Control Option Command

Indeed. Why does this ordinarily quite burlesque and colorful blog suddenly look like the works of Jacob Nielsen?

If you are new to this blog; move along, but if you’ve come to expect bright colors and swirly shit all over the place, take a while and harken.

I need a project to get back to my former glory, and I need to deliver myself a prompt, swift kick in the rear to get going. The best way to do this is to just publish this new design for the blog while it’s still butt-ugly so that I’ll have an incentive to fix it the fuck up as soon as humanly possible.

If you really miss the old design go visit Kajas blog.

That is all.

It was not my intention to turn this blog into some mock re-enactment of the bipolar curve, but…

shit…

It’s on me again.

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This is a shortie. I just want to tell you a couple of things pretty quickly.

1. One microgram is one millionth of a gram.

2. One microgram of certain stuff may make an enormous fucking difference in your brain.

3. Happiness is chemistry.

4. As is unhappiness.

5. This is Kaja.

6. These are some stats.

7. That’s all for now. I’m good. Thanks for asking. I hope you’re doing alright as well.

I have in fact been unable to work for the last nine months due to a rather severe depression. I won’t lie; It hasn’t been all fun and games, but it has been interesting.

I’d like to apologize in advance if this post comes out a bit jumbled and incoherent. There’s so many things I’ve been wanting to write about, and I do have a predisposition for rambling.

Depression hit me in March. It had been sneaking up on me for a while and then made it’s presence felt in that sudden and debilitating manner which is its custom. It was pretty clear to me that it was a big one from the get go. If you know me personally, you know I have a long history of moody extremism. To summarize for everyone else; I have bipolar disorder and have been treated for it since 2005 in some capacity or other. I’ve only ever felt depression of this magnitude and perseverance once, perhaps twice before.

So I’m having erratic sleeping patterns and I’m constantly fatigued and I’m going to my doctor getting my sick leave renewed every 2 weeks because I honestly think I’ll get over this soon and I get exhausted just looking after my daughter and I feel like shit. Depression. This was the stuff that had nearly ended me years earlier. Thankfully I’d grown a bit wiser or tougher or less melodramatic since then and I had an inkling on what to expect; Irrational thoughts and feelings. You know the kind I’m talking about. Even if you go through all the facts and it’s plain to see that 2 + 2 is indeed 4 and your family does love you, there’s this overwhelming feeling telling you that you are a worthless being and a burden to those you love. You can stare these irrational and delusional emotions in the metaphorical eye and know them for what they are, but you will still feel them.

And that’s basically what I did for a couple of months. Whenever I felt anything that I could rationally recognize as an unfounded negative emotions I put my hands over my ears and shouted until it went away, so to speak. Hardly what you’d call an ideal situation, but a hell of a lot better than last time around.

Then at some point I clicked a link to a YouTube video from a Stanford University lecture on depression given by Robert Sapolsky. I had just started taking Escitalopram which is an antidepressant that affects serotonin, the “happy hormone”, in an effort to get me out of the gutter. In fact, I’d already been regulating my mood disorder since 05 with different varieties of psychopharma, but beyond checking what side effects I might expect I had never really tried to understand anything about the drugs I was taking. I’m not a brain surgeon. This lecture however changed my point of view somewhat. A slight readjustment of my mental, hah, image of what goes on in my brain.

Never before had this stuff seemed even remotely accessible. To me, and I’m betting I’m not the only one, neurobiology seemed just as distantly removed from me as astronomy. Yet here this guy is drawing on a whiteboard and explaining in words I could understand exactly how Escitalopram works. He’s drawing pictures of what happens in my brain when I feel an irrational feeling of low self-esteem, and you don’t have to be neither a brain surgeon or a maniac to follow along.

Wow. Some people find Jesus. I found Sapolsky. I had always repeated the words “It’s biology. Some valve or drain in my brain is clogged. It’s no different than diabetes or lactose intolerance.” but now I finally actually believed it in my heart of hearts. If it’s broken, it’s fixable.

