Happy 3rd!

Yesterday was Lucy's 3rd Birthday. We had a quiet day. Her party will be in mid January. Here are some highlight pics:

Red, Pink, Pink, Red

red, pink, pink, red, originally uploaded by gorickjones.

Marnie, Lucy, Lucy, Marnie. Yesterday was a Converse kind of day.

Joy

Having a 3 year old in the house truly brings back the magic and joy of the holiday season.

T -31 hours 52 minutes

My mom arrives tomorrow afternoon. She will be here for 8 days. Lucy is super excited about Grandma Phyllis coming. Given my state of mind lately Marnie and I are coming up with good coping skills for me to manage her visit. It helps that the new medication I am on seems to be working.

My Beautiful Child

It Was The Drugs

Not all of it, but a good chunk of what I have been going through, particularly over the last month was because of a medication. My psychiatrist told me it could make me agitated, but he didn't tell me it could send me over the edge in a way that made me think I was losing myself. I could feel it, my very self slipping through my fingers. When I talked with him on the phone Monday morning and described what had happened to me over the weekend he said in a passing kind of way that "this sort of thing can happen with this drug sometimes". I wanted to go through the phone an throttle him! This would have been useful information for me to have don't you think?

Now a few days later I am feeling better. Not great, but better. The fog is lifting a little. I am on to a new drug hoping it will work. I am also considering finding a new psychiatrist.

And, thanks to dooce for this blog entry about mental illness. It really cuts to the heart of things.

Is it possible

that fighting breast cancer was easier than my current battle with mental illness? When you have cancer there is a plan of attack, well thought out, A, B, C, D. You have a team of people, it's all really clear what to do, what's going to happen. Not so when you are depressed or bipolar, or whatever, not so at all. You see I have been plagued for years with this struggle. I have been very reluctant to talk about it here. I am not sure why but I have none the less. Anyway, after our terrible trip this summer I hit a wall and have been trying with the help of my psychiatrist to find a new combinations of meds that will work. Well we haven't found it yet and I am getting worse and worse. I am standing here as it all swirls around me hoping that something works soon really really soon.

Three Years Ago

It is hard for me to believe that Lucy is about to turn three in a few weeks. I was digging around through Marnie's flikr pages and found these photos and couldn't resist posting them.