The Adventures Archives - Bi-polar with a stoma Blog

Tinned Sardines in Tomato Sauce

Blog_Bi-polar — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 18:48:37 +0000

I am told, that in my younger years I liked eating tinned sardines in tomato sauce. Being an adult now, I view this as quite a sophisticated and sensible choice of snack, so years later I purchased a tin of sardines in tomato sauce and I spread them (if you can call it that) on toast. There was tomato sauce all over the show, because sardines are messy little fishies. I remember thinking… “This stinks and it’s gross.” I don’t ever remember liking it. A couple of months ago I found myself battling another bipolar blip. I’m not quite sure where it came from, just that The Calling were the band of choice and lead singer Alex Band was trying to communicate an unknown message through his songs. I have no idea what that message was because the ever disintegrating rational part of my brain was trying its best to hang on to sanity, while Bernard was doing his absolute best to entertain himself by creating countless playlists on my Apple Music account screaming out saying: “Isn’t this fun?! Aren’t we having a good time with this?! Remember this song?! We used to love this song! Remember Kat? Remember?!” As I sat there in my office at work, trying to put my best foot forward and keep a smile on my face as I did my day, I kept thinking… “This isn’t fun. It’s not even a little bit fun.” So many people ask me what bipolar is like, and all I could ever say was… “It’s a series of highs and lows.” Well, after eating the sardines in tomato sauce I can now say… Bipolar is being told how good something is because you’ve not had it for a while. The only thing is, when you get the chance to experience it again, you come to realise that what you thought you liked; what you thought was good for you, is quite the opposite. You realise, you don’t like being high, it’s not fun being up all night, the whole music thing has become one giant burden on the shoulders of every person you know, as well as yourself; and it’s actually really boring. Bipolar is like being trapped in a tin of sardines. You can’t move, everything stinks and it’s really messy! This time around I was on the ball (it doesn’t happen very often). I took the extra meds, stuck to my routine, spoke to my consultant and waited for the nightmare to pass. Unfortunately, bipolar disorder isn’t going away, you can’t prevent it, you can’t stop it; you just have to deal with it when it happens. How you choose to deal with it, is your own choice. Every day I remind myself, and others; that music is still fun. I do like certain songs, and making playlists on Apple Music is perfectly okay. I just have to be aware, before it’s too late, that even when the world is big and my own world begins to shrink and it feels as though the walls are caving in. I can take solace in the fact that… …I am not a tinned sardine, in tomato sauce.

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Where Eagles Fly…

Blog_Bi-polar — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 16:56:50 +0000

Every day this world teaches me that life is too short. We never know how long we have left to roam this planet and we never know what hurdles may appear in front of us that might stop us from living a life that we can truly appreciate. A few months ago I made a vow to myself that if circumstances permitted me to do something I would love to do, then I would try my best to make that happen. I had an English teacher in secondary school who was a big fan of the Eagles and when he was telling the story of a concert he’d been to, I have always remembered him saying that the band were amazing musicians, but they didn’t get along and had to be flown separately in private jets whenever they had to do a show together. Now, I don’t know if that’s true because any snippets I’d seen of them playing on TV, they always looked as if they were getting along just fine. I viewed the Eagles as being a band too far out of my reach. I believed that I would never be able to warrant paying the cost of a ticket, never mind be in a position to pay for one. So when the 4th June came around and I had a ticket in my hand for The Long Goodbye tour, I was pretty much the definition of… …the Kat that got the cream. I don’t know if anyone reading this knows who the Eagles are or if they know any of their songs, but this isn’t just about music; for me this concert was about sharing something with Mum. It was about coming through a lifetime of misfortune mixed with those momentary flashes of joy you wish they sold behind the counter in Boots! When I was in hospital in 2011, all I had in my possession was a little personal radio that I could plug my earphones into. I found five radio channels and each station played a different genre of music. There was Pop, Rock, Older Rock, 80s/90s Pop and Classical. Each station had one or two songs that my tortured Bipolar brain clung to and I would sit for hours flicking through each station waiting for a specific song to come on. When “Take it to the Limit” came on by the Eagles it brought a whole new meaning to that song. I don’t know what the band intended the lyrics to mean but for me, it was about being in hospital. It was about finding a way through the darkness of being in a psychiatric ward and coming through the other side into a brighter world. Take it to the Limit At the concert I wanted to film the band singing that song because thirteen years later, I am in a brighter world. Even when I’ve had those dark days; these days, the brighter ones outshine the bad. I know people will say… “You don’t need to film it, you should just enjoy the moment.” Well yes, I see your point. But when you’re sat on a psychiatric ward for weeks on end with only five channels on a personal radio for entertainment and your lifeline is one song… let me tell you now, I wanted to have Take it to the Limit on my phone so I could remind myself as each day passes, that I am not the same person I was back then. I am not peering out of the window of my room, looking at the metal fence, too tall to climb, thinking… “Is this it? Is this my limit?” Because the truth is, there is no limit, not really. Even when people say… “The sky’s the limit…” That’s not necessarily true either, because who knows where the sky begins and where it ends? Who gets out their measuring tape? Over the last few months I’ve been given the opportunity to do more talks at work than I have done in the last four years, and I love being back in the driver’s seat. As each talk has got bigger in capacity I have reminded myself of what my initial intention was ten years ago. I told myself, that if I was going to speak in public and tell people a story, then I would only do it if I was going to do it well. Being just “okay” was not enough, being “okay” wouldn’t make people remember what I’ve been through and it certainly wouldn’t make people remember me!” So I went back to the beginning. I got in touch with my good friend Richard McCann and I booked myself on to his Storytelling Retreat in Leeds, 21st to 23rd June 2024. Oulton Hall, Leeds It was three days in luxurious surroundings, fine dining, good company and intensive training on how to stand, deliver, and tell your truth. Oulton Hall was out of this world, tall ceilings, chandeliers (you all know how much I love a good chandelier), I had a suite! With a bed twice the size of my own at home, a walk-in shower as well as a separate bath, big sink, wide mirror, massive TV, a desk to set up my laptop on. I had a coffee table to accompany my sofa and armchair, and to put the icing on the cake that already had far too many tiers… I had a fridge and free flowing tea and coffee! Winning! The suite! There was a spa with a pool that was at my disposal so I went swimming every single day. As I sat in my suite, in the centre of the biggest bed I have ever seen, I thought to myself… “This is the only time I will ever get to experience something like this.” I promised myself I would get the most out of the weekend. I would follow Richard’s guidance, I would write down everything I needed to remember, and I would...

