'The best medicine,' by me, via Flickr

Speaking from personal experience (is there any other way?) the key to successful recovery from a life-changing problem is all down to setting up and maintaining a routine. I have yet to fully sort out my routine but because I have been working toward developing one, I am starting to get better. Life is starting to get better too and even though it has been less than two weeks since everything fell apart for me, I can now see there is a way to set things right again and move on with my life.

The bruises are still healing but time fixes everything, as they say. I’m on the road to recovery and if I maintain the routine I am developing, I will not only manage to pay the bills, get accounts in order and keep them in order but I will also manage to complete the 365 days of photography project without a missed photograph (it has been very hard to keep that going sometimes but now I’m near the end, being able to look back on the collection I’ve put together is fantastic) and I’ll also have two active YouTube channels to boot!

The routine is a fairly simple one. I get up around 7-7.30 am, read for a while in the bath while I wake up (a cup of tea helps with this), then read the Internet while I have breakfast. After that, I’ll either start on researching the articles I’m going to write or, if the light is good, I’ll record my videos. I record two videos each day; one is a topical comedy show with news and law thrown in for good measure, the other is a vlog.

Speaking of topical news shows, here is today’s. It’s both news and law but it’s mainly opinion.

If I’ve recorded, I edit the videos and set them to upload while I begin work on writing the articles. If I didn’t record yet, I write the articles. When I take a break from the articles (and I’ll need one because there’s only so much typing I can do in one sitting right now – my head is still not fully together) I either record and edit my videos then set them to upload while I finish work, or I watch videos on YouTube. At some point during all this, I have lunch with Jennifer.

This will usually take me all day to complete and I aim to finish around 6 in the evening but so far I’ve usually been finishing around 8 pm. Once I’m done, the evening is mine. I like to draw the next day’s comic in the evening while watching a film, listening to an audiobook or maybe listening to a podcast. It’s nice.

Then, once everything is done and the comic is uploaded, I settle down with Jennifer to watch a film, or maybe a couple of episodes of Doctor Who.

It’s a nice routine, and one I never thought I’d have. Routines used to bother me because I preferred to have a life where I did what I wanted, when I wanted. Now, I prefer some structure to my life because it keeps my head together. Maybe that’s the result of my life crashing down in pieces around me or maybe I just finally grew up. Who knows? I don’t.

Anyway, it’s about time I stopped writing now so I’ll leave you with today’s vlog and I’ll see you later!

Parents, family and close friends may not wish to read this entry. In fact, I wouldn’t blame anyone for not reading this. I just have to write it to get it out of my system.

I took every tablet in the house that I could get my hands on, cut into my wrists with a pair of scissors because the knife I tried to use didn’t work, and then attempted to open the wounds with a saw because the scissors were taking too long. I didn’t feel any pain (the theme to M.A.S.H. comes to mind) but I must have been in some because I blacked out before I could do any major damage.

When I woke up, I called an ambulance. They arrived a few minutes later (the ambulance station is a three minute drive from my house) and took me to the hospital, where I was immediately informed that I couldn’t leave until I had been assessed by a psychiatrist. I nodded when asked if I understood because I was too busy vomiting to actually speak. Then a load of trainee nurses attempted to get some blood out of me, giving me three large and nasty bruises on my arm in the process. To be honest, that was the least of my worries.

My mother and sister rushed down from Durham to see me. Jennifer’s mother arrived before them and stayed with me for most of the day, right into the evening. She was amazing and I really have to thank her for her support. Jennifer came as soon as she could (she was in Scotland with work when she found out). She cried, we argued a little because both of us were upset, then she left.

Jen, my Mother and my sister all then went through my accounts, the files in my office and everything else in the house to work out what had caused me to do this. They found all sorts, every problem I’d been bottling up over the last year came to a head and they set about making a plan to resolve it all. Meanwhile, I spent most of the first day laid in hospital, vomiting and sleeping then doing it all over again.

The next day, they confronted me with all the problems and we had to have A Talk. It was almost like an intervention, only I wasn’t on alcohol or drugs. Instead, I had to explain to them the problems I have been battling against because of my mental illness. Then the psychiatrist finally arrived and I had to explain everything to him as well, going right back to the first time I did massively stupid things like tried to fight crime, believing I was invulnerable to harm.

Yes, you read that right. If anyone wants to know why bipolar people aren’t allowed to serve on juries, read that last sentence again.

