Half of the Family Out of Town

It is Thursday, and Melissa and Mic have been gone since Sunday, leaving Maggie and I at home to fend for ourselves. Maggie has been at the pool nearly every waking moment since it opened on Saturday. She got her dad’s “pool rat” genes. We’ve done well, kept the house clean for the zero showings we’ve had, and not starved to death (quite the opposite, in fact.) My mood has been very solid. I have managed to get some things done around the house, clean, pack most of the basement for the move, and still allow myself some leisure time. The allowance of leisure time is something that, until ECT and Respirdal, I was unable to do. Between the Risperdal controlling one of my primary mood triggers (OCD/mania) and my other trigger gone for the week (Mic), things have had no reason to be anything but good.

In looking back through old journals, and after some consideration, I notice that I usually don’t let stress get to me while things are stressful. I can think of times when I’ve felt stress while it was happening, but it’s not usually until its over, and some time passes, when stress effects my mood. In many places in my old journals, and in several anecdotal incidences, I find that it may be a day or two after a particularly stressful time when my mood takes the beating from the previous stress.

Something strange (“strange”, “typical”, call it what you like): Since ECT, I have noticed that smells linger with me. What I mean is that I can smell something unpleasant and that smell will stay with me for the next 24-48 hours. I will smell it from time to time, usually just faintly, but in the strangest places (places where I know the same smell doesn’t really exist.) Its like my mind takes a “snapshot” of the bad smell and then shows it to me every so often for a day or two.