In a word, yes. In two words…heck no. 
Fabulous Creature - Thanks for the info on type II, and thanks for calling me out on “curable”. I tried to qualify it, but I do know it’s never completely curable.
And I know plenty of type IIs eventually need to take injections, but is it accurate to say that they are “becoming Type I’s”? Just semantics, maybe.
And congrats on your decreasing dosage - I’m not familiar with glyburide, but I’m sure less is better.
–KidScruffy
As a carryover from my hydrophobe thread:
Obviously these vary from person to person, but they’re generally true.
I am Bipolar:
You must be unstable all the time and must be watched with caution - No, I am as normal as my regular personality lets me be with treatment and I have been absolutely fine in that aspect for over 2 years.
You must find it hard with things like holding a job and having a normal life - I have and have had very good professional jobs. I also have a wife, a child with one on the way, a beautiful house, and everything else.
It must take a lot of drugs to keep you stable - the main “drug” is lithium and it is an element rather than something a company dreamed up. Homeopathic types should love that. However, there is the potential for something called lithium toxicity and that is very dangerous. Lithium has to be monitored by doctors because the effective dose is so close to the toxic dose.
Aren’t you going to try to get off those drugs now that you are better - No, but a lot of bipolar people do that and it is really dumb. Many people would kill to have a serious illness that you can keep in check with just a few pills a day. It will come back and start to destroy things again.
You must feel really bad about being bipolar - Well, I wouldn’t choose it but doctors will tell you that if you have a major mental illness, bipolar disorder is the one to have. Once you get your treatment worked out, it tends to be pretty effective in the short and long-term without many problems as long as you stay on it.
Don’t you think that you could talk to a good therapist and get off those drugs - I do have a therapist but that isn’t related much to direct treatment of bipolar disorder. It is a biological disease and requires biological treatment. If the lithium stops, all the talk in the world isn’t going to help me. I know that from personal experience. Any competent therapist won’t let bipolar patients go without drug therapy as well.
GERD with a hiatal hernia
Heartburn is no reason to stay home from work.
When I get a bad bout, my head feels like it’s going to explode. I get diahrreah. I’m nauseus. Breathing hurts. Talking hurts. I get dizzy from the headache. My back, neck and arms hurt. So, yes - sometimes it can cause me to miss work. This is very rare though (now).
If you’d stop eating junkfood, you wouldn’t have heartburn.
I get two kinds of heartburn. One is caused by spicy food, etc. That one can be treated with OTC stuff. The other is extreme, debilitating, and can only be treated with time (my prescription doesn’t even help). I can tell the difference between the two. Regular heartburn is a slight burning in my chest and frequently the nasty puke taste in my mouth. My GERD heartburn is much more than that - see number 1.
If you lost weight, you wouldn’t have heartburn.
I am heavy now. I admit that. I have lost 40 pounds in the last 6 months and have another 30 to go. But I haven’t always been a fatass. I have always had problems with heartburn.
Everyone thinks they have GERD now because of all the OTC treatments available.
The OTC treatments are for regular heartburn. I have never talked to anyone with diagnosed GERD who gets any relief from OTC treatments when their GERD acts up. Even my prescription doesn’t stop an attack. All the prescription does is reduce the amount of attacks I have. I now only get about 1 a week and they aren’t as severe as they used to be. I used to get them every day and they caused me to miss work or school at least once a month. I haven’t missed work due to heartburn in over a year.
Your reflux would get better if you stopped smoking.
For the record, I have only been smoking since I was 19. I am 26 now. I stopped for 3 years a few years ago. I have been actively complaining about reflux since I was 8. I have suffered from it since I was a very small child. I was not fat or a smoker when I was 5 - but I remember going home from school more than once because of what I called “throw-up burps” which would not go away and would make my whole upper body hurt. I later learned that those “throw-up burps” were heartburn. I admit that for a GERD sufferer, smoking is stupid. But, you know what? It’s my decision. I wasn’t born yesterday. I know smoking could kill me even if I didn’t have other health problems. We all make stupid decisions and we suffer the consequences.
You don’t really have GERD, you just have heartburn (because of weight, diet, smoking - whatever).
