Hello, hello! Welcome to the Bipolar Parent’s Saturday Morning Mental Health Check in: Appointments Edition!
How are you? How’s life treating you lately? What have you been up to this week? Have you been maintaining your self-care routine? How are the kids? What parenting challenges have you been dealing with lately? Please let me know; I genuinely want to hear from you!
My Week
My week has been following the theme of the previous couple of weeks: utterly depressing. I just haven’t been myself lately. I’ve been struggling to do housework and the most basic of tasks, like brushing my teeth (ew).
I missed an appointment with my therapist on Monday. I completely forgot about it. Luckily, I was able to reschedule for Wednesday.
My therapist believes my depression may be seasonal. I have been unusually exhausted lately as well, so she asked me if I would a) get a physical and some bloodwork done with my primary care physician, and b) set up an appointment with my psychiatrist.
I have the appointment with the PCP on Tuesday of next week and the psychiatrist on Thursday. I am blessed to have a treatment team, and decent insurance.
On Thursday, I started potty training the toddler. She’s amazing at it. She only had a few accidents on Thursday; on Friday, she had one. I am so proud of her.
Unfortunately, I was so excited to potty train her, and so focused on asking “do you need to go potty?” every fifteen minutes, that I missed my morning meds (Welbutrin and vitamin D) on Thursday. That threw me for a loop for the whole rest of the week.
Wellbutrin shares a caffeine pathway, which means I can’t simply take it in the afternoon, or the medication will keep me awake at night. No sleep means mania for me, usually. I want to avoid that at all costs, as mania is much more destructive than depression in my experience.
On Friday, I did very little, except to fold 5 loads of laundry that had piled up on my bed. I also, to my chagrin, yelled at my son for making his sister scream. There’s something about a high-pitched, extended, hysterical screaming that goes right to my primal brain.
So that’s been my week. A week of big, stressful changes, that I’ve been experiencing through a thick fog of apathy. Hopefully my PCP and psychiatrist figure out what’s wrong and treat me accordingly. Thanks for listening, and wish me luck!
Related:
- Getting Support During a Bipolar Depression Episode
- 10 Signs That You Are a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)
- 11 Lessons I Learned From 11 Years of Managing Bipolar Disorder
