Fat AND bipolar?

Yes.  It's true.

I am fat.  I am bipolar.  I won't go into the rest of my flaws; they could take up and entire and very long entry and there's no need to bore you with all of my junk.  Not that having a mental illness is a flaw any more than having cancer is a flaw.  I didn't ask for it and I didn't do anything to bring it on.  The fat?  That's another story.  That I can control (to an extent).  I control what I put in my mouth and I control how active I am each day.

As I sit here, I have eaten nearly an entire bag of m&ms.  It's not pretty and I expect severe nausea to kick in any minute now.

I know I've said before, I'm an emotional eater.  Here is where the bipolar fits in with the fat.  Life has not been going terribly well lately.  I feel no need to go into details, and some of them are far too personal to write on a public forum.  But, I am an emotional mess.  I've stopped several times at the supermarket and/or Target picking up Ben & Jerry's and a variety of candy and "regular" ice cream - have you tried Turkey Hill's Party Cake flavor?  Wow, delicious!  The emotions that have me eating are not at the mania/hypomania end of the spectrum.  They are where I spent most of my time - at the depression end.  Severe depression.  With death thoughts.  So I eat, and then I feel more angry and more depressed.  It turns into the perfect - awful - cycle.

The stress!  We had to cancel a dream vacation because we weren't able to save the necessary money each month - a new fridge; dental work; a new (to me) car; 2 weeks ago was a new sliding glass door; last weekend was 3 new toilets - which now require new seat covers and floor mats; Casey (the bigger dog) got sick; the list goes on and on.

I wound up very sick in Aug/Sept with a stomach virus and was, therefore, unable to keep my meds down.  Knowing it was a holiday weekend, I paged my psychiatrist that Friday to avoid needing to contact him over the weekend.  I called before noon on Friday.  After not hearing back 2 hours later, I called and got an answer, being told that he was with a new patient and could be a while but she would make sure he got the message.  She called me back and said he never received the page but would call me back later and that he may want my chart in front of him.  To give you the full picture here, the Wednesday AND Thursday prior to this call I was in the ER - most pertinent piece of info here being that I got home at 2:30 am Friday morning.  Being somewhat incoherent I made sure there was someone with me so that I could remember what the doc said.  By 10 pm, no call and hubby and I were exhausted, so we went to bed.  11 pm - I repeat 11 pm (!) the phone rang and it was him.  Totally inappropriate and unacceptable!  He said maybe he'd call back the following day.  Not hearing from him by 11 am-ish, I paged him and took another several hours until he called back.  He gave me a bit of an attitude and a titration schedule for my meds.  Of course I had Mr B stay with  me until he finally had to go to the grocery store so I was home alone, with a list that made only minimal sense to me.  I wasn't lucid and I wasn't stable.  One night at midnight I had a very embarrassing symptom.  I wound up paging my GYN (I verified that she was the one on-call and that she was awake already for a delivery; she is also a family friend).  She called the next day after giving me several suggestions to help with the symptoms overnight.  She had done some research and found a name for my symptoms and the probable reason was one of my psych meds.  Of course I called my psychiatrist back and he was really quite arrogant, saying that he'd never heard of it.  Basically since he didn't know of it, it mustn't be the cause, if it even exists.  Now, the psychiatrist is in his 50's, the gynecologist is in her 30's.

So, I got a new psychiatrist.  I'd had my feelers out for over a year with no success.  I'd exhausted anyone my psychologist knew so was left on my own - and that's ok.  After the above situation I'd had it.  The final straw.  So, I have a new one.  I saw him for my second monthly appointment last week.  There was some horrible traffic shown on the news so I left 90 minutes to get there (a drive that could take 40 minutes traffic-free, rush-hour-free).  He seems to run on time, so I went right back for my 15 minute appt and then headed back home.  Basically I spent 2-1/2 hours on the road for a 15 minute appt.  The "icky" doctor, as we call him here, always ran so, so late that the drive (he was only 10 minutes closer than the new guy) back and forth didn't feel so excessive.  Don't get me wrong - this is not a complaint.  The new doc is totally worth the drive.  Hey, I get to listen to some great music!

And some of the stress is as follows: a doctor's appt with the podiatrist who did my ankle surgery last December who ordered an MRI; a doctor's appt with an ENT who ordered an MRI of my brain (for which I have to have a series of bloodwork done) and an ultrasound of my thyroid; a dental appointment; my usual therapy each week (an hour away) and a number of times getting lost to and from these appts and misinterpreting the date for one appointment (I got lost on the way) and being there a week early.  The list goes on with a bunch of financial stuff and other miscellaneous.

So this may have come across as a gripe-fest but it's the circle my life has been on for the past several weeks.

Stress --> depression --> eating --> depression worsening --> comfort eating, etc, etc, etc.

I have to go, there is a pint of Ben & Jerry's calling my name.

Oh yeah, as a PS: I had lost 32 lbs on Weight Watchers prior to this and have found about 10 of those pounds back.  Crud!