Bipolar Disorder: My Struggle

What is Bipolar disorder?  in short, A mental disorder marked by alternating periods of elation and depression. The following link will take you to webMD for the details of B.D. Any of you out there that feel you may have bipolar disorder or know somebody that you think might have it. WebMD has a symptom checker similar to what your doctor will ask you if/when you go...

 Bipolar Disorder on webMD


My name is Joe Zwalinski Jr, I am a 29 year old male living in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. I was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder in 2007 as well as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and severe social anxiety disorder. I was only diagnosed then but the fact of the matter is I suffered for many years before that undiagnosed so untreated. I am still fighting to cope and adjust to my meds and find my condition to be very frustrating and at times I'll admit I want to "throw in the towel".

I was born in Philadelphia, Pa on July 30th 1982 and lived in Philly for 22 years of my life. I grew up in North Philadelphia, a very rough section of the city once referred to in the Philadelphia Almanac as the "bad lands". Filled with drugs and violence this place was a real faith killer for me. Outside I would witness so many horrible things, the worst of all was the shooting of my friend who died later in the hospital. Outside sucked but inside wasn't THAT much better! My father was a caring person but was a heavy drinker so would often be drunk and when he was drunk he was very mean. I have a memory as far back as being small enough to be able to stand beneath the dining room table as I reached out for my Mother on the floor crying trying to shield herself from the punches and kicks. I brought this up to my Mom when I was 19, I told her "Mom I keep having this nightmare..." and told her that, she cried and told me that it WASN'T a nightmare and that she was shocked I could remember but it was actually something that happened when I was about 3 years old.

These acts of physical abuse happened quite often through my childhood and later on in my teen years the physical abuse lessened but the verbal abuse was just as often and extremely hurtful. I was a skinny but tall teenage boy who was tired of seeing his Mother in pain and so I started standing up for her. This would lead to my Dad pounding on ME a bit but I always say I happily took it so that my Mother wouldn't have to.

Growing up in the conditions I grew up in made me a very sad young man and was often feeling depressed and suicidal. I spent most of my time in my bedroom or in the basement writing poetry and listening to music. I would turn up the music on my headphones just to stop hearing the screams sometimes but it got to the point where I was still hearing screams even when there was nobody home...that's how bad it got. My first attempt at suicide came when I was 16 years old after a fight with my Dad. I just had enough and was so lonely and felt so hopeless that I just didn't want to live anymore. I swallowed a bunch of pain killers and drank a bunch of Jack Daniels whiskey. As you can see my attempt was a failure as I woke up hours later on my basement floor covered in vomit. Nobody found me but I guess lucky for me I rolled off the bed?

My Mom had a bunch of medical books and one time I read through the section on depression and I showed the book to my Mom & Dad, I highlighted every single symptom and told them I think I have a problem. They simply responded: Mom "You're too young to be depressed" and my Dad "What do you have to be depressed about?" I took their answers to heart and just dropped the subject all together. Looking back I'm angry at both my parents for ignoring my cry for help and it was a pretty loud and clear CRY FOR HELP! that went ignored...

Through years of ups and downs (mostly downs in my mind) I hit 21 years old and I started to hit the bottle pretty heavily. One night I went to the bar and I ended up drinking pretty much a whole 18 corona's by myself. I sat knocking them back alone quietly one by one by one until I was fitshaced and started my walk home. The whole time walking home I remember feeling so very depressed and wishing I was never born and all that mess. My drinking remained heavy for about a year straight until I was 22.

In early 2004 my Mom & Dad moved out to the Chicago area because my Dad found a job that relocated him out that way. Back in Philly I stayed with my Sister and rented the basement at her and her husband's house. I had started up my own DJ service when I was 20 and was working full time but me being young and dumb I didn't save money. The "friends" I had made would all come to me for money to help them out and being the caring person I am I could not refuse. In the early summer of 2004 while I was at work my sister's house burnt down, pretty much destroying everything inside. All of my DJ equipment was ruined and all of my clothes and personal items. I was compiling poems for a book that I was going to have published (I'd say I had about 600 poems in stacks of notebooks) but they were all ruined by the fire and water damage from the firefighters. I lost EVERYTHING!

