Dear Bipolar

Seth and I, before bipolar took away his amazing smile.

Dear Bipolar,

I am writing you this letter 1,622 days since you came into my life and stole my sweet husband’s soul.

This letter will reach you 908 days after you physically took my husband from me.

Since you have done this to so many peoples lives, you probably don’t remember me. I will try to refresh your memory.

1,622 days ago, you came into my life, uninvited. You were not invited in, I know I did not leave a door or window open, yet suddenly you were there. You stepped into my husband’s soul, turned my amazing and vibrant husband into a depressed, angry, anxiety ridden, empty shell of a person.

You caused my amazingly bright and creative husband to see dead people, hear voices, and caused him to think about suicide daily. Your voice was in my husband’s head. You ridiculed him at every turn. “You’re not good enough” you said.

You took the sparkle out of his eye.

You took the pep out of his walk.

You took away his smile. How could you take away that amazing smile??

You took away his trust and faith in the world around him, causing him to think the world was after him.

You even made my husband think I was out to harm him.

You entered our life when we were just getting started. You see, we were happy. We didn't need YOU. Yet, you kept working on my husband. Bit by bit, destroying him.

908 days ago, you put a gun to my husband’s head and took him away from me.

Left me widowed at 29 years old.

When I am angry about my husband’s suicide, I blame you.

My husband would have never killed himself. But you were happy to do it.

Bipolar, I hate everything about you.

I hate your games, your mania, your depression, your psychosis, even your name. Bipolar = Two polar opposites. Did you leave something out when you created your name? I think you did.

Because of you, I do not get to see my “happy ending”. I do not get to live to be old with my husband. We will never have children or fulfill our dreams and goals.

Bipolar, your day is coming. I might not live to see that day. But your days are numbered.

A cure is coming.

It might be in the form of a pill, a shot, surgery, or hell.. maybe even a microchip.

When I get to the other side, my first duty is to get rid of you.

I will not let you destroy another person. I will not let you destroy another family.

Mark my words, your days are coming to an end.

And I will be watching, with my husband’s arms around me, with a huge bowl of popcorn and a huge beer when it all comes crashing down.

Sincerely,

Melinda

(If you or someone you know suffers from mental illness (Including if you have a parent that is mentally ill), PLEASE consider organ donation to the Harvard Brain Bank <-- Click here.

They are trying to find a cure for mental illness, but need organ donation.

Seth wanted his brain donated to the Harvard Brain Bank, unfortunately I could not fulfill that wish.

Please help with the research and study of mental illness for future generations.)

His story is coming to a end, I promise!

After my husband's suicide attempt, my husband was scared.
The experience he had with his attempt, shock him to his core.
His attempt really scared him.
And made him really take a hard look at his mental state.

He started trying really hard to get a handle on his bipolar.
He tried a lot of medications.
Did personal counseling.

For the first time, he took it seriously.

But it didn't last.
The medication were always a short term fixed.
Then they stopped working.

A month later, May 2009, Seth tried to take his life again.

Below is Seth's writings about his experience.
   I was out of the hospital for a while and working when I just totally lost it again. I was up in the air about 28 feet working on a phone/cable line and started crying and wrapped my safety harness around my neck then hung myself for about 5 minutes. The problem with hanging is it takes too long. I decided to come down from the telephone pole and called Melinda and told her I needed to go back to the hospital. I did a self commitment to the mental ward at Uof U and stayed there 2 weeks this time. 

I promise, I am almost to the end of Seth's story.
Then my widow story begins.
Stay tuned!

A pocket full of cash

My favorite picture of Seth. This was on our wedding day.
I look at his face, and he looks so happy, and completely lost in love.
August 12th, 2005

When I got home from work and saw all the prescription bottles were gone...

I just knew.
My deep, dark, fear, was becoming my reality.

I felt like from August 12th, 2008 to April 1st, 2009, was just a waiting game.

I knew deep down in my heart, that one day, the love of my life was going to try (or succeed) to kill himself.

I never wanted to admit to myself that I knew this and how much fear I had bottled up inside my heart and soul.

When Seth didn't come home that night, I knew he was somewhere...
Trying to take his own life.

I didn't sleep at all that night. Every noise, I would be up, looking out the window, hoping the noise I heard was my husband pulling in the driveway.

He never did.