I spent the majority of my life complaining about two things - my knees hurting and heartburn. My doctors always told me that my heartburn was caused by food, weight - whatever. Finally, when I was 20, I got yet another new GP in the hopes of getting help. After hearing my complaints, she told me that she had no doubt I suffered from GERD. She sent me for an Upper GI. The diagnoses was (to be specific), “rather sever reflux with a hiatal hernia”. There was also something in there about my lower esophageal sphincter being very weak and “loose”. I spent the next few years trying out every prescription remedy available. None worked. After finding an ulcer pill which helped, I was checked for ulcers. After 5 abdominal ultrasounds, ulcers were ruled out. My gall bladder was checked. I was also tested for a bacteria whose name escapes me at the moment. That was also ruled out. The concensus is that I suffer from nothing more than severe GERD with two complicating factors. 4 doctors have agreed on this. I have been lucky though. I had an esophageal scope done last year which proved that despite my lifelong problems with GERD, I have somehow managed to escape with only very minor scarring of my esophagus.
GERD is just an annoyance. It doesn’t cause any lasting problem.
Tell that to my uncle. His esophagus was so filled with scar tissue that he couldn’t consume anything solid. Even things like pudding had trouble going down. His doctors also found pre-cancerous cells in his esophagus. He was not a smoker, hates junkfood and doesn’t like spicy food. He has never been overweight. He had surgery to (sort of) repair his esophagus. He can now eat solid food and his GERD is finally starting to calm down a bit and respond to treatment. But, the scarring is coming back.
My favorite only happened once so it doesn’t really deserve it’s own number.
7a. Why didn’t you have the hiatal hernia repaired when you had your surgery last year?
How’s this for a reason? I was having surgery for a herniated disk - in my back. As far as I know, my neurosurgeon doesn’t do much with stomachs and esophagi(esophaguses?) 
Amen and preach it sister on that one! My mother, who was manager of residential facilities for the mentally ill for almost 20 years shovelling psychotropic meds by the bucketful, has told me this both about my depression and her own. (By her own estimate she’s been battling depression since the 1940s and by all observations it’s been winning hands down.) “You want to write- you can’t write if you’re all doped up!”
I tried explaining to her that when I’m depressed I don’t want to write. I don’t want to do ANYTHING. I get bathed and dressed and go to work because I absolutely have to because the alternative is losing my apartment and living with her and that’s the one incentive that can do anything for me when I’m depressed, but when I would come home I’d vegetate with the TV and that was about it. ON MEDICATION I may not have quite the source material for writing about depression I had before, but thankfully I have a good memory. (The Adderall is I think really helping as well, though it’s for narcolepsy rather than Depression.) She points to the vacant expressions of the people she worked with as proof, not quite seeming to grasp that these people are the “TOO ILL TO FUNCTION” mentally ill. (These are the people whose illnesses are basically too severe to ever lead anything like a normal life- the ones who have to have medication just to sleep at night because the voices keep them awake- and what quality of life they do have comes from the medications and even then there have been some success stories- one woman who used to live there and who hears voices and has had all sorts of wild hallucinations has actually graduated law school and become a successful Social Security attorney- she still gets sick sometimes but she deals with it and she knows when it’s happening. Frankly, some of the ones who’ve never gotten out of the place are the type of people who if they weren’t MI or schizoaffective would probably be content to sit on their ass all day (there is definitely a point at which the illness leaves off and the personality kicks in, and vice versa), but all in all judging people with mental illnesses by the standards of a group home is like judging the abilities of all 75 year olds by the ones you meet in a nursing home. There are 75 year olds who have very active lives and surf the net and run 5 miles a day (takes them allllll day, but they do it) but the ones you find in a nursing home are the ones who can’t do these things because they’re infirm.
Anyway, didn’t mean to go off on a tangent, but it’s a hot button issue and recurring argument with my family that always gets me pissed. It’s almost like they somehow want me to be depressed (which I know they don’t- it’s ignorance rather than malice- but the effect’s the same).
My sister and I have had an ongoing argument since we went to see the movie THE AVIATOR, which she absolutely loved (I liked it as well but for her it was like a personal testimony type thing). “You see, today they’d put Howard Hughes on pills for this and a shot for that and more pills for some other and he couldn’t have done all that he did?”
“You mean sit around naked pissing in jars and covered in filth and repeating himself hundreds of times and wishing he was dead?”
“No, smartass, the Spruce Goose…”
“THE HERCULES!”
“…and the other stuff, that movie that took him 4 years to make cause he wanted it exactly right with the clouds but was perfect…”
“That movie that lost money and drove everybody who worked on it nuts and that he still wanted to reshoot because of his OCD?”
“…and all the other stuff. He wouldn’t have had the drive or the wits to give that senator from MASH what for or anything…”
“And let’s see… he wouldn’t have kept starlets prisoner in apartments he owned and bugged his girflriend’s apartments due to paranoid delusions and had three disastrous marriages and several disastrous relationships and wound up living in a penthouse wearing kleenex boxes for shoes so terrified of germs that somedays he could not move and making the lives of everybody who cared about him absolutely miserable with his lunatic demands and needs until finally died of drug abuse and eating disorders shrivelled up and miserable and a total prisoner of his own illness…”
“We never would have had The Hercules.”