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The Devil & Del Amitri

Blog_Bi-polar — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 16:31:36 +0000

Everyone has a hero. Everyone has someone they look up to, someone they wish they could be like, someone they could just meet. Who are my heroes? When it comes to me, I’ve had a few… Back in 1990 I watched the film Mermaids for the first time and within ten minutes I wanted Winona Ryder to be my big sister. In 1995 Natalie Portman won an award for best performance by a young actress in the film Leon, I not only wanted to wear the clothes she was wearing as she stepped on stage to collect the award, but at the age of fourteen I wanted to be her best friend and be her at the same time. In 1993 I saw Cool Runnings at the cinema and came out wanting to be a bobsledder. I even went home and asked my mum to hard boil be an egg so I could have a lucky egg just like Sanka! The minute I clapped my starstruck eyes on old re-runs of the 1982 TV series Fame, my imagination had already enrolled itself in the 7th series that never happened. I wanted Meat Loaf to be my dad, I wanted to be Enid Blyton’s protégé, be best friends with Zach and Kelly from Saved by the Bell and have my first and second novel published by the time I left high school. I wanted to be a ballet dancer and convinced myself if I pranced around my bedroom floor on my tip toes enough, I could give Darcey Bussell a run for her money. My first celebrity crush was Sylvester Stallone when I saw him in Rocky III and I was devastated that it was filmed in 1982 which meant he was far too old for me and would be more suited to the role of favourite uncle, which would have made things even weirder! When I was picking out careers for myself my maths teacher pointed out that I wasn’t clever enough to be a psychiatrist. I then turned my attention to becoming a psychologist; but shortly after I changed my mind and settled on becoming a podiatrist because by this point I was fully emersed into the world of Indie music and I had a crush on just about every singer in every band that I was obsessed with. I told myself I could be a “foot doctor” to the stars. Whenever I watched Top of the Pops, Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading Festival, any kind of concert where my favourite bands would play, I always thought… “Their poor feet, they must really hurt doing all that standing and dancing.” I was absolutely sure that I could help them and get closer to them by becoming an employee. If I was their “on the road” foot doctor, I could surely make them fall in love with me. First it was Crispian Mills, obviously, and I didn’t care that he was ten years older and when anyone said… “What would a twenty-four-year-old want with a fourteen-year-old?” I didn’t care, I was convinced he would one day float into my GCSE maths class and say… “Put your calculator down darlin’, you’re coming with me.” When I discovered he was married I knew the Crispian Mills ship had sailed and my ears turned their attention to Ocean Colour Scene. I would religiously watch TFI Friday just so I could hear the first few beats of The River Boat Song. When one of my school bullies informed me that thirty-one-year-old Simon Fowler would most definitely not be interested in fifteen-year-old me, I said… “Give me one good reason why not!” He replied with… “He’s got a boyfriend, you minger.” Now mark my words, I was less bothered by the “minger” bit than I was about the boyfriend bit, because now I knew it wasn’t possible and now I had no-where to go. Then I saw a music video by The Montrose Avenue and told myself that if couldn’t cut Crispian Mills’s toenails or file the dead skin off Simon Fowler’s heels, then surely Scott James would let me check out his bunions, assuming he had any. When my friends were fawning over Peter Andre and Deiter Brummer and trying to work out how they could go and see Titanic for the sixth time, I was looking out for the next band who might need their feet fixing. It turns out I had a list… Puressence Mansun The Seahorses Dodgy Starsailor Ruth Train – this would have been tricky since they were American. Stereophonics James Gay Dad Head Swim I have often said that I live my life through music, because as a teenager music and my writing was all I had as an escape. I could create any world I wanted and it didn’t have to be accurate because it was fiction. I could invent good people and turn them bad, I could make my characters swear and it didn’t matter what they said or what they did because they weren’t real and that wasn’t their fault. I could make them out to be as rude and as nasty as my school bullies because within those pages I could flick off the switch of whatever was happening in my real world and get some peace. The archive… Every Sunday I would finish off my homework while I listened to the Top 40 and pray my favourite bands were still hanging in there. Whenever they released a new song or a new album I had already pre-ordered my copy at my favourite music shop in Bolton and on release day I would dart down to to X-Records to pick up my cassette (Does anybody remember cassettes?). As soon as I got home I would gently unfold the leaflet to see if the lyrics were written inside. Regardless of the case’s contents I would sit beside my cassette recorder with my ear as close as I could get it to the speaker and learn every...

