Can you catch Bi-Polar????

Sleep, the evasive aspect of life that I have always had an issue with! I have since I was a small child had an issue with sleeping for more then a few hours at a time. It is one of the fun things about the "Illness"! Or so I have been told.?

As I have said in earlier post I have always had an idea that there was an issue with me being depressed, and missing sleep was one of the keys that someone should have picked up on? But then again like most people with this illness, I learned to hide aspects of life from others, and sleep was one of them. I could stay up all night long and then go to school and not thing twice about it? But I never told anyone that I wasn't sleeping. And obviously it was the same with sleeping too much, I got around this saying that I was going to my room to read and when I was depressed I would just sleep. And if by some chance someone discovered I would just say I feel to sleep reading.

One of the hardest parts that I have had to deal with is something that although I have had the knowledge of my illness, is something that is kind of odd. It is even a bit difficult to understand? Part of my illness is that I can have both a Depressive state and a hypomanic state at the same time. Basically I call this the Bi-Polar Speedball! I am depressed and in a state of manic behavior. This took me a long time to work this out because A) It is a strange concept & B) Bi-Polar is a odd enough illness, let alone when you toss in ideas of being both in a depressive state as well as a manic state.

So I can be sitting somewhere and be in a depressed mode and all of a sudden I have a ton of energy and no way of dealing with it? Conversely I can also be in a manic mode and running around or be at work and all of a sudden I can fall into a depressed state and as much as I want to slow down and just crawl into a bed and self depreciate I just cannot? I feel I have to keep moving! Because of these two types of behavior states, it has always made it more difficult for me, let alone others to actually figure out that I am BP. I do have to give some credit to one person. I was dating years ago, and she also has BP, and she figured out that I was BP, well actually she said: "I think you have a little BP in you?". And since she was a professional in the health field, and worked with BP'rs and was also a BP'r, what she said had a bit of credibility? Only I didn't take to heart what she said, it was always there, it was just never a large enough issue back then. However, it has been said that the older one gets and they do not get the BP taken care of, the worse it gets.

And guess what, it was about 6-7 years later before I figured it out. Well, with my Dr's help and the help of help of my "Partner" at the time. We figured out that maybe there was a potential issue with this possible illness. Well, it took about a year before we determined that I actually had it. The strange thing about this illness is that there is no test? They just ask you a bunch of questions, and over the course of time it is determined that one has the illness. It is really strange? But, when it all comes to it, all Bi-Polar really is is just a chemical imbalance. Much like diabetes. So, the next time you meet someone with the Bi-Polar illness, remember that it isn't anything that you can catch, it is just more like your Aunt or Uncle who has Diabetes, and it's not like you can catch anything from them either?

Till next time......Keep this in mind, If you don't try something new, you'll never learn anything new and what fun is that?

Ciao!