After my bank account was drained by friends and family charging me to stay with them til I "got back on my feet" I decided I would accept my parent's invitation to move to Chicago and stay with them for a bit. I moved her in November of 2004 just after the presidential election of George Stinkin Bush's 2nd term. I arrived to Chicago O'Hare airport with only the clothes I was wearing. Turned out my sister and her husband claimed the insurance company said none of MY stuff was covered by the fire insurance since they did not tell them I was staying there...which still makes no sense to me but anyway...I got no compensation for the things I lost and here I was staying with my parents, broke and still lonely in Chicago...

A little over a year I ended up meeting a woman at the bar up the street from my parent's apartment and we hit it off right away. She saw something in me and she also saw I was troubled and needed somebody. Our relationship was very turbulant in the beginning as I still drank pretty heavily and sometimes when I wasn't even drinking I would have breakdowns that would sometimes be pretty violent (but I would more so punch walls and break furniture and fight myself from hitting HER).

In 2007 we got married! I was working and  I was having my ups and downs (to the extreme both ways) still. Finally one day when I opened up to my wife on a day I was feeling depressed, she told me to GO TO THE DOCTOR! I did and my doctor diagnosed me with severe depression but what he did was handed me a bag of sample medications. I was also there for back pains as well (the back pains I'll get into later)...So he gave me a bag of muscle relaxers, pain killers and anti depressants. I'd say after about 2 weeks of taking these meds the shit really hit the fan.

In late July of 2007 I had a nasty argument over the phone with my wife and she said to me "I think we need time apart" though in my mind I heard "it's over" and I just lost it and trashed the room and I spotted the bag of pills and once again ate them all like I was at a buffet. All I remember after that was police and medics talk/yelling at me and seeing my wife's eyes full of tears and hearing her children (I have 2 step daughters) crying in the other room. I would have died if the kids hadn't came home, they were staying by their friend's house and just decided to come home. The door was locked so they called my wife who came home and found me and called 911.

I was committed to the psyche ward at Elmhurst Memorial Hospital in Elmhurst IL. It was here that I was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder and was started on Lithium carbonate, an anti depressant and at that time Zyprexa. My time in the "looney bin" was much needed but what sucked was I spent my birthday in there. I was in there for about a week and a half before finally being deemed good to go.

For the next year I was in a world of hell because the medication was making me feel like a zombie all the time and I felt it wasn't working for me. The doctor I had at the time made the mistake of telling me drinking wasn't so bad but just to keep it moderate "a glass of wine or a beer a day" type advice is what he gave me.

In 2008 my wife was pregnant with my child and it was only about 5 months away til she would be born. This was our 3rd pregnancy unfortunately my wife miscarried before so this was probably our last chance at having a baby together. During all of this my Mom wasn't doing so good. My Mother was diagnosed with breast cancer before I was even born and it spread throughout her body during the course of 20 years plus. She ended up with cancer of the bones and cervical cancer and a couple other things I can't remember off hand. In the late winter of 2008 my Mom had an aneurism burst in her brain! My dad called me from the E.R. and I rushed there.

When I saw my Mom in the emergency room my eyes filled with tears because here was my Mother looking at me and asking me for help and if she could have some medication please! She thought I was the doctor! when My dad told her "that's not the doctor that's your son" she said "I have a son?". She had to have emergency brain surgery and she recovered but sadly she lost some of her memory and she struggled with this. I was over their apartment one day and my Dad had the nerve to pick a fight with her and started calling her stupid because she didn't remember something and then he got pissed at her because she didn't put HIS caffeine free pepsi's in the fridge to get cold.

After a few minutes of hearing him degrade her I jumped up from my chair and went off on HIM. We got face to face for a minute and it got very heated when my Mom got between us and tried to stop us from fighting my Dad sucker punched me a few times and one of those hit my Mom...I was infuriated!!! I was about to destroy this man but my Mom begged me not to hit him because he himself had a heart condition. That was my Mother though, didn't matter how bad a person was she was all about peace. I left there and didn't speak to my dad for quite a long time.

