The Awakenings Review: Volume 7 Number 1

The Awakenings Review


Volume 7 Number 1 (Fall 2017)

Awakenings Review, Vol 8 No 1Preface by ROBERT LUNDIN, Editor

Oh where a little mania will take you.

A nephrologist pointed out to me a year ago, in a rather friendly but somber tone of voice, that the creatinine level in my blood was dangerously high and I clearly had moderate to severe kidney disease. This was due, he said clearly, to my ingestion of lithium for the past 35 years.

“What can be done about this?” I asked quizzically.

“We’ll have to reassess your taking lithium,” he said with a strong tenor of sympathy in his voice.

“You mean I won’t be able to take lithium—zero?”

“I’m afraid that’s right. Can you discuss this with your psychiatrist?”

I already knew this was coming. Years ago I had been cautioned about the deleterious effects of lithium on the kidneys and the fact that my creatinine level, a measure of the kidneys’ blood-cleansing efficiency, was poorer than normal. Now it had gotten worse, considerably worse. I had found my way to a highly-regarded specialist and, gloomily, he sank my last hopes of staying on the drug which had helped me so much.

My psychiatrist, a middle-aged woman of Italian descent, was quite matter-of-fact and laid out a conservative plan to wean me off of lithium. We’d reduce my dosage very slowly and increase the antipsychotic Zyprexa from 15 mg to 20 mg a day. Zyprexa, she stated with her thin lips in a half-smile, could also be useful in treating mania.

“Can’t we do something to replace the lithium?” I asked.

“There’s no drug that exactly replaces lithium. It’s in a class by itself.”

“More weight gain?”

“Possibly.”

With that less than hopeful outlook I began my months-long reduction from a therapeutic lithium blood level to a lower than therapeutic level, to where I am today: lithium free.

I haven’t freaked—sort of. No, true, I haven’t freaked. I had been woefully worried that without lithium I wouldn’t be able to do my job as a mental health instructor at the local county health department which I had been doing successfully for six years. I was so sure I’d miss blocks of work from uncontrolled mania and depression that I queried the HR department about going on disability. This turned out to be premature and unneeded and happily today I’m completing my work in the mornings and afternoons basically without a hitch.But, and a big but, when evenings roll around, after the setting of the sun, after dinner when I park myself in front of my computer, I tend to get expanded and impulsive. Oh yes. With the vastness of the Internet at my fingertips I have managed with some impetuousness to do a couple rather stupid things.

The first I wish to recount was just embarrassing.

One afternoon at work I had shown my class a video on Nepal and the trek to Mount Everest base camp. That evening my mind crisp with manic zeal, I thought I would do this little jaunt myself in, say, five years. That would give me ample time to plan the trip and five years to get from an exercise-less 240 pounds to a trim and robust mountaineer’s physique. So sure was I of this that I emailed two of my old rock climbing buddies inviting them to join me on the brilliantly conceived excursion. Neither of them, predictably, and mercifully, replied to my silly invitation and the next morning, with a clear mind, I grimaced at my ludicrous behavior. It was not a serious breach of conduct but it should have been warning of what was next to come.

In early June, Kenyon College, my alma mater, holds a week-long playwrights conference for the tidy sum of $2,000. At registration they require a nonrefundable deposit of $500. I didn’t want to go, I really didn’t. But late one night, expansive and fancying myself a greatly talented playwright, I took five hundred of my hard-earned dollars and signed myself up. Ugh. The following morning I awakened like a drunk with amnesia after a bender, remembering only that I had done something regrettable the night before, and not being able to remember exactly what it was. I scoured my memory. Oh shit, what did I do last night? What? I checked my email to see if I had written more about Nepal. Nothing. Then I noticed my wallet was not in my pants pocket where I always leave it. It had been opened and set aside. Credit cards! Oh no, I used my credit card for something. Oh God. Then the fleeting memories began to jell.

“How was your evening?” asked Kelly, my friend and colleague at work later that morning.

“I spent $2,000 last night?”

“Oh Bob, you didn’t. What did you buy?”

I told her my tale. She smiled incredulously.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“I think I’m having mega-buyer’s remorse,” I sighed. Kelly shook her head.

“You might enjoy it. Think. Maybe it was supposed to happen.”

Well, I am going and I’ll find the money somehow. By the time this issue of The Awakenings Review is in print I will have come and gone, and probably enjoyed it. Kenyon does do things like this well.

I’m still off of lithium and becoming vigilant in guarding against other manic complications in the evenings. Lately, I’ve been working instead at editing this journal. And what a pleasure that is given all the talented and supportive writers that come our way. Often you applaud us for the particular work that we do: our mission of providing an outlet for writers with mental illness. Thank you. It is a good thing we do and we’re proud of it. We’re pleased The Awakenings Review has been in publication nearly every year since the year 2000.

In this issue—Volume 7, Number 1—poets, essayists, short story writers, and photographers have come to us from Framingham, Massachusetts, Port Republic, Virginia, Louisville, Kentucky, Edmonton, Canada, Tucson, Arizona and many places in between.

These writers all come from circumstances in which they’ve experienced the trying consequences of mental illness first hand. Connecticut writer Claire Bien brings us a gripping essay, “Hallucination,” of the second of two psychotic breaks she had in the 1990s. New Yorker Bonnie Beth Chernin draws from complications she faced in her mental health experience in a clever short story, “Pharmacy Tales, in Four Parts.” Margo Barnes wrote to us that “Mental Illness runs deep in my family’s genetic tide pool” and then proceeds to write ironically about “My Father’s Gift.”

Poetry has always been an integral part of emotional healing and in this issue that is no different. Journalist turned poet, Dana R. Yost, says “I have turned to poetry as both a means of therapy and an outlet for my lifelong passion of writing.” Pennsylvanian Michael D. Riley writes us “These poems of addiction and OCD cut deep for me, needless to say.” And Connecticut poet Deborah Matusko says it clearly, “I find that writing poetry is very therapeutic.” From Canada, poet David Fekete tells us the place of poetry in his life, “I want people to know just how difficult it is for consumers like me to function at all…[This] feeling I want to convey through my poetry.”

If nothing else, I hope you’ll read the biographies that these writers have included with their works and glean from them the fortitude that each of them have in being able to share their struggles with mental illness in a public way.

Copyright (c) 2018, The Awakenings Project

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