Thursday, October 27, 2011

Journal Entry 2

Night two of only Celexa and Klonopin PRN. Took the Klonopin tonight but I still have a lot of energy. It's a fun, sporadic energy but very inappropriate for 11 PM. Probably the beginning stages of some sort of hypomania. This was only day one off lithium, and I'm sure some of you Bipolars can relate to this guilt I feel for enjoying what is probably a little manic burst. I just hope ECT kicks in before I get too loopy on these reduced meds.

Now to businss: ECT. I was supposed to get my first treatment this morning, so I didn't eat or drink after midnight as instructed. I was awoken at 5:30 AM and given a hospital gown. By a little after 6:00 I was sitting by the nurses' station, waiting to be transported down to the second floor. Around 6:30 a wheelchair was brought up to transport me to ECT. After taking the elevator, I was pushed through a hallway and through a large room lined with hospital beds, separated by curtains on tracks. This is where the treatments are done, I was put in a hospital bed in a side room while my pulse and blood pressure were taken and my charts, located on a table beside me, were looked over. In the meantime I was offered warm blankets. After maybe twenty minutes I was wheeled into the procedure room where I again waited, then answered some questions from the anesthesiologist. After a while I was told I couldn't have the procedure performed that morning since nobody had done the bloodwork that is required of me pre-op in order to gauge how thin my blood is from the Coumadin I have been on since the discovery of the pulmonary embolism. I apparently need to have blood drawn each morning, they don't want my blood too thin in case I have a vessel "malformation" somewhere which might rupture from the minor convulsions and muscle tensing, which occur during the seizure despite the administered muscle relaxants. I was very disappointed that I couldn't have the procedure performed today, and I wasn't sent back upstairs until after 8:00. Hopefully all goes well tomorrow morning and I am able to report back on the actual ECT procedure. For now I'm going to try to sleep, and tomorrow I will attempt to have my Klonopin increased to counter this bout of persistent energy.

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