I have been married for almost 19 years. After 6 months of marriage I knew something wasn't right with my husband. He had no control of money, he was either up up up, or unhappy and down. Everything that happened that was bad was someone else's fault, never his. Of course I believed him, I loved him, I was a newlywed, why shouldn't I?
By our 3rd year of marriage, I had had enough. He had lost 4 jobs, we were in dept up to our ears, we fought all the time, everything was my fault, he constantly told me that "I had changed" and it was all my fault. I was miserable. One fateful day, our car broke down, I remember being stressed out thinking "how am I gonna pay for this" and he said to me "don't bother getting the car fixed, just use the money to buy a gun so I can kill myself." We got the car towed to a shop, I met him up there with our other car, as I was driving home he was rambling on and on about something and I finally screamed shut up at him. He opened the car door and jumped out of my moving car out onto the grass bank next to us. I had to have been driving about 30mph at the time. The sad part is how dead I was inside by then, I pulled over to look and make sure he was ok, then I drove off. I drove home, packed some things and left. I was done, my marriage was over, or so I thought.
I left home, but I didn't go anywhere, I went to the local library and sat and thought. I didn't know what I was going to do yet and how I was going to do it. About 3 hrs went by and my pager went off and the number was his parents house. I called it, thinking they wanted to know about the car or something. It was my husband. He wanted to know what time he should be home for dinner. Seriously? That was what he asked me, what time should he be home for dinner. Not "I'm sorry I jumped out of a moving vehicle" or "I'm sorry I threatened to kill myself" but "hey, what's time is dinner?" I knew then he wasn't right in the head. I told him I was leaving him, I couldn't take anymore of this up and down craziness and I wanted out. He wanted to talk and we finally agreed to meet and discuss this. I had wonderful insurance at the time and it covered "emergency" situations like this. I was able to get an appointment for us the next day with a therapist. After meeting with the therapist for an hour, he said "your fine, HIM on the other hand..." and that began our journey. It took us about 3 years to get the right diagnosis, and 3 more after that to get the right balance of medications. (On average it takes 10 years to get the right diagnosis for a mental illness.)
One of the things with medications is that you will always need to tweak them. What works for one year may not work the next. A medication might go off the market, or might go from name brand to generic. Generic brands have the same amount of medication in them but not the same fillers, this means that the time release may not work the same. And I don't care what anyone says, the moon does affect their moods. Live with mine for 3 months and tell me it doesn't. I can tell you which cycle it is in by what his mood is.
The motto in our house is "Drugs are good, Drugs are our friends, better living through chemicals". While he would like to be off of meds, he can't be, because of medications he is the person I feel in love with again, I'm thankful to have him back.
Bipolar is not the end of your life, it means compromise, a lot of work to get medications balanced, and the realization that you can not have that "high" that comes with the manic moods that they love. If they are willing to understand that and live with that, you can make it work. But it is work, it does get hard, there are days when you think "why am I doing this" but doesn't every marriage have those days?
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