fatigue
• Fatal skin rash (FATAL SKIN RASH!!!!!!!!!)
• Weight gain
• Weight loss
• Dizziness
• Vertigo
• Muscle weakness
• Sensitivity to the sun
• Excessive sweating
• Increased urination
• Thirst
• Drowsiness
• Insomnia
• Nausea
• Headache
• Brain zaps
• Tremors
• Sedation
• Disorientation
• Confusion
• Memory impairment
• Irritability
• Diarrhea
• Constipation
• Lactation (***has actually happened***)
• Hair loss
• Sleepwalking
• Infertility (they give these to teenagers)
• Liver damage
• Difficulty breathing
• Rapid heart rate
• Cataracts
• Uncontrollable muscle movements
• Cognitive impairment
• Seizures
• Stroke

And, of course, The Big One:

• Sudden death

So in order to keep me from killing myself, I'm just jamming myself full of chemicals that will, almost certainly and possibly dramatically, shorten my natural life.  It's beautifully ironic, isn't it?  The ideal outcome of my illness is that I will want to live just in time to start declining physically.  I suppose, best-case scenario, I might get a good ten years before my body starts to fail me.

I can laugh about it in the daytime, but right now it just feels so unbearably tragic.  I did not choose this life.  I do not want this life.  Over and over people tell me I'm selfish.  They say that suicide is the easy way out, that it will only hurt the ones I love, that it's a "permanent solution to a temporary problem."  Tell me: How is depression that has lasted more than half of my life temporary?  Depression that no amount of medications and therapy have been able to cure?

I have felt for many years that I have a terminal illness.  My life, at this point, will end in suicide - it's not an if, it's a when.  And when I make that choice, I want to come back to this, and take a moment to ask: How can you look at the pitiful wreck my life has become and call me selfish for wanting out of it?  When people we love are in pain and they are dying, we let them go.  Even if my psychological pain does lift, I don't have much to look forward to.  This is not pessimism.  This is a realistic summation of the probability that, if I don't kill myself, my death will only be slower and more painful then the death you'd choose for yourself.  I don't think that makes me the selfish one.

Anyway.  It's time for me to take my medications.