Invisible Illness: BiPolar and Brain Aneurysm combined

I’ve been told that I’m a difficult patient. Hmmm. Not a shock.

Several months ago I suffered a cerebral aneurysm. It began in August with a trip to the emergency room, an excruciating headache and vomiting that made childbirth look like a walk in the park. (I can say that-I’ve got two kids.) It took several months of diagnostics; CT scans, CT scans with contrast, MRI’s, MRA’s, neurological workups, an angioscope, neurologists and neurosurgeons collaborating, to determine what and where the issue was. Part of the complication of diagnosis was the assumption that my bi-polar made me an unreliable reporter of my symptoms. Seriously. I was told more times than I care to remember that it was simply a stress-headache.

But the angioscope was objective enough to get noticed. A bubbled vein below my frontal lobe, sort of between and behind my eyes. Needed to be clipped. A six hour surgery with two operating neurosurgeons to, well, no details. Just know I have a seven inch scar on my scalp and screws in my skull.

What does this have to do with bipolar? Well, the neurosurgeon told my fiancee that they had no idea how lifting the brain to clip the aneurysm was going to affect the bipolar. They didn’t tell me this. Apparently, no one mentioned it to the ICU nursing staff. In the three days I spent there, I was apparently impatient and irritable. I don’t know if it was the surgery or the meds that keep me from remembering those three days.

When I came home after three days, my fiancee stayed with me for a week. I didn’t know how much he felt he was walking on eggshells. He didn’t know how often I was biting off the tip of my tongue to not be snippy.
I just kept hearing “you’re really not a good patient”. I probably wasn’t.

But here’s the invisible dilemma that both aneurysm and bipolar share. They are not visible. My head scar is covered by hair. And though the neurosurgeon explained the impact of surgery on the frontal lobe, the damage to executive function, the inability to plan and complete tasks, the loss of short term memory, and the ongoing fatigue…people forget. It looks like nothing is wrong, ergo everything should be back to normal.

But it’s not. Not only has fall come and gone, the Seasonal Affective Disorder has hit. Christmas is overwhelming. Bipolar depression has set in. And still the fatigue.

So, I push on to be ‘normal’. Forced smiles, accepting invitations through clenched teeth, and hiding the overwhelming exhaustion as much as possible.

Grinding on trying to make the internal behave as the external appears capable of.