Epilogue
August 2014: Happy ever after was not to be. I had thought that since my illness stemmed from a shortage of serotonin, if I took daily doses of the stuff or improved the efficiency with which I used it everything would tick along beautifully, like a diabetic using insulin. But it wasn’t meant to be. I am now taking one hundred milligrams a day of Nortriptiline, one pill short of the maximum allowable daily dose. At this dosage I have great difficulty getting up in the morning; it takes a huge effort of will on my part to get dressed and face the day. Also, at this dosage my thinking is fuzzy, and I sometimes watch the world go by in slow motion. Marion may say something to me, but by the time I’ve processed the message, formed and delivered a reply she’s left the room, busy on other matters. Several of my early ‘orbital’ illnesses are trying to creep back in. I can control them for the moment, but I find it very distressing that they are trying to reclaim me when I had thought them forever vanquished. I have no fear of visits to my doctor, thank heaven, and keep him up to date with my symptoms. He suggested on my last visit that my friend Nortriptiline is a very old anti-depressant and I might benefit greatly from one of the newer drugs. I told him I was not ready to do so, not yet, but I will visit again soon and tell him I am now ready to try a different pill.
I do not like to leave the house. If Marion and I are driving to Halifax on a simple shopping trip I will not sleep the night before. I have no specific fears; I do not fear a traffic accident, or any kind of calamity on the trip. Just old phobias re-emerging.
When I go for a run down my old jogging trail I fear attack from behind every bush. I am five feet ten inches tall, weigh 180 pounds. My dog, Kuba, is a ninety pound German Shepherd with attitude problems, and he has started to come jogging with me. Together we should be safe even from the brown bears which sometimes turn up on the wooded parts of the trail. There are probably a thousand reasons why I need not fear; unfortunately, logical thinking plays no part in this. I will still move to the other side of the trail when passing a bush which could conceal a mugger (six feet tall and wearing a grey overcoat?)
Did you know that laughing is so like crying that I can start one and morph seamlessly into the other?
The cruelest cut of all is that the pills no longer keep me free from my ‘crashes’, my ‘episodes’. Winston’s Black Dog attacks me five or six times a year, with various degrees of violence. The worst episode of my life occurred three years ago at a time when I was supposedly protected by my medication, and it lasted five days.
Marion is still able to smell the difference in my body chemistry when an attack is imminent, and with her help I can sometimes minimize the severity of attack, even avoid it. She is, as she has always been, my guiding light back to sanity, and as long as I have her I will not fear.
When I finally stand at the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter asks me if I have any complaints about my life I will tell him ‘No, Sir, none at all’. I have lived my years in freedom, I have enjoyed good physical health from the start, I’ve had all the material success any man could wish for, and I have been surrounded by love. To love and be loved counters an awful lot of Black Dog bites. And who knows, perhaps my life-long struggle against mental illness has made me spiritually stronger. Maybe it was an intended part of this life, put there for a reason. No complaints, Pete: open the gates, please, there are people waiting for me in there.
I haven’t looked at my checklist for a while. I will do so now. To fellow sufferers, God bless you and keep you strong. I don’t expect to live long enough to see a cure for our condition, but with luck, perhaps developments in medication will allow us to negotiate a longer lasting truce.