About this time I started having really bad tremors. My hands were shaking to the point where it became embarrassing to eat or have coffee with others because these activities required more dexterity than I, a 30 year old man, could muster. I decided that I was now at a point where the side effects of the drugs I was taking were so severe that they negated the supposed benefit. I started actually reading up on my medication, more than just enough to sound interesting at parties, and decided that the anti-epileptic Lamictal ¹ was the most probable culprit. I (responsibly) consulted my doctor and quit the anti-epileptics altogether. My mood was turning from melancholy to a sort of dogged bloody-mindedness. I was determined to wait this shit out. But even though my mood was becoming less of a problem my other symptoms were not.

I still couldn’t predict whether I would sleep for 30 minutes or 30 hours when I went to bed. The only sleeping meds that worked were too strong for me to dare take them when I was taking care of my daughter, in case I wouldn’t wake up if she was screaming. I was still constantly fatigued and had problems focusing on any even remotely intellectual task such as reading, writing or indeed; coding.

Now, up until this point I had last been in regular treatment with a psychiatrist three years earlier. This psychiatrist, while in all probability very capable, was working under the strain of the under-staffed, over-worked public services in Norway. The care I received while being a guest of their establishment was impeccable, but I’d be lying if I said that they work without restraints and are able to custom tailor the treatment to each patients special needs.

Although it pained me as an avid supporter of public health care, I decided I had to consult a specialist on bipolar disorder in the private sector. We don’t really do that sort of thing in Norway. I also decided that now is not the time for therapy. I know a lot of people feel strongly that medication should always go hand in hand with psychotherapy, but right now I need actual bits of my brain to do their actual damn job. Like someone once said about another health reform; “The time for talk is over”.

The first thing he did was send me off to do a plethora of tests that I had never been subject to in my years of professional bipolarity. He also told me that he felt a different anti-depressant than the one I was currently taking would probably help a lot more. He asked if I wanted to start taking them right away or wait for the tests. I took the pills.

By the next session we’d determined that anti-epileptic drugs (which I have been taking for 5 years) are completely wasted on me and that a lot of my symptoms are due to my metabolism being shot to hell because I lack some obscure thyroid that I’ve never heard of nor been tested for. Also; I had started dating again after more than 2 years of sexual indifference. The new anti-depressants seem to be working is what I’m saying.

Now, I need to tack on a disclaimer right about here. One of the things that is a huge pain in the ass with mental disorders is that it’s really really hard to judge your own current status. In hindsight it’s usually easy to spot when you’ve been manic or when you’ve been depressed, but it’s a bitch to try and figure out your status right now since you are viewing it through glasses tinted with either extreme optimism or or extreme pessimism. That’s why It’s a good idea to wait a while before you decide whether a certain treatment seem to be helpful or not.
Still… I was able to write this post now, and that’s not nothing.

So, am I well? No. Not yet. My sleeping patterns are messed up and I still have problems concentrating. But I just started on yet another² drug to help with the thyroid problem and my psychiatrist is hopeful that it’ll help with several of these issues. But even if it doesn’t work, I remain optimistic. And the reason I remain optimistic is because I am finished fighting ghosts. Now I’m just looking for the right formula, and that seems a lot easier.

They say one sign of madness is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. Well, I’m not doing the same thing anymore. I’m doing something different.

Today my grandfather died. He was 90 years old, or so few months shy that you’d be deeply neurotic to say different. He’d been in poor health for a long while now and I believe he was staying alive more out of politeness than anything else. Above all he was a very polite, kind and gentle man.

I’ve been around a few dead, and a few dying, people in my time. Somehow watching my grandfather on his deathbed was a lot more terrible than watching a guy in his twenties or thirties fight for his life after an accident or a stabbing or a diabetic coma. A young man, however serious his condition, somehow at least gives the impression of having some life force to fight back with. My grandfather at his last was skeletally thin, his skin a motley grey and blue and his body drained of will and power to live.

I saw him hours before he died. He was unconscious, but we can never know what he heard of our bedside chatter. My grandmother, who has been suffering from dementia for a while, was looking for a younger version of him or, when convinced that the man in the hospital bed was indeed her husband, trying to convince my mother that he was cold and should wear a shirt out of a misguided sense of decency. I have no knowledge of how dementia feels for the afflicted, but I hope against hope she won’t live out her days discovering every day, for the first time, that her husband is dead.