“It flew for one mile one time. We’d have made it without it.”
“He’d have been just another rich kid with a trust fund.”
“He might have been happy.”
“Let’s agree to disagree.”
“Let’s.”
“You’re wrong.”
“You are.”
RINSE LATHER REPEAT
I think that people who tell others with OCD, Depression, etc., that they shouldn’t take medicine are no better than snake handlers who tell people that prayer will cure their appendicitis. I would probably not be alive if it weren’t for anti-depressants and I’m the only member of my family who takes them. I’m also the only member of my family who controls his temper (mine’s as bad as their’s, I just manage to avoid blowing as easily due to medication and some ‘exercises’ I’ve learned). And of course my sister was pharmacist for 25 years which adds some irony to her hatred of pills.
Or, we’re too lazy to deal with our problems so we just pop a happy pill to make them all go away.
And I’m not diabetic, but I’d like to point out that not all Type 2s are overweight. My grandmother is a Type 2 and if anything, she’s always been underweight. She has a bad heart and she’s eighty-seven years old, but she’s a teeny, tiny, petite little thing.
Everything in the OP plus this:
**
“My god, don’t eat that muffin, you’re going to go into a diabetic coma”**
Bite me, no I’m not. Insulin reactions like the one you’re afraid of happen when someone crashes, NOT from eating a muffin 20 minutes after I tested at a 91 and I’m not going to have a chance at a real meal for three more hours.
This appears to be me. 7 years ago, a 4 mg Amaryl and diet/exercise kept me good. After a time, I had to add Avandia. Last February, I started Lantus, now that may not be doing the trick, as I’m eating better, exercising more and getting higher readings again. No clinical explanation, I’m doing all the right things, and managing to keep myself in control, but only by closely monitoring and dosing myself right.
I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Not sure I can come up with 7, but here goes:
2)** You should just stop doing the compulsive behaviors!** No, this only manages to severely heighten my distress and even if I DO manage to curb one type of behavior, a new one immediately steps up to takes it place.
I must have OCD too! I have to keep my house spotless or it really bothers me! No. You MAY have Obsessive Compusive Personality Disorder, but this is a whole order removed from full-blown OCD. You may also just be slightly anal and a better housekeeper than me.
So, you must have to wash your hands all the time then! No, OCD compulsions come in as many forms as you care to imagine and can change frequently.
What you need is behavioral therapy! No, what I need is 50mg of Luvox and a glass of water. (In fairness there is some evidence that combined behavorial and pharmacological treatments are effective)
I saw “As Good As It Gets” and Jack Nicholson was cured just by getting out of the house more and hitting on Helen Hunt. It IS possible for symptoms to ebb, especially when things are going well or you are distracted, but symptoms reoccur during times of stress and never go away entirely. Even with treatment you can’t definitely expect a 100% total cure in all cases. (Jack Nicholson does do a fairly accurate emulation of the diease however)
You must be deathly afraid of germs then! Sometimes. I am also afraid of the number 22, the clock hitting 9:34am, and something terrible happening to a loved one because I forgot to count to 10 before going to bed.
***All this is based on my personal experience and does not necessarily reflect the experience of all people with OCD. IANAD, A psychologist, or a Half-elf. YMMV. Void in where prohobited. Offer not available in all areas. Remove shell before eating nut-meats. Do not put in eye. ***
I have OCD and I get, “Well, you KNOW that’s not going to happen, that’s totally unlikely!”
Duh. That’s the fun thing about OCD-you know your fears are completely out of proportion and ridiculous-but you can’t stop them. Fun!
I have neurogenic syncope (basically – I pass out/faint)
You don’t know what it is like. This pretty much goes for any condition/disease you don’t have. Do not tell me, “I know just how it feels”. You don’t know just how it feels, so do me a favor and keep your mouth shut.
Passing out once in your life is not the same as my condition. See above.
It is a disease. It is not a disease. Technically, it is a reflex. So don’t ask me when I am going to be cured — I am never going to be cured.
No, I did not just have a heart attack, and no, you didn’t just bring me back to life. Sorry to disappoint you-- but you aren’t a hero. I am very impressed that you learned how to take someone’s pulse, but just because you can’t feel a heartbeat doesn’t mean you should do CPR (especially if you never learned it). You see that little medallion I wear around my neck, if you would bother to read it, you would see the words “Neurogenic syncope” if you don’t know what those words mean – please do not try to revive me, wait until a medical professional wonders by.