Anyway, he eventually confirmed the diagnosis I had been given earlier in the week and said I could go home because although I had made a concerted effort to kill myself (no “cry for help” here), it was clear that my mind was back to functioning normally and I presented no danger to myself of others. Besides, as he put it, I would go “stir crazy” if put on a psych ward for observation because my “intellect requires stimulus” and psych wards are stimulus-free zones in order to maintain calm.

So I went home, where I had to face Jen and my Dad (who I thought was going to be angry with me for scaring Mum and my sister so much but he was actually incredibly kind and understanding). We had Long, Serious Talks and aired all the family history in order to make sense of what has been going on. Then, once plans were in place to sort out the mess I had made, we sat down to talk like a family again.

Now, two weeks later, the wounds are healing nicely but I may end up with some scars. The mental health team visits every few days to make sure I’m doing okay and to let me talk over any problems but I think they are going to reduce their number of visits per week now I’m getting back on my feet. Mum phones almost every night, which still makes me sad because it’s yet more evidence of how much I hurt her, but at least she can tell that I’m doing okay.

As a result, I am getting my life back on track after a year of sheer hell. Stress, illness, moving house, financial worries and general mental illness all conspired to push me over the edge, but my loved ones caught me before I fell too far to be brought back.

I will always be grateful to them for that.

'Pouring Water' by me, via Flickr

The last few days have been stressful, to say the least. I was so worried about what the psychiatrist would say when I saw him on Monday that over the weekend, I hardly managed to get anything done at all. It has been terrible to think that there were two possible reasons for the delusions I’ve had over the last few months, and one of those reasons was that my mind had created a wild but highly intricate fantasy.

I hoped that the psychiatrist would say everything was fine with me and that the reason I had thought I had been working for months now when I had actually not been doing anything was because the antidepressants I had been on had given me terrible side effects. I hoped he would say I would be fine once the medication had been given enough time to leave my system.

He did not say that. He told me the evidence I presented suggested I was mentally ill and that I had created the delusion due to a combination of stress and mania. Not just normal, everyday mania though, he called it hypermania. I had to look that up because it’s not on Wikipedia or my normal haunts. Basically, it’s state of “full-on psychotic mania”. Great. No diet crazy for me, then.

He told me I was likely to be mentally ill and suffering from Bipolar Affective Disorder. This is something Jennifer and I have suspected for a long time but which I never had confirmed in the past because I was unnerved by the stigma associated with mental illness. Yes, I know. That’s terribly shallow of me but that’s just how it is.

Even though I knew in the back of my mind that he was going to tell me it wasn’t the medication that caused my problems, I didn’t want to hear it. The actual diagnosis came as a shock to my system. The fact that he wants to start me on lithium to treat the illness, and the fact that he handed me forms to get blood, thyroid and cardiac tests done immediately so that I wouldn’t have a big delay before treatment could start was an even bigger shock. Am I so badly damaged that treatment can’t possibly wait a second longer than absolutely necessary? Damn. I don’t do anything by halves, apparently. When it comes to the chuckle factory, I go all in.

I talked a little about what this might mean for my intended career in law in today’s vlog. The short version is that I might not be able to become a barrister even if the resits in April go well. I’ll have to check up on whether mental illness bars me from practicing at the highest levels in the court system or not. I hope it doesn’t but I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that you need to be all there if you’re going to represent someone in the higher courts.

Monday wasn’t all bad news, however. On the way to the hospital, I checked my emails and found I had been asked to licence one of my images from the 365 Days of Photography project to the company making 2012 olympics commemorative stamps. They want to make a stamp bearing an image from each city the olympic torch is passing through, which includes Bolton. Specifically, they want my photograph of Bolton Town Hall to represent Bolton on their stamps. I said yes. How could I not?

Tonight we’ve had Jen’s parents and grandfather around for a meal. It was nice to see them again, and nice to chat with everyone. Jen told them what the psychiatrist had said and it didn’t seem to affect how they acted around me, which is great. I knew it wouldn’t change anything but there’s always that worry in the back of my mind, as I’m sure you can understand. It’s that stigma thing rearing its seven puss-filled, greasy heads again.

Still, the evening went very nicely and we all enjoyed it. Jen showed them her YouTube videos via the wonders of the YouTube app on the Xbox 360, which was fun. It’s interesting to see images I recorded on my telephone being streamed across the ether onto our TV screen. The future is a wonderful place to live, isn’t it?

Speaking of videos, I think I’ve spent enough time rambling at you all today so I’ll leave you with a brief episode from the Nobmouse channel. Today marks the end of the New Funkytron saga, so expect regular programming to return tomorrow.

Bye for now!