Split

Written May. 2008
I don’t claim to have an explanation or to understand it myself, but here are the facts. For many, many years, I have waffled. Much like a split personality, but without the black-outs. On one side is a world of devouring music, books, art, painting, and what we’ll call “smart thoughts”. On the other, a world of high productivity at work, involvement in local activities and events, volunteer work, etc.

I have known about this phenomenon really since I started my career almost 17 years ago. It’s as simple as this: the more music I listen to, the less work I am motivated to do and I start to get behind. I can see it happening as plain as day. My focus shifts. I won’t call it ADD, because I have no problem paying attention or doing something for hours at a time, but the things I pay attention to don’t have a lot to do with accounting or writing reports.

I don’t want this to sound like I don’t want to do my job, because that’s not it. If you know me, you know that although I bitch and moan as much as anybody else, I love my job and I think I’m good at it. I would say that I like my job 75% -85% of the time, and when I like it, I like it a lot.

I just get “fuzzy”. I get distracted. I get moody. (ok – moodier than usual). I clean like a crazy woman. I vacuum the bedspreads every day. I take long trips by myself. Disney World, hiking at hurricane ridge, whatever. I write in my journal. I don’t, however, get my work done very efficiently.

So for the first good many years of my career, I learned to walk the line. I could tell and adjust when I was getting off-track. I could take a day off and get my head back on straight. I knew pretty much how much music I could listen to, how much painting I could do, and how much wine I could drink. As time went on, however, I pretty much tapered off to not listening to much music, never painting, and hardly ever drinking wine.

My husband reminisced about when we had a box of wine on the porch and neighbors circulating in and out all evening. My friend Charlotte told me that my life “lacked a soundtrack”. I stopped sleeping. When I did sleep, my brain never stopped racing and, in 2004, I had a near nervous breakdown.

I yelled at my trainee one day because it was humid outside and I was feeling sticky. I obsessed over every small decision I needed to make. The last straw was one morning when Jason said “awwww, Schaffer got something on this pillow”, and I turned into a weeping puddle on the floor. What I was saying as I sat there sobbing was not “I’ll never get that pillow clean”, it was “I know this is an insane over-reaction and I cannot control it. This is the weirdest scariest thing I’ve ever experienced and I think it’s time for me to get help.”

So I did. I found a doctor through a friend. My friend told me that she was young and compassionate and easy to talk to. My husband was one million percent supportive and went with me for the “I’ve gone crazy” talk.

I outlined my symptoms: Extreme mood swings, overreaction to little things, high anxiety, weight gain, depression, complete and utter absence of the ability to sleep. When I told her that Jason and I were also struggling with infertility, she said “Oh, I know exactly what’s wrong. We’ll do the tests anyway, but I know what it is.”

The tests were conclusive. “Insulin resistance”, “Metabolic Syndrome”, “Glucose Intolerance”, “Syndrome X”…it has a lot of names but a lot of doctors don’t know about it or don’t believe it exists. I’ve been told by both other Dr.’s and pharmacists “there’s no such thing as insulin resistance, you’re either diabetic or your not.”

Well, I’m not diabetic. None of the tests say I am. My blood-sugar remains low to normal. But my body sure as hell does not process insulin or glucose properly. How I do compare with diabetics is that all the extra insulin floating around in my body is bad news. It prevents serotonin from getting into your brain properly (thus the depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders). It causes weight gain (or maybe it prevents weight loss, who knows which comes first). It floats around LOOKING like the hormone that tells you not to ovulate, which is exactly what our fertility problem is. It causes cholesterol to be stickier.

So I started walking around with a bag full of medicine like some other people in my family (who shall remain nameless) that I used to make fun of. Metformin, Zoloft, Lipitor, Ambien, Byetta shots twice a day. After the first three nights that I actually slept, I felt like a totally different person. Seriously, it is unreal how much sleep deprivation affects you. I didn’t even realize how much of a zombie I was just from that.

So I started doing way better. Towards the end of 2004, I got pregnant, but had a miscarriage very early - common for someone who has not ovulated in a long time. It was sad but it made us hopeful.

Four years and much medication, therapy, and life-style changes later, I’m trying to learn to walk a new line. I’m still on lots of meds, and I’ve become a vegetarian (8 months “sober”). I’m not doing yoga like I need to, but I MEAN to.

My goal is to get off the meds. I’d like to be effective and efficient at my job but get a little bit of the old me back. I want to listen to slacker.com while I work yet still get work done. I want to be able to read voraciously and still be able to get in the “zone” to finish a report when I need to. I want to paint and still be able to balance a bank account to the penny in less than an hour.

Can I find that? I’m not sure. But I’m working on it. The Dr. has changed my medication, and I’ve changed my diet. I read a book that led me to believe that perhaps the hormones and adrenaline in meat were affecting me particularly harshly. I’m trying to be as vegetarian as I can be.

Maybe it’s working. Lately I feel a lot more like turning on the radio. I’ve been reading like crazy. And I’m still feeling pretty on top of things at work.

In the meantime, there are kinks. The most obvious one I’ve noticed lately is that right now I am tremendously sensitive to sound. Of course since I spend most of my time with Jason he gets the worst of it. For example, I haven’t had to take an ambien to sleep in several weeks, but Jason and I haven’t slept in the same room in that time either. He doesn’t even really snore, it’s just sort of a little wheeze, but it keeps me from sleeping a single minute.

The dogs’ barking shoots my anxiety level to the moon. The sound of people chewing food or biting their fingernails sounds like somebody is scratching a blackboard right in my ear. If the TV is on a volume level over 16, it feels like jet engines are in the room with us. The sound of my Daddy listening to Fox News at 2million decibels just about sends me over the edge. When commercials come on that are louder than the show I can feel my muscles tense. When I get into a car and radio is on, I want it immediately to stop. At work, I am usually right in there with everybody else gabbing all day, but lately it sounds like everyone is yelling. I find myself asking people to use their inside voices when they probably already are.

And then there are the video games. Now I knew when I married Jason that he was a game geek. Thankfully I am too. In the past few years, we settled into a routine where we played our games side by side and both of us wore earphones. But now we have an x-box in the house hooked up to the Bose sound system and an awesome speaker system in the computer annex. Jason doesn’t like to wear his headphones, and I really can’t blame him.

Sometimes I try to go into the room where Jason is, just to be there. I work on my laptop or play around on my desktop. I’ve even tried to listen to my i-pod while he’s playing a game, but I just can’t seem to tolerate the constant sounds of war. Maybe something is wrong in my head that is making me this sensitive to sound. I really think it’s just due to the different combinations of drugs and diet sending me through an adjustment phase.

So I find myself asking once again for tolerance. I’m trying to find, and walk, the line. I’m trying to be myself but better. I’m trying to get to a place where we can have a box of wine on the porch and it doesn’t make me shut down from anxiety. It may take awhile, but I have a goal. I see light at the end of the tunnel, and I don’t think it’s a train. J