As I alluded to earlier I feel pretty sure my grandfather was ready to die and had been for some time. Although he was a gentle, kind and unassuming man he had always been a real man in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Not a Clint Eastwood and not a Frank Sinatra. Not even a working-class hero. He was a real man in the sense of a man who becomes an engineer because it’s a sensible way to make a living for himself and his family. A real man who could fix a bike or a lawnmower properly and had a workshop in the basement, not because he wanted to spend a lot of time in a workshop but because it’s good to have access to the proper tools to mend things around the house and fix things that are broken. A real man who, when my mother was young and the first Italian influence was introduced to the Norwegian kitchen, wanted potatoes with his spaghetti; Without potatoes it wasn’t a real dinner. I think being emasculated by age, and feeling his memory and wits slowly disappear over the last few years drained him of his will to go on, and in the end he only clung to life out of concern for my grandmother.

I was lucky to get to spend a lot of time with my grandfather in my childhood. Norway is a very long country, and we lived initially in opposite ends of it, but as I turned nine our family moved to Oslo and in fact moved right next door to my grandparents. When I was a toddler my grandfather built me a swing in the tree out in their garden. He built me a sandbox out of four great logs and he let me “help” by holding the other end of the saw, or assist with digging a trench for the log with my little shovel. We were doing it together. When I was older he took me out into the woods to find suitable bits of wood to make bows and slingshots and boomerangs, and he told me stories from the huge tomes of fairy tales and folklore he had procured for his grandchildren.

My grandfather was, as my grandmother still is, a deeply religious person. Those who read this blog regularly or know me in person know that I am not a fan of religion. If religion had always manifested itself as it did with my grandparents I would have no problems with it. In fact I would celebrate it, even as a non-believer. These pious people have been confronted with an atheist daughter who chose to marry a communist from Tromsø ¹, a granddaughter who married a dark-skinned, divorcee from Madagascar, a lesbian granddaughter and a borderline criminal grandson² who fathered a child out of wedlock. And they loved us all. Unconditionally and without judgment. No sermons, no evangelism, no attempts to make us “better our ways”. Just love.

They spent last christmas with me, my ex and our bastard child. Truth to be told the question of whether or not we were going to marry, or perhaps already were married came up several times since my grandmothers memory isn’t all it was, but every time we told her that; No. There won’t be a wedding. We have a child together, but we’re just friends now. She’d reply “Oh. Alright. I didn’t know that”. A couple of times she’d laugh and say “Hah hah… It wasn’t like that when we were young!”.

My grandfather, sadly, was already beyond involving himself in such topics. As I’ve already stated; He was a very polite man and wouldn’t want to burden the company with the fact that he had trouble following the conversation, or indeed remembering the last ten years. Still, whenever he saw the baby that unbeknownst to him was his great-grandchild crawling around on the floor giddy with the glamour of paper wrappings and new toys he would light up and make funny noises at her or pat her lovingly on the head. I think he communicated more with her than with the rest of us that evening.

These old coots. These two nonagenerians. They are truly the salt of the earth, for all that metaphor is worth nowadays. They have, or had, a decency towards their fellows and an approach to new people that puts me to shame in some ways. In short, these people are the embodiment of all the things I see that is good about religion and none of the things that makes me oppose it.

Kurt Vonnegut has a great quote detailing what he would like to tell all newborn babies if he had the chance:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. About kindness and consideration for fellow human beings and how so much of the worlds problems would just go away if we had all been born with Vonneguts words in mind. My grandfather was the model of kindness on which I think Vonnegut would have modeled his introduction to life for all the babies.

I guess I could go on waxing poetic about my grandfather for a while, but I shan’t. He was a sterling guy and I am glad to have had him in my life. Now that he passed on I’m glad it only passed a day from him entering what we knew would be his deathbed until he was relieved. If I’m wrong and the bible is right, you’d be hard pressed to find even a fundamentalist sect of Christians that wouldn’t agree that this man should have his place in heaven. If I’m right he will live on in our hearts and minds. If that sounds like a platitude it’s because clichés become clichés because they’re often true.

Rest in peace, Hans Gammelsæter.