The Two Kinds of Decay

When

How long was I sick?

I got the tube pulled in May 1996. I recovered from my last acute CIDP relapse in November 1999. I recovered from my last severe depression in March 2004.

In May 2004, to treat my more or less constant steroid-induced hypomania, I stopped taking olanzapine, which I’d taken for five years, and began taking quetiapine fumarate.

And this may sound silly or arbitrary or vain, but after I traded olanzapine for quetiapine fumarate, I lost twenty-five pounds in six weeks. And those twenty-five pounds, which I’d been carrying since I’d first gone on steroids in 1995, was fat I couldn’t burn off with exercise or by restricting my food intake. It was from the drugs.

Once that nine-year-old fat was gone, I looked healthy even to myself. I ran and ran. I got lean and strong.

I was thirty years old, and most of the women I knew were fatter and curvier than they’d been as college students, and I’d thought for the past nine years that that had happened to me. That I’d taken on the shape of the adult woman my genes had programmed me to become.

It was a joyful and confusing time, 2004. I’d become accustomed to being one shape, and suddenly I was a different shape.

My gait changed. I became lighter on my feet. I had to buy all new clothes.

I became furiously happy. I ran a lot and drank a lot.

In 2004 I ran three miles for the first time since college, and even though I am even now still taking quetiapine to treat the hypomania, I’ve integrated the drug’s side effects into my life.

Also in 2004 I made a mistake in the midst of an unstable euphoria, and in 2005 I took my last drink. In penance.

And after the requisite horror of the first six weeks, the first six months, the first sober dates, the first sober sex, the first sober year, sobriety made me feel better than I’d ever felt.

I say 2004 is the year I got better, because it’s the year the biggest problem in my life changed from CIDP to drinking, and that’s a separate problem.

That’s why, even though my last CIDP relapse was in 1999, I say I was sick for nine years.