In the spring of 2008, my wife sent me to the bar one night after a long day and told me to have fun. My friend had a band and was co owner of this new bar so I went to hang out and jam a little and chill. Well, I drank a whole lot of beer and people were buying me shots of hennessy and I lost count at about 8 double shots. The rest of the night I only know what I was told because I do not remember ANYTHING that I did. I somehow ended up home (I know, forgive me yall) and my wife said she came out and was yelling at me for driving home drunk and staying out as late as I did. She said she saw a look in my eye that she NEVER saw before and said I didn't even look like myself at all. Apparently I got up and chased her in the bedroom and she said she was so scared she slapped me and kicked me in the nuts. I did not even flinch she said, but that I slapped her twice and went to the living room and dropped to the floor passed out.

In the morning when I came to I saw my cell phone was blown up with texts from her. The texts all said for me to be gone by the time she was off work and that it was over this time. I then went and swallowed lots of meds again and after I took them I went for a walk figuring with the heat outside I would collapse and hit the ground and hopefully this would do it (I'm so glad nobody would ever sell me a gun!). Once again I was found, I woke up in the hospital again but this time I did not speak a word to anybody for the first few days. I was just tired of being me and wanted to be done with my life.

My blood alcohol level at the time they checked it was STILL wayyyyy above the limit so they said during the time all of that happened I must have been extremely lit. In one of the group therapy sessions I suddenly started thinking about my unborn child still in my wife's belly and I broke down and cried heavily. I then made the ultimate decision that I was done with alcohol and that I was going to dedicate my life to my daughter and make sure that I do not leave her side or allow her to grow up in fear the way I did. The psychiatrist eventually told me that the experience I had was temporary psychosis brought on by the mixture of the alcohol and my meds.

During my time in the psyche ward this time I was very unsure of what was going to happen when I was released. My wife was set on it being the last straw and that scared the hell out of me. After advice from her friends and even after a chat with a counselor at the hospital she decided she would stick by me and I promised her alcohol and me were broken up! I have kept that promise by the way and it is now 2012 and I've had maybe one or two beers tops. My mom & dad moved back to Philly in 2008 because my Mom needed constant supervision because of her brain surgery.

On August 25th 2008 my daughter was finally born. I was in the delivery room for my wife's C section and got to witness that gore fest called child birth. I went into the nursery after they cleaned her up and she lay there screaming and crying and as soon as I stood by her and said "Daddy's here" and held my hand next to her she stopped crying and grabbed my hand and looked up at me and at this moment I felt like I was saved.

In October 2010 my sister told me that my Mom's doctors were saying she had about a week to live, so my wife and I scrambled our butts off to get a rental car and we were set to make the 13 hour drive out to Philly so I could see my Mom and tell her I love her and say our "goodbye". On October 5th, we woke up and got the car ready but my sister called me and broke the news that my Mom had passed away earlier that morning. I was then and still to this day heart broken by that.

Now it is 2012 and that is most of the story of ME. There was a lot more to say but perhaps I'll write a book and be more detailed and include more stories. I wrote this story just to give you all a view of who I am and what has brought me to where I am right now writing this blog. Bipolar disorder is very hurtful and to those of you who can relate, YOU are why I am starting this blog. Some of you are kids reading this (younger than me = kids just as people older than ME are ancient), and you might feel like you are scared or you might not be coping with your problems so well. Well I want to offer some support and show you that you can make it!

My coping tool has always been poetry and music. I am an artist that works with many different forms so that I can relate to more and more people. I rap, I play guitar, I do some photography, I also make videos and montages...I am a stay at home father on social security disability because I have a very messed up back and other pains in my body. I have numerous herniated discs in my spine, spine degenerative disease, 6 kidney stones, 2 hernia's, irritable bowel syndrome and I have frequent migraines that last for days and are so intense.


This week was the start of my blog, I gave you my testimonial and let you know how I got where I am. feel free to comment and share YOUR stories or if you have any questions feel free to ask. Please keep negativity away from here and keep it respectful (some people can be real jerks). If you have any questions or comments please feel free to comment or send me a message and I'd be happy to chat with you!

Thank you all for reading! Have a lovely day and I wish you all good mental health and a big hug! You are NOT alone!!!

*If any of you are having suicidal or any harmful thoughts of any nature please contact the suicide hotline immediately National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and please fight the urge. Be well friends!

Joe


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