Funerals are funny. At funerals, you expect time to stop because time has stopped for the person in the casket. Everyone is taken out of their context and put into black, business-casual wear, and then gathered at some somber place. It’s almost like you’ve walked into an old black and white Hollywood film, a familiar and cliché setting. Oh, and it’s always grey outside.
At least that’s what I thought my grandma’s funeral would be like. I mean, it was grey outside and the place was dreadful. Time did stop for me, but only for like 5 minutes. When the ceremony began, I noticed a damn Starbucks cup two feet away from my grandma’s casket, then I hear my cousin-in-law, Tom, smacking on his gum. In the back, my niece is messing with the new snapchat filters, and next to me, my cousins are making sex jokes. Traditional Vietnamese funerals last for days. I could only make one of the days and that one was from 10am-9pm. Eleven hours of this crap was not the way I wanted to say goodbye to my grandma. To make things worse, some asshole leaves in the middle of the family gathering for God knows what. Welp, that asshole was I. I forgot my fucking medication and I needed to go to the Kaiser pharmacy.
Let’s backtrack a little. Two Fridays ago, I went to my English class and pitched my blog idea about medication for mental disorders. This is ironic because after class, I went straight to the bus heading to San Francisco, and I forgot my medication. I panicked. Why? Because the last time I decided to stop my medication, my bipolar brain went haywire. Let me just vaguely explain how I reacted to stopping my medication a few months ago: I was basically bedridden and when I had to go outside, I felt like my anxiety was going to push against my skin until I exploded into a million pieces, just like that dynamited whale. If you haven’t seen that video, by the way, you really should. Actually, here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFwxH3PPWiU Watch it now. Isn’t it just the best? Anyways, on the bus, I texted my doctor and asked her if my brain was going to crash if I didn’t get the medication. She didn’t answer my question. She just told me to find the nearest pharmacy to my destination so she could call in for my prescription.
The one time I chose to stop taking my meds without my doctor knowing was because the medication wasn’t working, but without new medication, my brain was left to do as it pleased and what it did was go through a withdrawal. A lot of people downplay how important medication is. Not very many people think about how untreated illness and nonadherence to medication can lead to psychosis, mania, hypomania, mania, relapse, and suicide. So, if you happen to be thinking of stopping without doctor supervision, DON’T. Please, please, please don’t. If you have a friend taking medication, be supportive and if you can, make sure they’re making their appointments.
Here are some links to read about medicine adherence. I ordered them from audience friendly to analytical:
http://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/breakingbipolar/2010/09/medication-non-compliance/
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/managing-compliance
http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/appi.ps.52.3.378
So, even tough I was at a funeral, I decided to pick up my medication. When I returned to the funeral I cried a lot and weirdly enough, I laughed a lot. Yeah, my day was inconvenient, my family annoyed me, and they made really inappropriate sex jokes while my dead grandma was lying in the same fucking room, but life is just fat satire with tons of contradictions. Time didn’t stop at that funeral and it will never. Starbucks will still be open, Tom will keep on chewing his gum, my family will always be crass, and I will always have more to learn about my mental health. It was God's bizarre way of telling me that even though my grandma passed, life goes on for everyone, even for her. I see her in my wonderful and annoying ass family and I see her in me and god dammit, we are one good-looking family. You did well, Grandma.
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