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I can tell a story…

Blog_Bi-polar — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 17:09:54 +0000

When you have an illness, of any kind; it can be a lonely and isolating world. You’re trapped inside your body and your mind and there’s very little you can do to separate yourself from that. When you have an illness you’re reminded every time you look into the mirror that there’s something wrong with you. When you have a mental illness, every time you look into the mirror it’s an introduction to how you’re doing that day. It’s been ten years since I made the decision to try my hand at public speaking. In 2014 I couldn’t even read a menu out loud never mind stand up in front of a group of people and talk about my mental health journey. Most people I talk to say the thought of public speaking terrifies them, and once upon a time, I would have agreed with them. Over the years people have asked me… “…Why? Why would you do such a scary thing to yourself…by choice?!” My answer is simple… “Why not?” When I’m asked why I wanted to become a public speaker, I don’t struggle to find my words. I got tired of people saying “no” to the things I wanted to do. I got bored of medical professionals putting the mentally ill into a box and saying… “This person can’t do this because they’re mentally ill.” I got frustrated with the world for allowing people to perceive the “mentally ill” as a group of people who can’t function in a society that is far from functional in the first place! My life today is very simple. I have not travelled the whole of the world, I have not experienced a tornado of heartache and heartbreak and throughout my 20’s and 30’s I was never ambitious when it came to my working life. Some say I settled for a basic way of living and I probably did. But what I would say about that is… “At least I’m alive.” A friend once said I should aim higher and look for a proper career. They said… “If someone asks you where you see yourself in five years, what would you say?” I said… “Alive, hopefully.” I don’t measure success according to the five, ten, fifteen year plan others set for themselves. I try to be grateful for what I have and if I am happy with the things that come my way, then I count that as a success. When I started public speaking I didn’t really know where I wanted to take it or how far I could go with it. When people ask me what I talk about and my answer is “myself” I always answer with caution because all I can see in their eyes is them thinking… “What could you possibly have to say about yourself that anyone would want to listen to?” Well, as it turns out, I have quite a bit to say and people seem to want to listen to it. Before Covid I was doing multiple talks per month but after lockdown everything didn’t just slow, it came to a halt altogether. I went from one job where people knew I had a public speaking side show, to a job where no one knew anything about me and any mention of public speaking was most probably seen as either a lie, or not worth registering because there was no current proof. Well now there’s proof. This year I have gone from doing three talks in four years to three talks in one month; and it feels good to be back on that horse. Every year since 2019 Abertay University have asked me to speak to some of their students. During Covid I spoke over MSTeams, which if you’ve used it, you’ll know it’s a better version of Zoom but still problematic. Last year the doors of in-person speaking reopened and I had the chance to go up to Dundee again, stay in a hotel and have a little adventure. I had three rules! My rules were as follows… Do not get an ear infection. Do not get fibre induced acne on face. Do not have Colitis flare up. What happened? I hear you ask… All flippin three! Every single one of them! I managed to curb the ear infection and found an anti-biotic spray I’d kept since my last one, so that was that taken care of. I imagine you’re wondering what fibre induced acne might be. Well, I can’t digest anything with fibre in it, which is basically anything healthy. So what did I eat prior to going to Dundee? A lot of fibre, which then causes my face to break out into a collection of volcanoes that take days to fully erupt and weeks to clear. I got three of them on my face! To complete the triangle, of course my colon decided it wanted to shed the insides of itself and have me writhing in agony the night before I left for Dundee, and skating on the edge of a cliff with no toilet insight. And trust me, when you have no working muscles to hold in the delights of a stagnant organ that never worked in the first place, needing to go to the toilet is the last thing you want to be thinking about. Picture this… I’d paid for a first class train ticket and as I was feeling like a tired and deflated whoopie cushion, I was beyond relieved to discover I could sit next to a toilet. That is until they cancelled the train and we were stranded at Preston to then be ushered in to a strange taxi that would take a couple of us to Glasgow. I was fine. I was absolutely fine… until I needed the toilet. I have never used Tena Lady, but at that moment I would have snatched an old lady’s hand off just for the protection. I remember finally arriving in Dundee and waiting for my hotel room...

