in between

I’ve felt since my last manic episode, about this time last year, that if I’m ever manic again my heart will give out and I’ll die. Last time was bad…really bad. It started innocently enough, I was actually aware that I was manic and that something was wrong. I was hearing voices. By that, I mean to say that my inner dialogue was hijacked and my thoughts were being spoken to me as if they were somebody else. I don’t know if that’s the common way people experience them or not but that’s how it worked for me.

I wound up in the hospital after two friends of mine brought me there. I had already tried to commit myself twice but it was to no avail. By this time I had completely lost my mind. I thought they were robots and that I was one of the last living humans on earth. At some point I also though they were gay porn stars. Possibly gay porn robots…

At that point I probably had not slept for a few days and I spent the next 5 days in the hospital not being able to sleep. Although I don’t remember the times when they would do this, they would restrain me and inject me with some kind of tranquilizer to get me to calm down and/or sleep. A fellow patient told me that people had told her that I was running around the ward naked. I don’t remember this but I can imagine something like that happening. I’m 6’4″, about 280 pounds, and I know that it must have been absolute hell for the nurses and workers there to try and keep control of me. I hate that realization when I’m finally sane enough to know what I was doing.

Somehow after 5 days of not sleeping (that I’m aware of) added on top of however many days before that I hadn’t slept the doctor, who was a different doctor than the one I’ve had for the past 10 years (he retired from inpatient last year), let me go home. So what did I do? I wasn’t sane. My mania had lessened but I still had a complete break from reality. I continued to not be able to sleep and I absolutely terrorized anyone I came across with my nonsense. At first glance I might have appeared normal but I was absolutely nowhere near it.

There’s a lot of shame I still haven’t worked out for some of the things I did in the next couple days but I will say that I was convinced I was being poisoned by certain drinks at the gas station and that only certain other pop would provide the antidote. I somehow saw myself able to split into different personalities so that I was the one that absolutely was destined to be with basically any female I know or came across. I don’t know, it was just all fucked up. I can remember it just like I can remember anything else that happened that long ago so it’s all pretty clear.

I had gone a REALLY long time without sleeping (really unprecedented), my heart just pumping out of control and my brain just firing off at 2000 miles an hour. The strangest, or possibly, the scariest thing that started to happen was I began to see people and things that weren’t actually there. I would see homeless people everywhere, they would stop and talk to me, they would walk beside me, and at the time it never seemed strange or out of place. I was visiting my mom and my niece at my parents’ house and became convinced that I was a child molester and that I was going to molest or abduct my niece. When I left my parents’ house that night and I didn’t take Kassie with me (even thought she wanted to go) I felt like I had beat the game and successfully “saved” child molesters everywhere. From across the street in parking lot I heard two people, a man and a woman yell, “YOU DID IT!” and I watched them walk across the parking lot excitedly like I was their hero.

When I finally went back to the hospital 3 days later, I was convinced it was the year 2000. It’s a long walk from the emergency room to the mental ward so they have a security guard escort me from Point A to Point B. For some reason I was stopping at every drinking fountain I saw to get a drink of water and after maybe 5-6 stops I completely blacked out and when I came to I was in the ward waiting to be checked in only this time it was a beautiful, distorted, pseudo-2000 ward and looked nothing like how it should. All of the patients, many of whom I recognized because I was just there 3 days before, looked younger and happier and everyone was running around as if they were 12 years younger. The color scheme of the walls and everything about the place (although it was structurally the same) was completely different and beautiful. They were even playing a game of bags in the day room. I could hear the bags hit the board over and over as I was standing there at the desk waiting for a nurse. I was in a completely alternate reality.

Finally, after a few minutes of standing there, a nurse came and got me and I was still 100% convinced, 110% maybe, that it was 2000. We went into an office type room with just a door and no windows and she asked me a bunch of questions as she checked me in. Everything was normal except I thought I was 19. After a few minutes of that, we came out and the whole place returned to look how it should. No bags. Everyone looked as old as they really were and that was that.

At this point I was crazy as crazy could be. I was completely gone from that sort-of-passing-as-normal state and I could barely function as a human. I hadn’t slept for what might be two weeks. I was no longer me, my head was practically gone from this reality. As I mentioned in a previous entry, I thought that I could travel throughout universes by taking a shower. This definitely wasn’t the first time I thought I was an alien, I seem to get to this point every time I’m in the hospital.

So I would try to take shower in other peoples’ rooms. I’m not exactly sure why, maybe just because it was the closest one to me when I decided I needed to change dimensions. Well, I do this and take a shower in someone else’s room and as I turn the shower off they’re banging on the door asking if I’m ok, I say yes, dry myself off put my clothes back on and looking back on it I’m sure they’re at wit’s end trying to figure out what to do with me and how to handle all the ruckus I’ve been causing. It’s now Monday, I think. So they have a girl start watching me. I say girl but she was probably at least 22 or 23. She brings out a battery powered radio and we’re listening to it (her job is basically to make sure I don’t do anything crazy at this point) and I say to her, “Do you wanna get blacked out?” (This is what I think happened anyway) She says yes and I punch her in the face.

Now that is the first and only time I’ve ever punched anyone. I’m a completely non-violent person but she wanted to get blacked out so I punched her in the face. That’s what happens, I guess. I think she was alright, I’m not really sure. I hope so. I don’t think she blacked out. But I’ve just upgraded my accommodations from the hospital mental ward to the county jail. And I don’t have a clue what the fuck is going on. And I get taken off my medication for something like 5 days. All in all, pretty terrible.

I wound up in jail for about 9 days total. I spent both of my parents’ birthdays and Christmas locked up. For about the first 4 or 5 days, I was so crazy I couldn’t even communicate. I haven’t written about the disconnect between my thoughts and my speech, but there is a huge one when it’s this bad. I could try to say somethingbut have something else come out of my mouth entirely (at least I think this is what happens). But anyway, I was locked in solitary confinement, with nothing to do, no one to talk to, no clue what was going on, and no way to communicate anything anyway. Luckily, my mania finally broke and the day after Christmas my mom was able to bail me out. It was felony battery which got dropped about a week after that. I haven’t talked to the girl or had any contact with anyone who knows anything about it. I just know that it’s over, thankfully.

To wrap this up, I couldn’t go back to my hospital because of the incident, so they sent me to another hospital about 90 miles away. Even though I was pretty much totally fine at that point I spent about 4 days in that hospital before they finally said I could go home.

I skipped over a lot of stuff (a lot of shameful stuff, I’ve never told anyone about what happened with my niece but there’s a lot of things that happened in those couple of days I wish I could take back) but this is basically what can happen to me. Last year was the worst, for sure. It seems to just keep getting worse.

For a few weeks afterward when I was finally sleeping some, I could just feel my heart was tired. I don’t know if it could go through another episode like this. Be thankful for the sleep that you get.