The real heroes

I am regretful that I forgot to mention the real heroes of my recovery. It first starts with my wonderful wife who had a front row seat not knowing why everything fell apart. She was with me for the entire ride where I am sure I emptied my emotion bank account with her, I am working on filling it back up. Same was true with my daughter, my brother, my parents, and extended family (step daughter). Then there was my community of friends who did not judge, only wished for my recovery. Last I had some incredible professionals who without them I would not had pulled through.

Thank you everyone who was by my side helping me, I will never forget you all.

Special needs kitty

A couple months before my health tanked, we had a feral cat walk down our driveway and night time and allowed us to see her. It took a month for us to be able to pet her, she would appear and run away when we tried to get close. Over the course of the summer we built enough trust that she started interacting with us more and more.

When I first started experiencing panic attacks, Sophie would climb on my ankles and lay on me. Any other time, it took great effort to pet her. But she seemed to know when I needed help, and she was there for me. As time progressed, we became much closer, and she moved up from my ankles to sleeping on or near my arm or on top of me when I struggled. Now when things go mentally south, she is the first being I look forward to help me. She is always around in times of need, she is my special needs cat who I love greatly.

The magic of strangers helping strangers

There was a time that I spent in a psychiatric hospital before my doctors had determined what was going on with my health. It was a time of uncertainty and nervousness not knowing why my mind was so unstable. I had to give up my long standing habits of drinking wine or having an edible, cold turkey. I was not sleeping and there was a couple of months where I could not determine the difference of sanity and insanity as my body was sending it strongest signs for help.

After my initiation, I had to join a group of strangers for group therapy. 6-8 very different people sitting together and sharing some of their most intimate thoughts, experiences and tragedies.  As one person spoke, the others would listen and try and help based on their experiences. Keep in mind, these were patients helping patients, not doctors or therapists, just people. It was an incredible feeling to have random strangers do their best to help other random strangers, humanity at it best.

I still think of the group that I worked with. How much I was able to empathize with them, share my soul and feel better as a result. When I left, the process had a profound effect on me. It soften me up to all forms of life. When I would see someone in need, I would think of them as one more member of the group in need. It made me a kinder person, a better version of myself, which I am very grateful for.

Invisible crutch

I think one of the hardest things about coping with mental health issues is all of the people that you know who do not have it and therefore have a very difficult time understanding it. I was one of those people. My first wife struggled with depression. I remember telling her all of my cures for something that I knew nothing about. I would say comments like, "you are sad because you are not taking care of your health with proper diet, and not exercising enough." Or "just snap out of it, why are you always so sad?" It was the invisible crutch that I was not seeing or trying to see. When you physically hurt yourself, mostly it is visible and get some empathy. But when you can not see the ailment, it can be dismissed, or worse.

In my case, the comments I get the most are "quit obsessing all the time and you will get better." It is like hearing, get rid of your anxiety and you will get better. Well that is a useless statement and reflects the lack of understanding about mental health issues - like it is a choice to hurt yourself - repeatedly.

Anytime I meet anyone with mental health issues, it is like an unsaid bond, I can relate. I can sympathize, I have an idea what you are going through. I see the crutch, I speak the language, I get it.

Describing my temporary insanity

My mental state went from what I described as my normal historical state (the person I had been my adult life) to a wet emotional mess overnight. As background, here is how I described my normal state: I ate a vegetarian diet, I exercised regularly, I meditated daily, and I was a light and short sleeper. I would describe my daily stress level as low and my emotional state as very stable. I had good balance between my personal life and professional career. If there was a crack in my armor it was a cross between restlessness and paranoia. I was always on guard, always scanning my environment, always looking for a threat. A ping on my personal radar would get my full attention and energy. I also was big on controlling everything that I interacted with, my friends and family all knew that I had OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). Although I still claim today that I was able to use my OCD as a method to focus and effective in having the will to get things done that I prioritized.

When the mental health issues began, it started with me worrying about bad and random thoughts that could happen to me. I started obsessing about my lack of sleep both in duration and quality. I also obsessed about my sinus congestion and my worrying about my inability to effectively breathe at night. My anxiety was all fear based, and I would not have previously described myself as fearful. My new emotional state had me worrying about everything and my behavior started to rapidly change.  I started to make my world smaller: number of people I spoke to, less places that I would go, and less opportunity to interact with others.

Another new mental issue I now had was the speed to which I would go from “something bad is going to happen” to the feeling of “bad things are happening to me and I cannot control them.” Bad things that flipped a switch to a constant state of fight or flight. I would feel the waves of adrenaline rush through my body and mind, empowering the fearful thoughts that I had choose to lock on to.

The last emotional shift that took place was the onset of panic attacks. For me panic attacks would start with emotions of great sadness and hopelessness.  Then there were physical things that happened: sweating, trembling, shortness of breath, nausea, and a racing heart. The fear that I felt was fear of dying and instability (like I might not ever feel normal again). They did not last very long in terms of time, like 15 minutes, but the after effects lingered for many hours. I would know when they would strike but I did not know how to manage my way through them.