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Addicted to Blake Shelton…

Blog_Bi-polar — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 21:18:13 +0000

Exactly three years ago in 2020 I was obsessed with Panic! At the Disco. I was convinced Brendon Urie was communicating with me through the lyrics in his songs. Every single song had a personal meaning meant for me and together we would conquer the fate of the universe. Only trouble was, it wasn’t real … I was having a Bipolar episode. See that’s the trouble with Bipolar, it’s a tricky little customer. It disguises itself as something enjoyable, something innocent and ten out of ten times the onset of mine is a fascination with music. It starts off as a song, and in 2020 it was… “High Hopes” …I looked on iTunes and over the course of two months I downloaded every song, every album, every collaboration Brendon Urie had ever done on to my iPod and listened to Panic! at the Disco and Panic! at the Disco only. I’m serious, every bus journey, train journey, lunch break; even the working day was consumed by Brendon Urie’s voice and his disjointed lyrics that I made sense of in my head to suit my purpose…my mission. I know it sounds crazy. I know it’s impossible to comprehend and I’m not sure I can even explain it; but this isn’t the first time and it certainly wasn’t the last. I have always been addicted to music. When I write stories I have music in my ears that helps me to set the scene and create the personalities and sometimes the appearances of my characters. When I was at school I would sit in my bedroom and listen to the Top 40 just waiting for a song by Ocean Colour Scene or Kula Shaker to place. I went to sleep listening to Meat Loaf through my headphones and in PE I would internally sing the words to… “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” …to help get me through the bleep test (remember those?). Music has always been there, it’s something constant, something dependable that never failed to pull me out of the holes I was sucked into. When I was bullied I’d close my eyes and picture Crispian Mills knocking on the door of my house and saying to parents… “I’ve come for your daughter and I’m going to take her away and make life wonderful.” When I listened to Simon Fowler sing… “The Riverboat Song” …I wasn’t the spotty swot people picked last for their hockey team. I was clever and popular with perfect skin. The music I listened to made me feel everything I wanted to be and as a result played into the hands of Bernard the Bipolar brain. When I was fifteen my GCSE English teacher gave the class a piece of homework. He said… “I want you all to go home tonight and pick a song, look at the lyrics and tomorrow I want you tell the rest of the class what they mean.” …Well I had a whole cheerleading squad in my head shaking their pom poms because this! This was my idea of homework. I didn’t care about Shakespeare, MacBeth was grim and as for The Lord of the Flies, well, William Golding badly needed to up his game if he was going to compete with my entire cassette tape collection of Indie and Rock music! I must have sat with my Walkman for hours, listening to every Meat Loaf song word for word, writing down the lyrics, reading them, thinking about them and pondering what they meant. In the end I couldn’t choose just one song, so the next day I went to my English lesson which of course was the last lesson of the day; the only lesson I’d been looking forward to all day! I sat in my seat next to my friend with three A4 pages completely covered in Meat Loaf Lyrics. I was ready! But the rest of the class were not so ready. It turned out there was only a handful of us who had done our homework. Not only that but I happened to be the only kid in the class who had more than just one lyric going spare. “Katerini, how many songs have you got?” “Give us a song Kat, you’ve got loads there.” “Kat, can I have one of your songs?” Out of the kindness of my heart and probably revelling in my sudden albeit temporary popularity, I ended up dishing out five or six of my songs thinking… “It doesn’t matter, I’ll definitely get asked for a one.” …purposely I saved the best one for myself because I’d had every single word under the microscope the night before and by now I was… A musical genius. ….so there I sat, all smug and excited; pleased with myself that not only had I done my homework to the best of my ability, but as my teacher asked everyone in the class I’d donated a song to, to then dissect their chosen lyric, I very quickly realised that I had done everyone else’s homework to the best of my ability too. I have never forgotten my disappointment. The disappointment that no one in the class said… “Actually Sir, this is Katerini’s work. I didn’t do my homework so I stole part of hers.” I was disappointed that I didn’t get picked, again, only this time instead of being on a hockey field, it was in a field where I saw myself as an expert. Back in 1998 I could not have foreseen my Bipolar diagnosis and I would never have imagined that the one thing I’d always loved and believed kept me safe, would sometimes play out to my detriment. Sometimes the noise of my own thoughts is too loud to bear so I put my headphones on and drown out the chaos with the voices of… Four Norwegian singers (Kurt Nilsen, Espen Lind, Alejandro Fuentes, Askil Holm) who I later imagined were talking to me through their live albums… “Hallelujah Vol 1” and “Hallelujah...

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Life’s Rich Tapestry…

Blog_Bi-polar — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 21:01:24 +0000

