My sweetheart gets out of the hospital today after a 10-day stay. He has bipolar disorder and had been cycling quite a bit for the past few months, and it just could not wait until the only psych appointment he could schedule with someone who takes our insurance and was also taking new patients…in April. He stopped sleeping, started getting more and more irritable and agitated (alternated with deep sads), and despite trying like hell to keep it all together until Spring his brain chemistry needed some major tinkering to keep him well and in this world.
The conversation about whether to go, how to go, when to go was one of the hardest and most necessary of my life. I’m forever grateful for this guest post, which let me know what to expect from hospitalization (he’d been through it all before).
I talked about it a bit on Twitter, but I’m still in the middle of FEELINGSTOWN and not fully able to write about all of it yet. My anxiety has been acting up, to say the least, and I may have freaked out crying on his (excellent) doctors on Monday when they told me he was out of the woods. They were like, are you okay, and also, here are tissues, you don’t have to wipe your face on your shirt and I was like DON’T YOU KNOW RELIEF-CRYING WHEN YOU SEE IT?
(They did)
My thoughts, in no particular order: He had the very best care and he’s got a good after-care and support system in place, I locked in a new therapist for myself, and our friends and family and community have poured out of the woodwork to support us. I can’t wait to see and kiss his giant face in 2.5 of the longest and shortest hours in human history, and I am going to ignore all y’all for a few days.
If you’re feeling down, I hope you can reach out and find some help. If you love someone who is feeling down, I hope you can remind them that they are loved and steer them toward some help. Let’s let Margaret Atwood take us all out of The Februaries together and listen to a pretty song.
CaptainAwkward.com 