XI. Drugs

XI. Drugs

I have to give some kind of appreciation of bipolar manic depression.  Manic depression was a term I had heard many times in my life, often applied to me; but the term bipolar was new to me, and it took me awhile and to figure out that it was just a new way of talking about a psychological disorder I had known about for a long time.  The good news is that, since I was a high-school, psychiatrists have learned a lot about why people have extreme mood swings from hilarious elation to desperate depression, and have come up with some medications for it.  But not quite soon enough for Tina. 

As I mentioned earlier, Tina's mental condition started reaching debilitating levels shortly after Ambrose was born, and I figured it was this hormone thing that happens to women, and it would go away soon.  When it didn't go away I started thinking that Tina was just being wimpy and weak-willed.  I figured if she just applied herself to the problem she could make herself better; drugs were not the answer. Well, when she first went on Prozac and got a lot better, I realized drugs were the answer.  But the effort to find the right medications, and combinations of medications has been an uphill battle for these 15 years.  In our experience, prescription drugs tend to work like every other kind of drug, i.e., they work for awhile, and then they stop working, forget why.  During some periods of her life Tina had been on medications that seemed to work well, when she appeared to be doing well; she was a reasonable person to live with, accomplished a lot, and was not constantly snapping at me and putting me down.  

When we were at the Big U, she was a miracle of industry, managing to hold down a part-time job, get a master's degree, and write  the first draft of her book (which, incidentally, that year won both the Outstanding Master's Thesis Award for her department, in addition to the Outstanding Master's Thesis Award for the entire university.).  However, it was during that time that I first noticed that she was not sleeping very much.  I don't know if it really started then or not, because we had not slept together for years, for two reasons: first, obviously, our schedules were very different, she always keeping me up at night, and I was always waking her up too early in the morning; but the other reason I stopped sleeping with her was that  I have a powerful sex drive, and have always been madly attracted to her, while she had always thought of sex as something like manual labor, and said no to me so often that I just couldn't stand going to sleep every night with a hard-on.  This is one of the reasons why her affair with Dan Tucker was ultimately surprising, but more on this later. 

I understood that one of the problems, with that fall, was the fact that she was changing medications.  One of the advantages we saw  to her going to San Jose, was that there she might be able to  get some help from some big city cutting edge doctors.  It was indeed over the  phone that I first heard the term bipolar.  Bipolar manic depression, she said, was different from normal depression, and the anti-depressant medication she had been on for several years was actually contributing to her  degenerating mental condition, by helping to keep her awake.  This business of not sleeping for three days  in a row, was not a charming eccentricity, an attribute of her genius,  it was a serious, serious problem that needed to be dealt with immediately.  

She needed to go on what was called a mood stabilizer to deal with the bipolar condition, and in order to do that she must come off the anti-depressant medication she was on.  I knew this was going to be bad boogey from the beginning because, whenever she had changed medications before, there was always this dark, dark period when  she was totally unmedicated and really went nuts with negative thoughts and feelings.  So, not only was she going to be depressed between medications, she was going be that way in a strange place, with all kinds of the external pressures on her,  and nobody to take care of her.  I still think this was a major miscalculation on the psychiatrist's part; I think Tina should never have been put through that difficult transition in her current context.  Psychiatrists can be pretty fucking dumb. 

I did so many wrong things that year, they all clamor for recognition in the "Stupid Shit Hall of Fame", but I believe the grand prize of all the dumb stuff I did that year goes to this one thing: I never got a phone.  I never got a phone.  I can't believe it.  It would have cost $50, maybe $60; but I insisted on taking all my phone calls at my office, which meant I was never there on weekends, for emergencies, in the middle of the night, whenever she needed me.  I have always hated the phone, don't get the phone, and come over really crummy on the phone.  Nevertheless, women, (I think it is all women), do get the phone, use the phone, need the phone, and dumbshit Dan Tucker, hermit mountaineer, dweller in dirt floor shacks, reader of dime novels, high school graduate, had the brains to get a goddamn phone.  Tina later explained to me than Tucker's   subsistence lifestyle was based on economy, humility, and spartan vacuity; it was a compromise of his basic values for him to get a phone.  Yet, because he went to the trouble, he could stay in  constant touch with Tina through her crisis, and became her best friend, while I became an evil demon.