Schizoaffective

by Jay Paul On July 28 I was hiking with a friend in a nature center. While going up a hill I felt a strange wooziness for a few seconds. I attributed it to some weird reaction to the meds I take for schizoaffective, and thought little of it. It happened a few days later when I was hiking by myself in a state park. That evening, I knew something was amiss when I felt woozy and like I was going to fall off my chair while meditating. I have felt woozy off and on ever since. At first it was bad. It hit me the worst when I was out walking. In early August, I cut the length of my walks down considerably. What was happening to me? The only change I could identify was going from a 2 mg Risperidone cut in half to a 1 mg Risperidone. I figured I was having some withdrawal from an inactive ingredient in the 2 mg tablet. I figured I would get over it in a few weeks. A few weeks came and went. I still had it, but it was less acute. I called my psychiatrist, and he thought it might be dehydration.

by Jay Paul In many ways, I consider myself lucky when it comes to side effects. The antipsychotics I am on cause some people to have diabetes or tardive dyskinesia. I have neither. But this does not mean I haven’t had my share of bizarre side effects. After a great June and July this year, when I felt better than I have in decades in terms of mood, something creeped back in in August. It may be side effects. I may be cycling. It’s not clear.             Bizarre side effects are nothing new for me. They started around 2000 when I was diagnosed with central apnea—a rare condition where the brain, not airway obstruction, shuts down breathing while asleep. I was put on a fancy and expensive CPAP machine called a bilevel. In 2013 I was taken off Depakote because of side effects. It was causing a build-up of ammonia in my blood. At my next sleep study, in 2016, it was found that I had mild obstructive apnea and no central apnea. The Depakote had been causing the central apnea.             S

by Jay Paul Perhaps the most common assumption about skin is that it seals off what is “me” from the rest of the world. For instance, I am sitting in this room right now with a bicycle to my right, a computer in front of me, and a bed behind me. My skin provides the barrier between these other objects and what is “me.”             Upon reflection, problems arise with this naive view. The biggest one is that we usually associate our consciousness with our self, but our consciousness rarely concerns itself with what is inside our skin. Except when we are in pain or discomfort, our consciousness focuses on what is about us in the world. Right now, the keys on this keyboard, which are outside me but touching my fingers, are part of my conscious awareness while, say, my heart is not. It’s true that I need the heart to be conscious, but I am rarely conscious of it unless something goes wrong with it.              The seat of consciousness is not inside our skin. It is all over the place. Ima

by Jay Paul On about June 14, 2020 this schizoaffective man changed for the better. It was a long time coming. The story begins over a year earlier.             One night in February of 2019 I was having trouble sleeping. I decided to meditate. I hadn’t done it in a long time. Until 2011, I was active at a Soto Zen center and meditated regularly. But severe difficulties intervened (see the July 16, 2020 post) and I got away from it. That night, the meditation got me back to sleep, and when I awakened, I realized how much I missed doing it. I did it again. I have meditated almost every day since then. I started regularly attending the Zen center. By the fall, I was meditating twice a day for 40 minutes each time. I also attended a two-day sesshin at the Zen center, which is essentially a meditation retreat.             The type of meditation I do is quite simple. I sit in a chair with my back straight. When a thought appears, I notice it, acknowledge it, and let it go. Then I just sit u