Noticing symptoms - my personal story

Last night gave me a big scare. It is extremely easy to have someone going through terrible pain and suffering due to mental illness right in front of you, while you do not have a clue that something is wrong. I am a great example of that conundrum.

When I was growing up you could easily have called me an over achiever. On top of earning good grades and taking advanced placement courses, I was heavily involved in all kinds of activities. My acting career began when I was eight. I was cast in a leading role in a university production. Not long after that I was in a television show for PBS. At the age of sixteen I earned the lead role in a production which toured Europe and was televised there. That was all on top of what I did through my high school and community theater.

Of course, that wasn’t enough for me. I was also an active, successful participant on the Forensics team, in DECA club, and choir, winning state and national awards as well as serving in many leadership positions. Since the age of eight I played the piano. My first composition won an award. Later on, at the age of fourteen, another piece I composed won a very important national honor.

By the time I graduated from high school I had already earned enough university credits to be classified as a sophomore. I pushed myself hard and believed I was unstoppable.

The over achieving alone was a sign of things to come. It’s not normal for a kid to do so much. All the time there was this constant pressure inside me telling me I needed to be more, to do more, that I wasn’t good enough.

There were down times which were like being trapped in a black hole. I would isolate myself, completely convinced no one wanted to be my friend. For hours I’d lay on the bed in my room staring at the ceiling.

I’d come home from dates and various activities only to break down sobbing in hopelessness. My parents brushed it off as teenage angst, PMS, and exhaustion, all very reasonable explanations. No one could have known It was all bipolar behavior. Back then no one knew about bipolar disorder. Little was known about depression.

At one point, after my mother had my brother, her fourth child, she went into a very serious depression. My parents went to great lengths to shield we kids from what was going on, but things were bad enough that I remember my dad sitting us down, explaining how mommy needed some extra help. She spent a lot of time locked in her bedroom. I don’t think my parents ever considered getting her medical help beyond some basic advice. They knew it was postpartum depression and figured over time it would pass.

So how would a person know if someone like me needed help? The real indicators didn’t show up until after I got married at the very young age of eighteen. The stress I put on myself boiled over. My memory began to deteriorate. I began having panic attacks - although I didn’t know what panic attacks were at the time. My headaches increased. My emotions became extremely unstable to the point that my husband began to wonder what happened to the girl he thought he had married.

Since much of my problem is based in my hormones, taking birth control pills made everything worse. I gained ten pounds of water weight, which made me hate myself even more than I had.

Hate myself you wonder? Yes. I was in a constant race against myself trying to prove that I was a person of value and importance. When we were courting, it took my husband an entire day of constantly lingering at my side, demanding an answer, until I finally admitted I loved him. It was too terrifying to make myself so vulnerable. On the surface I tried so hard to put on the face of confidence and control while inwardly I could find one reason after another why people would have good reason to reject me.

Not even a full year into our marriage the indicators were clear that I was having some serious problems. My extreme mood swings, the memory loss, inability to concentrate, insecure need for constant reassurance from my husband that he loved me, that I was indeed lovable, were all clear signs.

The two of us decided I could no longer take birth control pills. That was a wise decision. Beyond that we didn’t think there was a problem. Soon after, I went back to my old habits of thinking I could do anything. I piled mountains of stress on myself - working part time, attending school with more than a full time credit load, performing in a professional traveling show for extra income, and so on.

After two years of marriage we decided one of us had to graduate. Financially speaking, one of us needed to be working full time. I was the one closest to being done. I was the idiot who believed I could do anything, so we decided I was the one who had to finish school. With special permission from the university (due to my good grades) I took on a class load which was twice as much as the number of credits considered to be full time.

One month in I found out I was pregnant. The first thing that came to my mind was the stories I’d heard of how Chinese women would be working in the fields, pop out a baby, and return to their task. I figured if so many other women could do so much while they were pregnant, I wasn’t going to let it slow me down in any way.

For obvious reasons, I did have to quit the traveling show I was in. Otherwise I continued working, getting in as many extra hours as I could. It was unquestionably insane.

In December of that year our apartment building was sold to a new investor who decided to raise the rent considerably. It was far beyond our budget. In order to complete my required student teaching winter semester I had no choice but to quit my part time job. The loss of my income was too crushing. When we were unable to find another affordable place, we ended up moving in with my parents.

Although my parents were wonderful about the whole thing, our situation only became worse. My husband was mortified that we were living with his in-laws. The weight of his responsibility of being a provider was crushing him. We had a child on the way. My huge belly was a constant reminder of that impending lifelong commitment. He was scared.

I didn’t have time to get scared. Every day I had to be at the high school working the same hours as the drama teacher I was assigned as my mentor. In theater school doesn’t end when the bell rings. Always there are rehearsals lasting at least until 5:00. Saturdays were required. On top of that, I was still trying to take an evening course.

I was exhausted, overwhelmed. This strange, constant nagging pain was in the top of my head. My ability to focus was slipping.

By the time winter semester ended, even though we couldn’t afford it, I’d found us an apartment. It was clear my husband couldn’t deal with living with my parents any more and I needed to have my baby in my own home.

I went into a crazy cleaning frenzy just before we moved in. Any kind of dirt or mess within my home had become a point of extreme distress and aggravation. I’d start cleaning, but the more I cleaned, the more I realized there was no way I could get rid of all the dirt. It was probably the first time I ever noticed my own odd obsessive compulsive behavior.

We moved. The pain in my head continued to grow worse. Everything in general seemed worse. I couldn’t concentrate on any of my school work. When I could concentrate for a moment or two I’d end up falling asleep. With my student teaching completed I was able to return to my job. My credit load was higher than ever. Just to get everything in before August graduation I was working to test out of a number of classes. In the mean time I was scheduling interviews with local schools for teaching positions.

Midway through spring term on a Friday my son was born. I actually had to call a principal from the hospital to cancel an employment interview. Determined to not let anything keep me down, I was back in class by the following Tuesday.

Things start getting blurry after that. My husband and I were so thrilled with our new son. I wanted to be everything for him. Since I was breast feeding I was up all night, never able to get any kind of regular sleep. During the day I have little ‘black outs.’ I’d be doing one thing, like walking to class, then I’d find myself in a whole other place. The missing time was nominal. I don’t think I even noticed it was happening at first. Then, when it started as I was driving, it increasingly began to scare me.

All the same, I blamed it on exhaustion and did not allow myself to think it was anything serious. Somehow I survived spring term. Summer started. I was six weeks away from graduating. Everything was still on schedule.

I don’t know what I looked like to my husband. He was worn to the bone just like me, doing hard labor full time as a roofer over the summer. At night I’d been trying to let him sleep even though the baby kept me up. Outwardly I was going to great lengths trying to convince everyone including myself that I was fine.

I already wrote about the hallucinations that began (The Brain Tumor). They were what prompted me to go to my doctor. I was convinced the only reasonable explanation for me to be having such horrible hallucinations, black outs, memory loss, and constant headaches, had to be a brain tumor. That one misconceived notion probably saved my life.

There were signs and symptoms all over the place, but no one noticed, not even me until it was almost too late. That is one of the most fearsome things about mental illness. Someone can be falling apart right in front of your own face. If you don’t know what to look for, you could miss it entirely - an oftentimes very fatal mistake.