Part 2: “The world is even more unfair when you don’t take your asbestos plate armor along to the Flaming Fiery Death Fire Dungeon…”

“… and now you’ve set the gelatinus giganticus cubes on fire and they aren’t dying and you know what fire is contagious! “

The thing about Abilify is that it’s strong. Very strong. 10mg is considered a max dose for a bipolar sufferer, much in the way that 600mg of Lamictal is, to give an idea of scale.

Now, 2mg of anything sounds too small to affect one very much. Of course, I didn’t take into account the following:

  1. I’m sensitive to medication in the first place. The only reason I ended up on 500mg of Lamictal is due to a resistance that built up over seven years.

  2. I’m still on all my other meds while I’m taking Abilify.

  3. There’s a fricking magnitude of difference in strength between all my other medication and Abilify.

  4. Bipolar tends to strip away one’s ability to judge how well one is handling things. The answer should default to “no” but, silly me, I play the denial game way too often.

So. Playing with medication doses of any sort on a work day is a bad idea. I knew that, so I planned to only work from home, away from my team, and with my only meeting was a 15-minute status concall. My decision was based on needing to meet serious goal deadlines, so this seemed a good compromise with enough precautions.

It wasn’t enough.

And it was unwise of me to not simply have written the day off, as I ended up having to do so.

In my meager and unjustified defense, playing with the huge handicap bipolar bestowed upon on my judgement is… difficult to deal with. I have to be careful in ways that a lot of people don’t. Of course, this is my responsibility and I failed hard at it. The way I handled it is perhaps similar to a person with a triple bypass who, not wanting to be impolite at a party, proceeds to eat the sausage fat soup. It could work out, but good luck with never failing your saving rolls.

This is how you let your bipolar destroy your career. Or, if you are very, very lucky, how you let it almost destroy your career.

I still have my job. I’m not officially on probation, but I might as well be.

I don’t particularly want to live in the Flaming Fiery Death Fire Dungeon, but I do. Although it would help if some people stopped telling me that if I just pretended it wasn’t there I’d be just fine.

I’m sorry, y’all. This was going to be more upbeat, but that will have to wait for part 3, it seems.

2 thoughts on “Part 2: “The world is even more unfair when you don’t take your asbestos plate armor along to the Flaming Fiery Death Fire Dungeon…””

  1. Pretending it’s not there? Catastrophic. The only way to deal with conditions that affect your judgment is by remembering they’re there every damn minute.

    I’m sorry you had a rotten day.

  2. *hugs* Thanks.

    Amazingly the rotten day happened a couple days ago and it’s still pretty rotten now. Although my judgement is slightly better with the Abilify—I now can recognize that the just-about-probation isn’t personal about half of the times that I think about it.

    For a very long time I’ve been in denial about having a condition that affected my judgement at all, and then it progressed into denial that my case of bipolar couldn’t really affect my judgement, and yeah that led to a bad place.

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