Lost Opportunity…

They say life is a series of opportunities. Severe mental illness can rob you of those opportunities. Life becomes just a daily struggle to survive without forethought to the future. That’s what I am mulling over in my mind this morning.

My future was bright in my early twenties. I had a full paid scholarship to college in voice performance with a minor in piano performance. I was gifted with a silky smooth voice and perfect tone and pitch. Those college years found me withdrawing more and more from life until I spent all my time alone on dirt roads in the country drinking beer and neglecting my studies.
My father drove the two hours to my college to talk to my professors about my problems. They all agreed that something terrible had been happening to me over the previous two years. Who was once a bright, social, and earnest young college student with impeccable grades had turned into this reclusive hermit of a being wracked with paranoia and delusions.
I will never forget that day I called my father on a pay phone too afraid to use my home phone for fearing it was bugged.

“Help!” I said tersely.

“What’s wrong?” My father asked sounding confused.

“Something’s bad wrong with me,” I replied.

My father drove the two hours to my college to talk to my professors about my problems. They all agreed that something terrible had been happening to me over the previous two years. Who was once a bright, social, and earnest young college student with impeccable grades had turned into this reclusive hermit of a being wracked with paranoia and delusions.

On the upside, things did finally start to get better after years and years of trial and error and countless and numerous different medications. I found the drug Zyprexa and it changed my life. The delusions went away and the paranoia subsided. I met a woman and got married and we bought a house and a new car. I started a new career driving a big rig truck. The story was not all a bed of roses though. I experienced incredible weight gain and extreme drowsiness which was dangerous being a big rig truck driver. I had to go off the medications and things once again took a turn for the worse. I found myself homeless and divorced with my wife getting almost everything in the proceedings due to my mental illness. I was just too ill to effectively fight for my rights during the divorce.

These days I am stable on Risperdal Consta. It is an injection I get every two weeks in the muscle of my butt cheek. This gives me a steady and unrelenting dose of my primary anti-psychotic medication. This medication is not quite as effective as Zyprexa, but it does keep me stable without all the added side effects of that previous medication.

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My father called me yesterday afternoon with good news. My sister’s baby was born late yesterday afternoon without complications and weighed 8 pounds 6 ounces. They named her Kathleen. We are all so proud and happy. Yesterday was another good day.