Living Bipolar (22 page)

The hope I can give other people is, look at the situation I had with Landon. I cannot imagine anything worse, or more traumatic, or dramatic, than what we went through. The situation was absolutely crazy. We were best friends. Landon was in my parent’s house and left and stood in my driveway threatening to kill me. And then three years later he’s the best man at my wedding! We speak on a weekly basis. So if you’re looking for hope, and your thinking you couldn’t be friends with the other person, you’re crazy. I’m just a regular person and so is Landon.
If we are able to remain friends anybody else in the same situation can to
.

Jane’s Mom Connie’s Experience Raising A Bipolar Child

Connie’s Story

Looking back I thought I had a normal family. For ten or twelve years I thought culturally, professionally, and morally, that I had the ideal family and everything was normal. My expectations of my life were fine and I thought I had “The happy family.” Everything changed, though, when my husband became ill. I had to leave my children for about six weeks to go attend to my husband’s needs. He was having problems with his heart, and we had to go to Duke University in North Carolina to deal with his illness. At this time my daughter Jane was 10 years old and my other daughter was 8 years old.

This was the first time I had really left my children alone, and I think this affected both my daughters tremendously. Not only was their father sick, and something was wrong with his heart, but their mom was gone as well. They were left with their grandmother and this was very terrifying for both of my daughters. When I came back from North Carolina, everything had changed, and that's when a lot of things that used to be normal became abnormal.

I first saw signs of Jane’s illness at 12 years old. I was shocked because up until this point Jane was the perfect child. Jane was the perfect student, she was very bright, and she was always able to take care of herself and her needs. By the sixth grade Jane was in the top four of her class and she won many awards in school including a science fair award. To me she was brilliant, well rounded, she was pretty, and she had lots of friends. However, just before six grade she seemed to go through a great change.

Jane began to develop great fears. She developed fears of going out of the house. If she wanted McDonald's I would have to go and get it and to bring it home; if she wanted new clothes I would have to bring them home, instead of her going to the mall to get them. I took her to a therapist and it wasn't very successful. At the time I really felt deep down Jane would grow out of this phase of not wanting to leave the house.

The summer before Jane went to middle school Jane began to break down. For example, we went away for a short vacation and I remember when we came back she got her hair tangled while combing it, and I had to wash and condition her hair in order to get it untangled. Jane became hysterical when this happened and she feared that her hair was going to have a bald spot.

I had seen small signs of her illness up until this point, but I did not know what I was seeing. For some reason when she started middle school Jane didn't want to go back-to-school. She was beyond control. She threatened to throw a hairdryer in the bathtub to kill herself. Whether she saw something like this on television I don't know, but this is when I realized we have problems. Everything hit me smack in the face.

I didn't know what to do; I didn’t know where to turn to for help
. Naturally this was an absolute shock to my planning for my family’s life. You know parents have a plan for their family’s life. The plan according to me of how my family’s life was to go was: the kids are going to go to school, become teenagers, go to prom, go on dates, and all the other special moments. But when Jane threatened her life it seemed like it was the turning point for my rose-colored glasses, and my life, which soon after became absolute hell.

I went to Jane’s pediatrician when she was 12, and I told the pediatrician that Jane threatened her life if she had to go back-to-school. I still didn't know what I was dealing with and I guess I was still thinking this too shall pass. My life was very frightening. I took Jane to Miami Children's Hospital where we saw a psychiatrist and they immediately admitted Jane to the children's unit there. I freaked out. Me being separated from my child was just as painful as my child being separated from me.

She was in the children's unit for three weeks, where she was given a diagnosis of agoraphobia -- the fear of being in crowded places and leaving the house being around lots of people. They started Jane on some medication. During this time I also learned about the Severely Emotionally Disturbed Program (SED) for students like my daughter. But this was still beyond my comprehension.

I can't tell you how painful it was for me to see what I thought was a perfectly normal child being suddenly told she was absolutely sick and disturbed and in need of a special classroom.
I thought, “No my daughter can go to school. She can do this.” None of it seemed real. None of it seemed real. But it was.

Following this Jane had therapists, doctors, psychiatrists, and everything you could name. I was still in denial that my household was slowly becoming insane. I was still looking through rose-colored glasses believing that everything was going to go back to normal. I think this was the hardest thing for me -- accepting that things were not okay. Accepting that my fantasy of the perfect family was not real.
It was harder for me to give up my fantasy because if I gave up my fantasy then I would actually have to face the reality that I had a sick daughter
. At this point I still thought I was a normal person and I had trouble facing the fact that something was going wrong.

Within six months of Jane being in the SED program, they gave her the diagnosis of being Bipolar because they saw the rapid cycling and the highs and lows. There were behavioral problems too with Jane. For instance, I used to have to go to school for counseling and the school would call me and tell me Jane was missing, and they couldn’t find her. After the first time they called me I stopped panicking because I would tell the school to go look in the infirmary because Jane would be sleeping in the bed. That's what she would do, Jane would go to use the bathroom and then go to the school infirmary to sleep!

There was a lot of humor in Jane's antics but her behavior was also terrifying, and out of control at times. There was one time when Jane went into the school bus, and turned on the ignition, because she wanted to listen to some music. The school gave her an in-school suspension for this, and later this incident would become a family joke, but it was not funny at the time.

Slowly I found a therapist and I took Jane along with myself. This therapist was one of the greatest gifts of my life
because she helped me realize that Jane is sick and we need to deal with her illness
. The therapist recommended family therapy. But within three years, everyone in the family stopped going to family therapy, and that’s when I realized how ill I had become with my entire family. The therapy was now mine.