The next day, I had a email from my bank. My account had been overdrawn.

I checked my account online, and found $1,200.00 had been withdrawn.
I had $300.00 in NSF fees within only a 12 hour period.

I called the bank, and they confirmed, that Seth had withdrawn the money.

Now my husband is missing, I'm not even sure if he is alive, and I don't have a penny to my name.
I couldn't pay the mortgage.
I couldn't even buy food or put gas in my car.

The police didn't pay much attention to my cries for help. "He's an adult, he doesn't have to come home if he doesn't want to." "We don't consider it a missing person case until 72 hours has passed".

I begged and pleaded with them. I told them I knew he was going to try to kill himself.

I knew he was in trouble.

They took my information, but did not issue a missing person report.

I went to work that morning. Knowing I couldn't sit home and hope he pulled into the drive way.

Around noon, I got a call from a doctor in a hospital that was 5 hours away from me.

Seth was in the ICU.
He took all the pills he had.

The following is Seth's writing about his attempt. It is the exact writings he did about this. 

- Warning - This might be too graphic for some readers.

I have bipolar disorder and went into a depression and got some professional help. They put me on a drug called Lamictal. It helped a little but I still thought about suicide daily. I took the pills for a few months and then one day decided I did not want to live any more. So I planned trip in week to go kill myself. When the day came I had just refilled my prescription and had a shit load of pills. I grabbed the pills emptied my bank account and took off to Zion’s National park to kill myself. Somehow I ended up at Arches National park instead, but that didn’t really matter. I found a back dirt round that was rarely traveled. I had 11,000 milligrams of lamictal on me so I crushed it up and drank it with a drink. Then I waited to die at peace in the front seat of my truck in the middle of no ware. Then all of sudden I started vomiting like there was no end. My vision started to flicker like an old tv and then I went blind. I panicked and started my truck and drove it right into a sand dune. I continued to throw up nonstop all night. I tried to get out of my truck to dig it out of the sand but found I was paralyzed from the waist down. I crawled across the desert floor on my elbows until I reached my tires. I still couldn’t see my vision was flickering very fast and I can’t really explain that part. I got to the tire and tried to dig my truck out of the sand. After digging for a while I crawled back to the door of my truck. I still could not move my legs. I also noticed at this point that I no longer had control of my fingers. I tried to open the truck door but it seemed impossible without the use of my fingers. I finally got it open and pulled myself back into the truck. All I remember from this point on is vision going yellow but I could see. And I kept vomiting and coming in and out of consciousness. I must have passed out with my foot on the gas because I blew my engine.

When morning came around I just remember wakening to the sound of a jeep. It was a National Park Volunteer. I wondered over to her and asked her to call me an ambulance. I park ranger showed up first and confiscated my hand gun and just kept me conscious until the ambulance got there. The ambulance just gave me a hydration IV, nothing special needed. I had vomited all the Lamitical I took out of my body already.

When I got the hospital the nurse was really nice to me but the doctor was a jerk. I do not think he likes suicide attempts. 

Even though I was completely shattered that my husband had just tried to kill himself, I was so relieved to know he was alive. What happened, we could get through.

The doctor said Seth didn't want to talk to me, he wasn't ready. That he wanted me to know he was ok.

 I was then handcuffed and driven to the Mental Hospital at the U of U by a sheriff. He made me were shackles and cuffs the entire way. He was a really nice guy. All my clothes were covered in throw up and I stunk real badly, but he didn’t care. When I got to the U of U they committed me to 5 West Mental Ward. 

Seth was in the psychiatric ward for two days before he called me. With psychiatric wards, you have to have a password to call the patient or go see them. If you didn't have the password, the hospital would tell you they didn't have a patient under that name. I had to wait for him to call me before I could go see him.

One nice thing about the ward, was that with the password, not just anyone could call or go see him. He didn't want me to go see him. And he defiantly didn't want his family there.

When he gave me the password, he asked me not to give it to his family, that if he wanted to see them or talk to them, he would call them. 

When his family asked me about going to see him, I told them that he asked me not to give the password out, and that he would call when he was ready.

His family didn't believe me. They called the psychiatric ward asking to speak to him, and (because they didn't have the password) they were told they didn't have a patient there under that name.

I was angry. I felt like his family didn't believe me or trust me. That I was trying to keep their son and brother away from them. When really I was respecting his wishes.

