It Was Never Random

On the way home from dropping off my eldest son at school, my youngest son and I spotted three crows having an aviary battle. Back and forth they went diving after one another. Playfully or not it was difficult to tell, but they were definitely "fighting". While my son and I continued walking a rather treacherous portion of King St. I felt danger. Like a car backing out of a hidden driveway, unexpected danger.

I had my guard up for several driveways as I stopped cautiously to look several times before proceeding to the next driveway. Suddenly, a loud screeching and high pitched chirping sounds came from a tree to our left. I turned sharply to my left and saw a hawk going after some sparrows in a tree. They were directly beside us. I could practically reach out and touch the hawk.

A sense of danger is what I felt. Trusting your intuition is incredibly important. You feel, sense, and hear something before you can see it...always. Today, breaking news or perhaps un-breaking news has surfaced that anticholinergic medications can possibly and definitively(in some cases) lead to memory loss, brain damage, and eventually dementia. That includes many OTC medication that folks take daily like Benadryl and certain psychiatric medications. Like the one I take, abilify, is on that list.

I am bipolar as of last month. For 30+ years of my life I have been fine, now repressed memories that I have held deep down inside our surfacing. Back in November 2015, I felt some increased anxiety, so I sought the help of a Childhood Trauma Therapist specializing in EMDR(eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). It triggered my first ever manic episode where I needed to be hospitalized for over a week. They put me first on latuda, which gave me terrible side effects to include restlessness. I just could not sit still even if I was incredibly exhausted. Next on the list, abilify.

Abilify is an incredible improvement and has stabilized my mood to the point where I am ready to tackle these repressed memories. I am hopeful with my good intuition and the help of a good therapist that I will be able to stop abilify in the coming months. Now, it is a sense of hope that is my focus. With the support of my family, my dedication to my health, and God, I know all things are possible. Everything happens for a reason.