The handy work of Glenys Spathis Over the last three days I’ve discovered that life can be a combination of three things… The good The bad The ugly Want to know why? Well sit comfortably guys because I’ve got a three-part story to tell – but not necessarily in that order. The Ugly Now I’ve made it no secret that my stoma has been a little more than problematic over the last three years. I know I’ve talked about rectal brain matter and prolapsed intestines, not to mention constipation and you all know that Wilomena blows up to the size of a tennis ball so it must come as no surprise that we’ve been waiting for the last two and a half years to sort this out. About a month ago – almost three months after attending A&E at Wythenshawe hospital, a letter dropped onto my doormat informing me that my face-to-face appointment with Ms Telford (creator of all things Wilomena) would take place on Wednesday 15th December 2021. The appointment was at 3:30pm, so what’s the best way to spend half a day before we have to go to the hospital? Go Christmas shopping at the Trafford Centre with mum, of course. What did I buy, you ask? A bacon sarnie and a bottle of baby shampoo – absolutely nothing Christmas related whatsoever but we did have a nice morning together and it is the perfect place to kill time when you’ve got something that’s make or break hanging over your head. Let’s cut to the chase now because no one needs to know that as we drove to Wythenshawe Hospital I had to ask mum to stop at Sainsbury’s around the corner so I could use their toilet for a nervous wee. This appointment was a long time coming, it’s been like climbing the Himalayas (I’ve never climbed the Himalayas but I’ve heard its pretty steep) so as I sat in the vacant waiting room trying not to hyperventilate under my mask, clutching the strap on my rucksack and fumbling in the front pocket for my phone, I looked around and I got a glimpse of Ms Telford. It was relief! She was here! It was real! It was just like the moment when you’re at a concert that you’ve been waiting all your life to go to and the lights dim, the crowd goes wild and the singer comes on and you think… “…I’m here! We’re in the same room, we’re breathing the same air…” That’s what it was like seeing Ms Telford in a corridor, it was like seeing Cher in concert! With this in mind my nerves kicked in. Now I knew that she wouldn’t be doing the initial examination but she would pop in at some point to check and then clarify things but even so, I couldn’t help but panic. What if they didn’t look at Wilomena, what if they didn’t look at anything? What if they did the same thing everyone else has done and they just said… …absolutely nothing. It’s hard to describe what the last chance saloon looks like, but I’m pretty sure it looked like this appointment. I’d been through every other avenue and got nowhere. The GP’s told me to lose weight. They said I wasn’t putting my bag on properly. The stoma nurses told me all stoma’s look the same, mine was no different. They said my stomach muscles had dropped – I don’t even think that’s possible but I went with it because they’re supposed to know what they’re talking about. They’re all supposed to know what they’re doing! I can’t explain what it was like sitting in that corridor waiting to see someone whose role it was to find out what actual problem is…but this is a blog so I’ll try… It was like being an X-Factor finalist waiting to see if you’re in the running for Christmas number one, 50/50. I was called into the room by a really tall man with a kind face and he said my name wrong but I didn’t care. I walked into the room and he introduced himself as…I have no idea… I’m really sorry but his name flew right over my head and I feel awful because he was so nice so let’s call him Mr Surgeon, because I do remember that bit, he said he was a surgeon. The first thing Mr Surgeon said was… “We were supposed to see you in January.” (and he didn’t mean 2022, he meant 2021!) I said… “It’s okay, we can blame Boris for that.” He said… “This is our fault, it shouldn’t have taken this long, I’m sorry you’ve had to wait.” Inside my head I said… “Don’t cry, do not cry!” We sat at his desk and before he could say a single word, I took out my phone and I said… “I’ve got pictures! I’ve taken pictures and a video of what my stoma does and no one else has looked at them. Do you want to see them? Do you want to see the pictures?” My phone was literally shaking in my hands and I felt ridiculous. I was not on trial, but it felt like it. I was not in an interview, but it felt like it. I knew that if he didn’t see it for himself, if he didn’t look at the photos on my phone then I would be leaving the room with the same thing that I’ve left every single other room…nothing. So he looked at the photos and then he stood up and he said… “Let’s have a proper look then.” I thought… “Eh?” I said… “Do you want me to take my bag off?” He said… “Yes, let’s see what it’s doing in there.” I took off my bag and true to form Wilomena was bulging like an angry bloated garden worm and I thought… “Oh thank God!” Mr Surgeon had a look, he poked it, prodded the area...

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“All That I Have Lost…”

Blog_Bi-polar — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 20:24:13 +0000