I now had a new world that I had to learn how to navigate and I knew I needed professional help. What skills I had used to get me to this point in my life were failing in my flight for sanity and I needed some stability quick. The feeling that you are losing your mind is the worst feeling I have ever faced. The difference between sane and insane seemed one degree apart. One moment I was feeling as I always had felt: confident, happy and stable; the next moment I was emotionally out of control, panicking, fight for breath, and feeling helpless. This was my journey, my new reality that I had to fix.  

Sleep or lack thereof

Long before I knew what type of mental health issues I was struggling with; I knew I was fighting insomnia. I knew something was not right with my mental state as I had lost my ability to effectively sleep. The initial symptoms of poor sleep for me were based in a sinus problem, I was losing my ability to breathe through my nose. I would wake up every night gasping for air because my sinus were blocked. I started with a deviated septum, or a damaged nasal structure. Not consulting a doctor, I started to use over the counter nasal sprays to clear my sinus congestion. Because I used these products consistently for 8-12 weeks, I additionally developed nasal polyps in my sinuses which worsened my condition. I struggled with this condition for close to one year. The process of going to a doctor, going through their treatment and failing, getting a referral to a specialist (Ear, Nose, Throat), talking to my insurance company to understand my coverage, getting a second opinion on surgery recommendation, scheduling the surgery, etc. 

During that year I continued to try and develop methods to improve my poor sleeping. I had purchased many natural sleep supplements which had the ability to help me fall asleep but would only keep me down for a couple of hours. Then I would start the lonely journey of lying awake most of the night.  You know something is wrong when you are the only living thing awake in the middle of the night. It is a very lonely feeling, also one that quickly isolates you with most people because they have a hard time relating.

I continued my experiment of trying to find things to help me sleep. I increased the amount of wine that I was drinking, which like the sleep supplements, would help me pass out – only to awake a couple of hours later. I also research how marijuana could help me sleep. There are specific strains, CBD, that have been proven to help one sleep. Initially I had good success with marijuana helping me sleep, but I was building a tolerance to it pretty quickly, which caused me to increase my dosage to ridiculous and unsustainable amounts. Then I started to feel that my normal state of mind was no longer balanced, there was a certain instability to my mind. My homemade cocktails to help me sleep were also creating new problems and instability of my mental health.

Before this problem peaked, I had reached out to a therapist to help me. Initially I was cautious about reveling the severity of my problem and how I was trying to solve it. There was a negative reaction from the professionals that I was working with about the use of marijuana, almost in the form of shaming. Even though what I was doing was legal, it was not embraced. This made it hard for me to share the depth of problem and my homemade remedies to resolve it. More months went by and my sleeping problem worsened along with my new mental health issues of anxiety, depression and PTSD. I waited as long as I possibly could before accepting help for my condition. This delay also caused the cure hard to determine by masking the true symptoms of my ailment which was a stroke. After one year of failure to improve my breathing and sleeping habits, I was on the brink of breakdown, I asked for more help, and checked myself into a clinic. I now was dividing my curing process into resolving my breathing issues and trying to understand what was going on with my mental health. I eventually solved both problems and will talk more about the mental health battle in future articles.

Day 1

Well my story does not start with a definitive beginning or an end, the beginning can be linked to a series of side effects from having a stroke. I had sudden significant weight loss, I had double vision, and I started my journey with mental health: first PTSD, then anxiety and depression. At the time when this all started, I did not know that I had a stroke. So, my focus was trying to address a new and sudden set of health circumstances.

I say now to my friends and family that the difference between a normal mental state and a compromised state of mind is a very thin line. One day I was living what I would describe as a normal life and the next day my world started to crumble. The panic attacks that I felt were sudden, suffocating and disorienting. When they struck, I felt overwhelmed with sadness, had labored breathing and thought I was dying. After they passed, I would be disorientated to the point that I would have to remind myself who I was, where I lived, etc. I also had developed, over many years, a poor ability to sleep. What changed was I began to obsess about not sleeping which lead to poorer quality of sleep, between 3-5 hours of restless sleep per night, for almost one year. Suddenly something as simple as sleeping was now a major challenge for me, something I naturally did my entire life.  I also lost 40 lbs. in six weeks (my weight was 218 when the weight loss started) and could not see clearly. My body was trying to talk to me and I was not listening, so the siren in my body just continued to get louder until I could no longer withstand it.

This website will capture my journey through the health problems I faced, mostly focusing on mental health. I will talk about how I learned to cope with it, what it is like, and how I became stronger as a result. I choose the name of the website with tongue and cheek humor in an attempt to humanize the experience and the negative perceptions about mental health. As my therapist said to me, when you break an arm you have it fixed, so when you break a mind you should do the same thing. Yet for me, and for many people, there is a negative perception around mental health. I perceived it as a weakness, versus as something that is in need of repair. What I learned was my mind was in need of repair and could be healed.