I knew Seth was there to get treatment, and if he didn't want people there, that was his decision. 

When I went and saw Seth for the first time, he was medicated to the point that he would slur his speech. He would forget what we were talking about mid sentence. 

He was distraught. He would sit and cry, and ask me if I was going to divorce him.

During that time, I never once thought about leaving my husband.

I loved him, he was alive, and that's all that mattered.

At least in the psychiatric ward, he was safe.

But I need roller blades!

There is one memory that sticks out in my mind.

I had gone to see Seth at his apartment. He had no furniture or dishes.

He slept on the floor.

He asked me if he could move “our” bed to his apartment, so he could have a bed to sleep on.

My answer was “Umm.. No, you moved out. If we get divorced we will separate our belongings at that time”.

He was angry with me.

Told me it was my fault he was sleeping on the floor in his apartment.

I remember looking around his apartment, and noticed a box of brand new roller blades. I asked him how much they cost him, and he said “$300”.

I said “You know, rather than sleeping on the floor, you could have bought a bed with that $300.”

He got angry and said “But I need roller blades!”

I said “So having roller blades and sleeping on the floor makes more sense?”

I could see it “clicked” in his head.

What I was saying made sense to him.

I could see the anger subside. He realized I wasn’t the enemy. I was trying to help.

I was pretty baffled how something that was common sense to me wasn’t common sense to him.

This wasn’t the Seth I knew.

The Seth I knew would have thought about this rationally. The Seth I knew wouldn’t sleep on the floor in order to have roller blades.

He asked me if he could borrow $300 from me to buy a bed.

I was angry.

He made WAY more money than I did, yet he wanted to borrow money from me, to buy a bed.

After he just barely bought $300 roller blades.

He wanted me to sleep on the floor in our house, so he could have a bed at his apartment.

In a manic episode, it made sense to buy roller blades, and ask his wife to sleep on the floor, so he could have a bed to sleep in and have his roller blades.

I lent him the $300 and made it very clear he owed me the money. After all, we weren’t “together”. He lived somewhere else so it was no longer “our” money. It was MY money, and he owed me every cent of it back.

Surprisingly, he paid me back.

The roller blades now sit in my garage, being used only once.

After our counseling session, I knew the truth behind Seth’s strange behavior.

Shortly after that counseling session, Seth called me and asked if he could move back home.

I answered “Of course, if you get medical treatment”.

Seth moved home just before Halloween 2008.

We took him to the doctor, where he was diagnosed with bipolar type 1. Wanting a second opinion and confirmation of sorts, we took him to two other doctors, and ultimately receiving the same diagnoses.

After his diagnoses, I read everything I could find on bipolar type 1.

Unfortunately, I knew the suicide rate with people that have bipolar type 1.

The suicide rate is 70%.

Seth started treatment. The medications seemed to help some but also seemed to make some things worse.

He always had an underlying depression.

The depression wasn’t the scary thing for me. It was the mania and psychosis.

At least with the depression he could think clearly. He would sleep and be depressed, but he still had a clear head.

When he was manic, he was all over the place. He would start 20 projects, had brilliant ideas, he was always on the go. However, with the mania came the hallucinations and voices. He wouldn’t sleep or eat for days. He would get paranoid, overwhelmed and scared. He said he had about 5 different voices in his head. They were always whispering and he could never really make out what they were saying.

Then came the depression.

The projects he started wouldn’t get finished. He would sleep, eat, and drink too much booze.

He would then feel like a failure because his projects never got finished.

He rapid cycled between mania and depression. Sometimes he would cycle monthly, sometimes daily. Because he cycled so fast, getting him stable was always hard.

With the rapid cycling, by time we got him to the doctor, we were already a day or two late.

Every day was a struggle. We kind of just bumped along, hoping to get him stable.

He was put on lithium (which was the best medication he ever took), antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiety medication, sleeping medication, and an “emergency” medication that would pull him out of mania quickly.

April 2009 rolled around. He still wasn’t stable.

It was April 1^st. I was at work. For some reason, I had a horrible feeling something was wrong with Seth.

I left work and went home.

When I walked through the front door of our house… I knew…I just knew.

I looked for his medications that I had just filled the day before; all the bottles were missing…

And so was he.