Back in the day when I had a healthy thyroid gland a head full of hair… It’s Saturday night… I’m not even going to try and dress this up anymore…next to me I have my tipple of choice, decaff tea, a two-litre bottle of squash because my drug of choice in the name of Lithium makes me thirsty and a piece of pumpkin cake smothered in cream cheese frosting – I actually had to eat a piece just for the photo, at least that’s what I’m telling myself. Friday nights rock Matt’s just gone to the cinema with his nephew so I’m home alone with the cat and a heated blanket because my house is freezing even with the heating on. Before he left he asked me what this blog is going to be about and I replied… “I don’t know yet…” …which is true, I don’t; but off the back of falling into the bath the other week I’ve been thinking about a few things. I know I mentioned that a friend passed away in September and since then I admit I haven’t been the kind of self I like the world to see. My friend was superwoman. She was my idol, my Bipolar idol – you can all keep Stephen Fry, I don’t need him because I had my friend – she was my Bipolar Mum. Bipolar is a funny thing; it’s selfish and cruel and mean and it takes no prisoners. It spares no one and doesn’t give two hoots about the carnage it leaves behind. On all the writers courses I have ever been on the tutors tell you to never use cliché’s, but Bipolar Disorder is just one massive cliché. You can have an episode and you miss out on months of your life and you say… “Where has the time gone?” You might make it through the hospital admission and in your Christmas card to your family you might say… “I love you to the moon and back.” And my personal favourite is one that I have yet to use… “And they all lived happily ever after…” Growing up I had a vision of what my life would be like and it went a little like this… Dreaming big… School 6th form University Travel the world Meet a boy who plays the guitar in a band Get married Have one child Become a famous writer Live in a tiny village and ride a bike with a basket on the front Die happy! Nowhere in that list did crippling mental illness and misery appear. It was not on my radar; it was not allowed and it certainly was not welcome because I had dreams, I had desires, I had a whole load of things I wanted to do with myself like graduating with my friends. I wanted to throw my cap in the air and have a group photo with all of the people who had soldiered on through the three years of hard slog coupled with the parties and the crazy nights out that were never intended to happen but they just did. It was supposed to be three years, it should never have taken me six. I wanted to live in Edinburgh, a place that felt like home from the very first second my foot touched the platform ready to do my first Fringe Festival job in 2002. I love that place, its energy, the creative chaos; it was something I’d never seen before. I made life long friends, I saw things I would never see in Bolton. I was a different person and I lived my best days there so was it too much to ask to just hang on to that and keep it? Gilded Balloon Box Office Assistant 2002 I wanted to travel the world. In 2006 I went to Australia for six weeks and it was the trip of a lifetime. I saw my Fringe Festival friends again and I lived in those six weeks the life I had always wanted. Even though I was diagnosed, I was physically scarred and I was teetering on the edge of an episode because I never really knew if my medication was right or not and I was still wondered if I really needed it when I felt well. Fringe Friends 2006 When I came home from that trip I made plans to go back on a working holiday visa; but Bernard had different ideas. I was going on a trip, that was for sure, but it wasn’t to Australia…a locked ward on a psychiatric ward was as far as I was ever going to get. Bipolar Disorder robbed me of the things I wanted most in the world. It took from me… Contentment Satisfaction Simplicity Losing my friend didn’t put things into perspective; it tipped everything upside down and made me question every single relationship with every single person I have ever known. Because at the hands of Bernard I have lost so many friends, people that I admired, people that I adored and would have fallen backwards in the bath for! In the last few weeks I have asked myself… “How embarrassing was I?“ When a friend who I thought loved me got engaged I could not have been more happy for her. It was all she had ever wanted; to meet her prince charming and stop kissing frogs. But when I was excluded from every celebration that took place in the run up to the wedding I was hurt – actually I was more than hurt because I understood her reasons why. How do you introduce your friends and the family of the man you’re about to marry to a person who is the epitome of depressingly single? She doesn’t have a job and she’s spent however many years going in and out of a psychiatric ward like the revolving door to a cheap hotel? How do you explain to every successful person in the room that this...

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At Least I Think I’m Funny…

Blog_Bi-polar — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 20:54:35 +0000

Yesterday I fell backwards into the bath. It’s my own fault; I was sitting on the edge of it cutting my toenails and balancing my feet on the edge of the toilet seat – never let it be said that I am not a classy girl, I do things in style – I must have been day dreaming or something – about what I’m not sure – but in my Primark pyjamas I’m must have moved ever so slightly and within a teeny tiny second I found myself battling gravity, flailing my arms about, my fingers clutching desperately to my Tweezerman nail clippers – like that’s the most important thing right now! – really hoping that… I don’t bang my head against the tiled wall… And… 2. Look like a complete muppet. Well I didn’t accomplish either of those things but I did get stuck. My bathroom is not the biggest and neither is my bath, so found myself wedged at the bottom of it with my legs dangling over the edge and my toes dipping into the toilet bowl just scraping the water – again, I have nothing but class. As I sat there I tried to call out for Matt to pull me out of my predicament but I’d shut the living room door so he couldn’t hear me. In the end it was a complicated process of manoeuvring myself, twisting, reversing, shifting, turning – maybe there’s hope for me yet, if I’m ever able to drive in this lifetime that was a three point turn, a parallel park and a reverse around a corner all in one! What’s my point? Well, life isn’t very kind right now, in all sorts of ways and this is not about looking for sympathy; its really not, but the truth is, a lost a friend a couple of months ago and I didn’t deal with it all that well. I have lost myself. In the middle of my grief and my guilt I lost what I thought my life was like. I lost the image of what I wanted it to look like and the one thing that I can usually count on, my written word; I lost that too. I contemplated shutting the blog down and just leaving it and I kid you not, I was so close to following that through but, my friend Renae told me… “You will find your voice again.” …whether I have or not is a different matter, but right now there are words on the page and that’s a start. Back to the bath…as I’m being crushed between the sides of it I thought to myself… “This is hilarious, but dammit! There’s no one here to see it!” And then I thought… “I can’t wait to tell Renae about this.” And that right there is my point. I found my situation funny; it was laughable, it was amusing. I fell in to an empty bath while I was cutting my toenails! and even though my world is consumed by darkness; I am still grateful for the moments that make the edges of your lips curl upwards in a vague reminder of how to smile. Today this is the point of this blog. I have not been in the greatest of head spaces for a few weeks and I apologise for my behaviour. I am plagued by Wilomena problems and the debilitating interruption in life that Connie colon likes to chuck into the equation – you know the drill, three days of phantom diahorrea pains and then a volcano of mush that looks like the equivalent of human brain matter coming out of an orifice that isn’t supposed to be in use anymore! The other day I was sitting on the toilet – don’t pull your face, we all do it – while I was waiting for the brains to come out and in tears I kept thinking… “How can anyone love this car crash? How can anyone want to be in my life when every day there is just one disappointment after another? How can Matt love me?!” Part of me was near to giving in… Let Wilomena do whatever she wants… I don’t care anymore! Let Connie colon fanny around in there shedding her bits off…I don’t care anymore! Let Bernard the Bipolar just rip my sanity from the walls of my skull and we’ll call it quits… I don’t care anymore! Well, I’ve had a few days of feeling sorry for myself, and I do still feel sorry for myself – I’m not going to lie – but I know I have two choices… Shrivel up and give up? Or 2. Put my brave pants on and crack on. I’m choosing to put my brave pants on. It’s not easy and it’s just guess work and my only saving grace is my sense of humour. Life is not always funny. In fact it’s very rarely funny at all and it’s solely down to ourselves to create our own happy place and that’s something I’ve been doing my entire life. When I was a child I wanted to be a comedian so I made up jokes that no one else found funny… Knock knock Who’s there? Table Table who? Table leave the table… …I can only apologise… When I was in primary school I wanted to be an impressionist and my passion, my obsession at the time was Coronation Street; I wanted write it, I wanted to act in it; I just wanted to live it… So I memorised the voices, the accents and the movements of all of my favourite characters and I performed them. I performed them for my family, in the playground for my friends and I captivated the attention of an entire room at Brownies every Tuesday night relaying my rendition of Audrey Roberts and Deirdre Barlow. On coach trips with my Brownie pack, I was always the one to start off singing There Were Ten a...

