all I want for christmas is an allergic reaction

A few days before christmas I woke up with hives. Sometimes I'm sensitive to what I'm wearing, so I thought it was only that. It didn't go away, though. The patches of hives turned bright red, and the raised bumps were itchy and then they hurt like a burn to the touch.

I take Lamictal for bipolar disorder. It comes with a black box warning that if you get any sign of a rash to discontinue right away. There's a rash called Steven Johnson syndrome (SJS) that is associated with Lamictal. It's potentially fatal if it progresses enough.

So after dealing with this rash for four days I finally clued into the fact that it could be the Lamictal causing it. It was Christmas though, what could I do? Finally on the 29th I went to the hospital to get it checked.

The doctor took one look and told me to discontinue the Lamictal right away. Yep, lucky me - it could be the dreaded rash. The doc said that if I stopped the med it would hopefully stop the rash but just in case I should come straight back in if it continued to spread, especially to my mucus membranes. So I started dosing myself with benadryl and watching anxiously. It was a little bit scary.

But it went away. I stopped the medication and after a few days the rash had stopped spreading and then it slowly started healing. It's mostly gone now. So thanks, Santa, for that little bit of Christmas fun.

I'm off the Lamictal now though. Which means I'm not on a mood stabilizer. Which means there's a big unknown thrown into the mix with my bipolar disorder. Will the rest of my medication be enough? I mean, things were unstable as recently as May. Losing a med might bring mania howling down again... or god forbid, the other direction. I'm fighting off psychosis as it is.

Sometimes I want to throw everything down, cry "enough!" and stop all of this. No more medication. No more constant monitoring.

But then I spend an hour of class trying to think above the nagging voices that tell me the government is after me.

I still don't know. I would kill to be 'normal' and not need to swallow pills every night - pills that could be doing god knows what to me.

But really, there's no such thing as normal. Everybody has a story. On this day last year I was in the hospital. I was shut up in a small room at the mercy of the freakin' voices in my head. If taking a few pills will give me one more day away from that, I'll take the damn pills.

Normal is just a setting on the dishwasher.