Posted by Lonely on September 30, 2004, at 1:47:37
In reply to Re: Welcome!, posted by JimP on September 28, 2004, at 7:34:40
My husband of 32 years was just diagnosed as bipolar II with vascular dementia. We have no children but I do have health problems which have affected my career.
I've really suspected the bipolar for a couple years or more and definitely knew there was dementia from his stroke.
I find it interesting that other BPs on the board mention memory issues in association w/BP. That's new to me. I'd like to hear more.
I'm not terribly happy in this marriage; he has done really terrible things to me and I'm not sure how much longer I can keep from going off the deep end myself! He'll start his BP medicine this week-end. So far he's just been on antidepressants and I think they've caused rapid cycling. One of his outstanding "features" is flare, intense anger over everything and anything or just hearing my voice. One of the other problems I've run into is that the 4 or 5 therapists (LMSW and one psychologist) he's seen plus the same number of psychiatrists never really diagnosed him. They just seemed to pussy-foot around.
This week I went with him to the new psychiatrist and filled her in (she had all the personality of Stalin's daughter or a Nazi Storm Trooper) on the stuff he left out. Again, I was torn as I've been told he should handle his medical stuff himself yet others tell me I should handle it too. She didn't give me much chance to ask questions and was virtually in my face when I dared to disagree with her on something. Fortunately, I'm able to view the incident with a teensie bit of humor now - that's the reason for the titles I just gave her above!
I just read a really interesting article online about bipolarism and multiple sclerosis. It seems that people with MS have a high rate of BP. Two years ago, after his apparent stroke, it looked like my husband had MS because the leisions were in the corpus callosum. We've never found out for sure. The neurologist was good at cracking jokes, telling him to lose weight, yelling at me to lose weight, pushing pills and going out the door. We'll go to a new neurologist in Oct.
I'd like to hear more about BP and family members and how they deal with it. And, thanks for letting me spill my tummy!
poster:Lonely
thread:392091
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/relate/20040917/msgs/397121.html