Go Ask Alice

The Polar Bears are waxing the Moon
the little dog laughs and dishes the spoon
Alice followed the old stoner rabbit
into the twilight zone of the outer limits
and lost her mind to the others, Brother.
See you in another life! Hickory! Dickory! Lock!

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn

Over at the Poll Vault at Delphi Forums Diane started a Poll asking the question, "Do you sometimes get so weird you even freak yourself out?" Here is my reply:


I'm Bi-Polar. Sometimes my medications aren't effective enough to control the mood swings and I swing into a manic high that gets a little too euphoric or maybe too paranoid. It depends on what is going on in my life. Whatever the case it is it's always interesting.

Occasionally I've even gotten close to psychosis. People in the throes of a mania often experience heightened sensabilities. Being touched may be unbearable to them. For me, my tinnitus (ringing in the ears) becomes so acute and the sounds I hear begin to sound like radio sports announcers just loud enough that I can hear them but not understand what they are saying so I begin to think maybe it's a radio or TV playing somewhere. Intellectually I know that it's not but the noise is just driving me so up the wall I want to find the source and turn it off. I constantly have to remind myself that it's the tinnitus not the TV or the radios in the apartment.

There was an interesting couple of days when I thought the noise was coming from the refrigerator. No amount of self talk could convince me it wasn't. I had to pull the refrigerator out and unplug it for a couple of hours to prove to myself that the damn refrigerator wasn't talking to me. Now that's effing freaky. Actually I also thought it might be running low on anti freeze or whatever it is they put in the pipes to make it work and was gurgling. It's a noisy refrigerator. At least that was how I justified unplugging it.

When things get that bad--usually when I haven't gotten enough sleep for a couple of days or more, I have an antipsychotic medication calkled Zyprexa I keep on hand to take that knocks me back on my butt and putts me to sleep for at least 10 hours. Then I wake up all better and back to normal. My tinnitus is back to a low hum again and I can ignore it. Sometimes I need to take the Zyprexa a couple of days in a row. If I ever have to go more than three days, I'll be on the phone to my psychiatrist because my meds will have stopped working and I'm in deep doo doo.

B