Sorry I feel kind of good about this, but finally there's another person with BP 1 who wasn't diagnosed till relatively late in life. It happens a lot with BP 2's, but not so much with us 1's because our symptoms are supposedly so much more dramatic. But it doesn't always start out like that, and even if it does, having your social-climbing parents sitting on you (and you learning to sit on yourself) because they don't want anyone to know you're mentally ill has a stifling effect on the mania, if not the depression. That was why I started drinking so early in life, and why they let me.....better to have a kid who's a lush than a psycho, right?

People have asked me so many times "how did you get through 50-some years without knowing you had BP?" Well, a) I suspected it for years, but didn't know for sure until age 53, and b) when I reached critical mass, things got really bad really fast, and I had a few pretty severe manic and mixed-mood episodes before getting a handle on things earlier this summer. The diagnosis just evolved over time---started out as BP-NOS. It happens....my pdoc didn't want to tag me with a number until he was sure of what I had, and then it was like "Damn, I'm sorry, but we gotta label this thing."

Not to say that doctors are greedy---mine isn't, in fact he told me he'll give me a steeply discounted rate when he goes into private practice early next year---but as medicine is practiced nowadays, most "diagnoses" are basically for billing purposes. The money people have to have something to go on, and apparently Bipolar 1 is more lucrative than the other forms because I get charged a hell of a lot more now than I did a year ago. I asked the billing office about that last week when I was in---I kept seeing this "Level III" designation on my paperwork, and being the cost-conscious uninsured patient I am, I wanted to know what that meant.

Well, no one seemed to know exactly what it was, but what it came down to was, there were four levels of care and my dx put me in one of the two "complex" categories. Oh, goody. Here I think I've got a nice straightforward case of bipolar disorder, and some pencil-pusher decides it's worth $349.00 every time I plant my butt on the sofa. A year ago I was paying $176.00. Who knows?

Now I don't know where the hell THAT came from.....guess I'm just frustrated with medical bills, period. They're coming in thick and fast from my hubby's cancer diagnosis, procedures, treatments etc., we're already over $30K in the hole, and there's no end in sight. We have basically resigned ourselves to the fact that between medical bills and student loans, we are never going to have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of for the rest of our lives.

Oh well, we were poor for the first 15 years of our marriage, and now we're poor again, only not poor enough to qualify for food stamps or medical. Nor am I disabled enough to get SSDI (thank God! I'd rather live in this kind of poverty than collect money when I can still work). But you know, I'll live in a cardboard box if I have to, if it means my husband gets to stick around longer. He's worth it to me.