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“The Best of My Intention…”

Blog_Bi-polar — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 23:46:46 +0000

We’re celebrating! Believe it or not… Have you ever been asked that fateful question? “Where do you see yourself in ten years time?” Well I haven’t. But I’m pretty sure if that question had been asked ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to answer it. Truth be told, ten years ago my future looked and felt very different to my current reality. In 2011 I saw myself falling into one of three destinies… Death Existence Saviour of the universe. I know they range in desired qualifications and it’s difficult to explain how the third one came about but let me try. Bipolar disorder doesn’t come with a script. You don’t get a synopsis with your diagnosis and you don’t get a manual to help you deal with your symptoms. It’s like being a kid at the dinner table; you have to eat everything on your plate even if you don’t like it and you have to use whatever utensils are in front of you regardless of how big or clumsy they are because that’s all you have. As my illness unfolded throughout the years I experienced a range of symptoms that evolved and grew in intensity; they morphed into shapes that were the beyond my capability to comprehend and they left me damaged like a lost and beaten animal cast aside on the side of the road. I know that sounds dramatic but when Bernard the Bipolar cast a spell of a dark depression, all I wanted was death. When I was climbing out of that depression a mere simplistic existence was the most desirable outcome that I could picture for myself. And in the throws of mania I was cursed with torturous voices no one else could hear. I saw things, shapes, people, colours and smells that no one else around me could sense – try explaining that to your mates over a pint. I couldn’t explain it, I couldn’t understand it and because of the absence of any kind of Bipolar instruction manual the only thing I learnt how to do was perform the art of… “…I am completely fine…” …and not a single soul would question me because to this day I can look and appear perfectly fine when in fact I am dancing with a faceless demon that takes no prisoners and spares the lives of no one. On the 9th September 2011 I had been dancing with that demon for weeks and I had no idea. My lack of sleep gave me no indication that I had anything to worry about. My increased energy levels were a blessing because they made my twelve hour working day easier to cope with and nothing, absolutely nothing inside myself told me that the messages I was getting from the singers on my iPod were in any way detrimental to my mental health. It’s funny; looking back at that last paragraph it just screams out… “…MANIA MANIA MANIA!!!” On Friday the 9th September 2011 I had a phone conversation with my psychiatrist (at the time) Dr Miller…I have never forgotten that call. With a tight chest, my eyes streaming, I remember I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t speak but I remember him saying… “You need to talk to me Katerini because I can’t see you until Monday.” I said… “I’ve got special powers and I don’t know what to do with them.” He said… “Go to A&E and I’ll send someone from the crisis team to meet you there.” Following those few sentences I found myself an inpatient for four and a half weeks. I was almost sectioned and I spent my days writing the plans of how I was going to save the world because Chris Daughtry, Meat Loaf and a number of other singers were all communicating with me through the songs on my iPod. They told me I was the saviour of the universe and I was the one person in the entire world who had the brains and the ability to create a plan of action to save the world. All I had to do was create the plan and let David Cameron do the rest… …I’ll just leave that there… In 2011 all I had in hospital with me was a tiny radio. No phone, no iPod, no internet access; nothing but my portable radio and a pair of potentially crusty earphones. All I wanted to listen to was Josh Groban and Meat Loaf but they were rarely played on the radio so I tried my best to remember the lyrics of my favourite songs and I tied them in with my save the world manual so it would be easier for me to explain how things would work. My lifeline… In the first week of my admission I gave my “manual” to Dr Miller and he said… “…What if this isn’t possible? What if you can’t save the world? What if you’re just ill?” I said… “…then this no way for a person to live.” He said… “What do you think we should do?” I said… “I want a Lobotomy.” And he was trying his absolute best not to smile as he said… “You know we don’t do those anymore. What if you died?” I said… “Then you would know not to do it again.” He could see I was deadly serious, there was no smile on my face and I was not budging on my save the world manual either; I was deadly serious about that too. But the one thing that made this admission different to the previous five was the feeling of it being make or break. This was the worst one, this was the one that I didn’t see coming, this was the one where I would look back and I would say… “…I don’t know how I survived that.” This was the admission where my friends and my family would look at each other and my mum would say… “…I don’t know how we’re going to...