It is brought on by stress/emotional issues. It has nothing to due with my mental state and everything to due with my blood pressure and heart rate. You do not need to treat me with kid gloves. Yelling at me will not cause me to pass out, it will just make me angry.
The medication is not working, and it is bad for me. Just because it hasn’t “cured” me, doesn’t mean it isn’t helping. Yes, the meds have side effects, but I think it is worth it. And my opinion is the one that matters here.
I can’t have a normal life. I can have a normal life. I may have to skip out on rollar coaters and stay off the treadmill, but I can still function just fine on my own. So please stop acting like I am too delicate to do the simplest task. I am better at calculating what I am capable of than you are.
My OCD started right after I reached my teenage years and my parents tried this type of logic on me all the time. It was difficult to make them understand that I KNEW it was total insane BS but it STILL really, seriously, didn’t matter.
When I finally got on medicine that helped me, it was a total boon to my self esteem. “See! I am not just being stupid! I have a real-live medical condition… like epilepsy or having 15 nails in my forehead”.
After spending years being told it was my fault, all in my head, and to “suck it up”, it was supreme vindication.
Anna, is this an assertion you’re making, or one of the misconceptions you’re vening about?
I am pretty sure it is clear that it is one of misconceptions. It is a very common one with bipolar disorder.
I was being sarcastic. It is a common misconception about mental illness, and one that kept me from seeking treatment for way too long.
Generalized anxiety and social anxiety are like that, too. It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of it- you know you’re being irrational, but you can’t stop.
I’ve had chronic fatigue syndrome for the last 16 months.
Migraine
Yeah, Sampiro’s Sister…or maybe we would have had hundreds of 'em by the summer of '43! :smack:
Ah, SSRIs. How I love thee.
I actually heard somebody make that statement about Nicholson’s OCD improving when he “stops being so wrapped up in himself” to a co-worker with OCD. I pointed out that 1) it’s a movie- hello, Helen Hunt’s 65 year old mother is delighted that her daughter’s going on a roadtrip with a mentally ill man her age! and 2) Melvin ALSO starts taking medication in that movie, which helped as much as behavioral modification and a romantic relationship.
The same co-worker (black, female, 20something) simply could not explain her condition to our boss (white, female, 50something, stupidsomething)- that she knew the things she did when the medication stopped working were irrational and she knew that she did not have to take the stairs to three floors above the proper floor and then come down and she knew that she did not have to tap the stapler once on the left side of her keyboard and twice on the right side before she could use it and she knew that it was rude and wrong and distracting to say “mm-hmmm, mm-hmmm, mm-hmmm, mm-hmmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmmm, mm-hmmm” (always exactly seven times) when somebody asked you a question (needless to say she did not work with the public or on the phone) and she knew that she did not HAVE to take her smoke-breaks at exactly 10:06 a.m. (or whatever) and exactly 2:16 p.m. (or whatever) by the digital clock on the wall, but she couldn’t NOT do these things differently. It was not a choice, it was a pattern that would end the world as we knew it if she didn’t complete them, and she knew that was total BS but that was exactly how she felt and she was a slave to it. She improved significantly while I knew her, but her medication simply stopped working once [it will do that- decompensation is the technical jargon] and she was a mess until she was started on another regimen. (Sarah also had a phobia of mechanical pencils- sounds almost funny, but she seriously couldn’t touch them, have them on her desk and couldn’t concentrate if you were holding one in her eyesight, and she could not drive when her medication was not working because she would have to do things like stop by the curb and let exactly seven cars (or whatever number the part of her brain affected by the illness rigidly demanded) pass her, and when she smoked it was always highly ritualistic.
Sorry for the ramble, but I always thought that OCD is a just incredibly fascinating disorder (that I thank the gods I don’t suffer from*) because it’s so… well, orderly, and mathematical. I read in some source that Ray Kroc (the man who took McDonald’s from one successful burger restaurant to what it is now) had OCD and this had a lot to do with the standardization of the chain.
