Thursday, January 2, 2025

Thursday, January 2, 2025  

 

   I took my blood pressure medication but didn’t take the pill for the hypomania.   I didn’t feel out of control.  I wasn’t speaking fast or feeling like I couldn’t sit still for a minute.  I felt pretty calm. And then I couldn’t sleep.  At two am, I got up to take the Seroquel, returned to bed, and slept. The next thing I heard was Joseph walking to the kitchen.  I could hear he was wearing his laced shoes and was ready for work. When I checked the time, it was 6:15. Wow!  It was late already.  I must have gotten some sleep.

   I felt my left nostril running as I did my morning upper body exercises.  Why would it be only one nostril? I wiped my nose with my hand. Blood!  I had a nosebleed. Are you kidding!  I haven’t had one of those in at least 50 years. I looked up the side effects of Seroquel. It was a blood thinner, a common cause of nosebleeds.  Did the Seroquel act as a blood thinner?  I was on the lowest possible dose. I’d be seeing Dr. Reed on the 9th.  Whatever, I figured out how to get it to stop.  I found the place of the rupture and put pressure on it.

   The Twins weren’t up by 8 am.  I went to the lower garden and watered the 42 shrubs. I was ready at 9 am for my session with fourth-grade GV. I asked him if he saw a difference in his concentration.  No!  That wasn’t a surprise.  He may or may not have experienced an improvement after I showed him the bull’s eye target exercise for filtering stimuli. It’s the rare person who can accurately evaluate improvement. Our minds aren’t designed for that. We look for mistakes and areas of failure.   We ignore improvements. It’s called the apex effect.

    GV may not have seen a difference, but boy, I did.  He made fewer wild stabs.  He tried strategies.  He didn’t give up before even trying.  His mother texted me to say she heard GV denied his parents knew he felt insecure about learning; they were well aware of it.  I told her I was working on that. She said they saw a difference in him in all circumstances.  He was more willing to work out a solution than give up and expect someone else to solve a problem.  I’m thrilled to pieces.

   I had a session with my therapist/ life coach at 10.  I told her about the doctor’s diagnosis of hypomania.  Mine is fear-driven.  When I go into that mode, it’s more like terror.  That’s what I was like my whole childhood. I would be diagnosed with ADHD these days. Terror is one of the causes of the condition, but not the only one.  I’ve attributed my behavior to anxiety for quite a while. The diagnosis of hypomania is a new one and sounded right on the money. There’s medication to address that problem. Dr. Reed prescribed the lowest dosage, 25 mg, versus the highest, 300 mg.  It’s a take-as-needed medication with no requirement to be taken daily. Wonderful!  How long has this been going on?  We worked on the fear.

   Underlying the fear was sadness and grief.  I discovered I preferred the fear to the grief. Grief feels like giving up and disappearing, more like fading away than dying. I suspect the way out of this state is through the grief.  This was not just grief over the loss of Mike or my dad when I was 15 but all the losses, disappointments, rejections, scorn, contempt,  and endless criticisms my mother doled out.  Well, if I want out of the fear, it looks like that’s where I will have to go through the grief.

    I called Mama K after my session with Shelly. She was at work but would have her son set the Twins up.  I had Twin A first.  She worked in Barnell Lofts  Drawing Conclusions level E book.  We’re on unit one; it’s probably a high fourth-grade level.  Of course, this text was written over sixty years ago. The earliest copyright date is 1970, but the authors worked on it when my sister-in-law was one of their fifth-grade students in 1955. They must have been working on the books then. 

    This passage is quite a leap in comprehension. “Before Europeans discovered how to navigate, the Polynesians were masters of the art.”  We had to cover the meaning of navigation, Europe, and what the ‘the art’ referred to.    She kept thinking the art referred to painting.  She got it without my help,  but I had to do some WbyW sentence analysis with her to teach how sentences are constructed.