Family Education and Family Therapy

Family members and close friends often find that the educational information given to patients is useful to them as well. Families are, of course, in a unique position to observe the behavior and moods of Bipolar patients. Education about the illness can increase the awareness and acceptance of patients and underscore the family’s role in encouraging the patient to take prescribed medications and to live sensibly…

Family members, in addition to being educated about medications and the illness, should be informed about the importance of recognizing the early signs and symptoms of hypo-manic, manic, and depressive episodes. Changes in sleep patterns, sexual and financial behavior, mood (expansiveness or undue enthusiasm, pessimism and hopelessness), involvements in excessive numbers of projects, and changes in judgment are all highly characteristic of impending affective episodes. Often these changes are first noted by family members and can be crucially important to the patient in early intervention. Strategies for contacting the clinician should be determined, if possible during times when the patient is normal. To the extent feasible, general contingency plans and agreements should be made in advance to cover possible emergencies, hospitalization plans for mania, and financial protection for the patient and family during hypomanic and manic episodes.

-Goodwin and Jamison 1990: 738-739

One thing I noticed being in therapy
was once I got better, the rest of the family got better
.
I had never recognized how ill I was with the entire family
and I had to go for my own therapy to get better. The therapy was very intense and at one time we did an almost hypnotic type of therapy which allowed me to bring up painful issues from my childhood. I was able to uncover issues from way back in my childhood and this helped make me healthier as a person.
There was a lot of pain and self-examination and growth that I had to do on my part before I could work on making my family healthier
.

It's important to understand that I was dealing with a sick daughter, my husband was sick, and I was trying to be a mother while working a full-time job, and dealing with a sick family. So therapy was very helpful. I also began to attend Al-Anon meetings and through Al-Anon, and therapy, I began to understand my family dynamics, and my role in the family. I learned how much I was contributing to the family illness.

What I mean by contributing to the family's illness is
if you keep tying the child’s shoe lace, then you don't have the right to yell at your child when they're five years old and they can't tie a shoelace
. This is an example of what I learned in therapy and Al-Anon. In the past, I was always fixing things, such as, I would do my child's homework and they wouldn't learn anything except to go to mommy to fix it.

We got Jane through middle school and she went to high school in the SED program for gifted students. She made friends there but she was always lonely, she was always depressed, and she felt she couldn't handle the gifted program. The school thought Jane could handle the program but she didn't. I was always searching for the next place I could put her. I can't begin to tell you all the places that I searched for but one was a city program, one was at another high school, and one was in a hospital.

I was a registered nurse and for a long time I was operating on survival skills. There is one time when my other daughter threatened suicide and she cut her hand and I grabbed paper towels, and wrapped my daughter's hands up, and I knew she had to go to the emergency room. And to tell you how sick I was, I had just bought her some pants and she had gotten blood on the pants and I told her you need to take the pants off and put on another pair. And before I took her to the emergency room I scrubbed and scrubbed her pants in the sink with soap. I know that what I was trying to do was erase the blood, and the pain, that I was feeling from what I was going through at the time. I was trying to wash it all way, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Then when I gained control I took her to the emergency room.

Jane spent one year of her life with me screaming at her at seven in the morning, saying, “Get up, get up! You’re going to miss the bus!” We were miles away from where she had to catch the bus and there was no way I could take her by car and be able to make it to my job. Words can’t describe how stressful my life was. It was absolute hell.

The Al-Anon helped me the most in dealing with a daughter who has an illness that is not her fault.
I was driving myself insane trying to control my daughter's disease and get her up and get her out of bed and get her functioning and get her to do what I wanted her to do, which was to go to school
. Jane was going to a therapeutic school -- not just a normal school -- where they would give her therapy, they would give her doctors, give her medicine, and they would also give her school work. But the school would give her assignments at her pace.

Here I had a child who was sick maybe every day and I could never get her up, and I would go to work feeling ill every morning from trying to get my daughter up and then having to get myself ready. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was probably more depressed than Jane was. There is such a thing as a functioning alcoholic but I was a functioning depressive. Because there was no one else around to help my family do what they needed to do. I had to do it. I had to go to work, I had to make the money, I had to get the kids to school and everyone around me was getting sicker.

I was blessed by going to Al-Anon and getting a sponsor who had twenty-five years in the program. She was one of the original ones and she made me work the 12 steps, made me do the traditions, and she had me meet with her every week to do the work. I had to go to meetings and I had to do everything else that Al-Anon entailed, including sponsoring other women. I did Al-Anon for eight years

The first year of Al-Anon gave me the ability to
Let Go and Let God
. I learned I could not control people, places, and situations. I dealt with my husband being sick and Jane's illness.
I learned I had no control. And I think surrendering to the fact that I had no control helped me the most. There was nothing I could do to change my husband's illness, my daughter’s illness or to change the family as a whole.

I learned to “Let Go and Let God” with Jane's illness by stopping screaming at her. I would read my literature in the morning, pray and meditate, and go into her room calmly and tell her, “Jane it's time to get up.” I would explain to her I will give you five more minutes to wake up and then you need to get up and get on the bus. If she hadn't gotten up I would tell her I'll give you five more minutes to get up and get on the bus, and by the third time if she hadn't gotten up, I would tell her “I'll see you later today after I get back from work.” And then I would leave for work and just let her lay in bed while I went to work.