INTERESTING [IF ONLY TO ME] HIJACK:
I wish that I had a cite for this, but it’s purely anecdotal. I became friends with an elderly man (actually not quite as old as he seemed, but as a chain smoker with heart problems he seemd a lot older than he actually was) named Joe when he was placed in the mental health facility (technically a “halfway house” for people discharged from mental hospitals but not quite ready to make it in the outside world, but due to an extreme shortage of mental health beds [and AL’s actually one of the best states in the union for mental health care- CA for example is horrifying). Joe was sent there for being bipolar and delusional, and while he admitted for observation due to being extremely depressed and disoriented and delusional. He admitted to having had a life long depressive/anxiety disorder and some other problems, but he said he was not delusional, he had just had a weird life, but the things he told about his past were too improbable to be true. He claimed to have been born on an Amish rabbit-manure farm in WV, to have gone from being Amish to living in Greenwich village overnight when he was 19 (for the most melodramatic of reasons), to have spent two years painting the ceilings and walls of a 60 room mansion with scenes from American history for a Texas oil billionaire and to have painted a live portrait of Hirohito and Mrs. Hirohito while living in the royal palace in Japan and to have painted some of the cells from THE JUNGLE BOOK and worked for Disney for several years (doing most of the Johnny Appleseed shorts) and to have worked for the Audubon Society for years as their chief artist, etc… As you’ve probably guessed he wasn’t delusional: these things were true. They checked out. He was the only resident who while living in the group home got a $10,000 check in the mail from Andy Griffith for a portrait he did of Griffith’s wife while a guest (for the purpose of painting) in their beach house in NC. (The check had followed him around for a while because he’d gone on a “depressive odyssey” following a hurricane that wiped him out [he owned a house in New Orleans filled with his artwork and insurance was unbelievably expensive and he took a gamble and lost bigtime.)
Anyway, Joe worked for Walt Disney Studios for years and while they weren’t friends (in fact he couldn’t stand him) he knew Walt very well. He swore that Walt, while perhaps not OCD, most definitely had OCD episodes. One of Walt’s obsessions when he was having an episode was light bulbs- Disney Land had millions of light bulbs and Walt literally could not rest until he found one that was blown whereupon he’d go ballistic at the first engineer or maintenance person he saw. The longer it took him to find one the more he’d blow. It was something he had to do.
It got to where when he went into one of his “moods”, a maintenance man would call ahead on walkie talkie with a code word, whereupon a maintenance man in the next part of the park would take a blown bulb that was kept around just for this purpose and use it to replace a perfectly good bulb so that they could go ahead and get the ass chewing over with and Walt could get back to (what passed for normal). Joe described Disney all around as a mercurial person who could be insanely generous one second and “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!” the next and you never knew which one you’d be seeing that day. Joe quit after Walt through a major tantrum with the artists over some tiny miniscule perceived flaw (for instance [made up] he thought a leaf on a tree in the background of one cell was a slightly different shade than in another), gave his name as a reference to the Audubon Society as a joke (knowing they couldn’t get Walt on the phone and that if they did Walt wouldn’t remember him, and they received a several page glowing recommendation of Joe in Walt’s own handwriting.
Joe also dated my mother briefly. I really wish I knew where he was today (or if he’s still alive.)
Anyway, sorry for the HIJACK.[/HIJACK]
I hope I’m not going to be thought of as a “one trick pony”, and while having had gastric bypass surgery isn’t a “disease”, it’s a “condition”, I guess…here are some things that get bandied about:
You can never eat real food again.
Wrong. I can eat any food I want - in moderation. I choose NOT to eat sugar, large quantities of pasta/rice/bread or alcohol.
You will have to live on 2 tablespoons of food for the rest of your life.
Uh - no. Depending on the density of the food, I can eat anywhere from a 1/2 to a full cup of food (I’m 18 months post-op)
You’ll gain all your weight back!
Not totally true. You can gain weight back if there’s a mechanical failure of the operation, or if you eat “around” the surgery (high calorie - high carb liquids/soft foods.
You’ll keep losing weight until you die!
While there are cases of people losing too much weight, generally your body (the miraculous creature that it is) will eventually compensate (to a point) for the intestinal bypass & your new pouch will eventually stretch. It will never be as big as it was pre-op, but it will be bigger than the thumb-size it was immediately after surgery.
My cousin’s friend’s hairdresser’s uncle’s ex wife’s niece lost all her hair! You will too!
Not necessarily; some hair loss is common after any major surgery (anesthesia reactions, etc), but it’s temporary and in my case, minimal.
How do you eat now that your intestine has been removed? :eek:
They don’t remove your intestine (Physiology 101, anyone?). They bypass a portion of it which comprises the malabsorption function of the surgery.
You’ll die if you have this surgery!
The accepted mortality rate from the RNY bypass is approximately 1:200. Keep in mind that most patients having this sugery go into it with severe co-morbidities that put them at an automatic disadvantage. What’s more important is your surgeon’s mortality rate.
If this isn’t appropriate to the topic, please remove it; it’s just that there’s such an overwhelming amount of bad information on this subject floating about.
VCNJ~