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“Choking on a Carrot…”

Blog_Bi-polar — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 23:54:20 +0000

I had a whole blog planned out for this weekend. I’ve mad notes throughout the week and I was really looking forward to writing it… but plans change. Maybe I’ll get around to the main event tomorrow but for now, let me set the scene for this blog right here. It’s almost 8pm on a Friday night and in true Katerini style I am sat in my pyjamas with tea in my blog writing mug. There are no chicken crisps this time but I do have a couple of chocolate eclairs in the fridge that mum bought for me – thanks mum. The sad thing is, right this second I can’t stomach those eclairs. I’m looking at them and my eyes are saying… “…yes please!” …but everything else in me says… “…not right now love.” Why? Well, take a seat guys because this will either make you roar with laughter or you’ll end up closing your browser in search of a more appealing subject. Everyone knows I have a stoma and everyone knows her name is Wilomena. What most people don’t know is that Wilomena is not very well and hasn’t been for quite some time. I knew there was a problem about two and a half years ago when my little weird button shaped blob turned into a tennis ball poking out of my tummy. It was massive! It twisted and it grinded and I felt sick and the only way I can describe the pain is by asking you to imagine what it might feel like if someone had the fist of a giant and they were squeezing your organs and crushing them…then letting go…and then changing their mind and crushing them again. I knew this wasn’t right, so I saw the stoma nurse and she said… “…everyone’s stoma sticks out.” I said… “But mine didn’t look like this before.” She said… “They change, it’s normal.” But the pain wasn’t normal. And neither was it’s appearance so I went to the GP. He said… “Lose some weight, it’ll feel much better.” So I did. Still felt the same. Then I got a mystery infection and I was admitted to a surgical assessment ward at the Royal Bolton Hospital but they didn’t look at it and they didn’t treat the infection. The surgeon didn’t do anything except say… “You’re too young to have this type of stoma. If it was me, I wouldn’t have done it.” Well thank the lord it wasn’t him! Not to be dramatic but I’m pretty sure I’d be dead if my life was in his hands. I asked another GP to refer me back to my surgeon at Wythenshawe. She did…she referred me to the wrong surgical department… Long story short, welcome Covid! And I’ve been waiting to have a face to face appointment with my actual surgeon since March 2020. Has time become a healer? … No. Has my stoma changed? … No. It still looks like a freaky tennis ball. Am I still in pain? … YES! I am! I am still in pain and guess what? Barely anybody knows because I just get on with it. I’ve been waiting for the day for another trip to A&E because without treating the problem it was inevitable and I know that due to Covid, no one is really getting the care they need and if you don’t complain you don’t get seen. DISCLAIMER: If anyone is eating their midnight snack or drinking your morning coffee, or whatever you’re doing right now; this bit might not be for you and I am not offended if you do decide to close your browser but I say this every time. This blog is for truth, my truth. And I’m not about to tell any lies when it comes to my health or my life in general because while I may not tell people on a daily basis how pants I feel, this is the space for you to know that. If you’ve ever had Diarrhoea pains you’ll know how awful they are and last Sunday night that’s what I had. Let me tell you now…when you don’t use your bum like a normal person, that feeling is weird! I still have my colon and sometimes it wakes up and it decides it needs to get rid of bits and pieces that are clinging to its walls and the only way of doing that is by pooping like a normal person. Sounds simple doesn’t it? But god! It takes hours, days even, and it just wipes me the hell out. I’d been looking forward to the bank holiday weekend all week. Three days off work, a couple of lie ins, shop for a skirt for my uniform. But no, my bowel had other ideas. With every hour of Sunday night and all day Monday the pain just kept on coming and I felt sick, I didn’t eat, I could hardly drink, I was cold, hot, cold, hot… It got to 11pm on Monday night and I just couldn’t take it. Nothing was coming out and everything hurt, all over. With every rectal strain (sorry) Wilomena was the size of a tennis ball with the threat of bursting into flames… …so it was a trip to A&E. Wythenshawe A&E, where I knew I’d be seen. Credit where it’s due, Wythenshawe Hospital has a very civilised A&E department. I mean, yes it was a Monday night and not much was going on and there were very few people in there, but it really was quite nice. Covid hasn’t made life easy and every single person in that A&E department was waiting on their own. I’ve never had the experience of going to any hospital appointment on my own, I’m lucky that I’ve always had someone with me so this was a whole new ball game. I had to fight my own corner and put my brave pants on. I admit having a clearly visible problem probably went in...

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