The 2026 Winter Olympics Mark the 12th Anniversary of my Psychotic Break (February 2014)

Well. The Olympics are on TV again. It's Day One. That means it's the 14th anniversary of my wholly unexpected, life-altering and remarkably inconvenient psychotic break. 

That fraught, violent week-long episode opened a chapter in my life that is still playing out in many ways. At the time I wrote in an essay called Behind Three Doors:

"I went into the psych ward three times, under three different circumstances. The first time I have little recollection of, but the bits I do remember are supercharged. Being handcuffed to a gurney in an ambulance, running naked down my front stairs. A collage of images all mixed together in some slick roundabout in my memory was actually a prolonged psychotic episode that took place over a week, but in my mind it was one night. I don't know how I got from the ambulance to the psych ward that time, I don't know how many doors."

And when I went to the psych ward, the 2014 Winter Olympics were on the little TV. In my blog entry Behind Three Doors I wrote:

With the winter Olympics on the small overhead TV every night, my first stay on the psych ward was imbued with an eerie sense of monumental circumstance. The Olympics, this universal worldwide event that interrupts all normal broadcasting and takes over everything, was happening at the same time as this catastrophic storm in my head. My normal broadcasting was interrupted too. I was in this strange place with strange people and at night they checked on me with a flashlight every fifteen minutes. I found out later that's suicide watch. That's what they mean by "suicide watch," a term whose literal meaning has skated right past me all these years. I get it now  

I did my best to write about it all in Diary of a Low Budget Superhero, but I was so riddled with anxiety and crippled by depression that I'm afraid I lost days, weeks, months. I've always been frank with you guys, holding back few details about what's happening with this Gen Xer. That was a big one--do a Search on "Depression" in this blog and you'll find all old entries. 

So where are we in the Year of Our Lord 2026, fourteen years since the psych ward? Well, I'm doing okay. I really am. They got my meds right, finally. Everyone's different and they have to try you on all these different meds, and that can be hell for awhile. But they've got me on the right meds now. I don't foresee going back to the psych ward. No, I'm good.

Of course, I had a hemorrhagic stroke two years ago on August 1, 2023. That sucked. The past two years has been LOTS of physical, occupational, and speech therapy. I can walk now--that took awhile. I have a limp and use a cane. My right foot toes are numb. I don't have the use of my right--dominant--arm. Typing with one finger, with my left hand, takes forevvvvvvver. I tried speech-to-text but it doesn't work for me. I have a certain degree of brain fog and memory loss. But I'm okay. It could have been worse.

Speaking of worse, do you know that Joe had a heart attack two days after my stroke, and two weeks later a heart transplant? We almost lost him. He had liver failure and kidney failure. He was on ECMO. Tufts (thank God for Tufts) told his sister that he was the sickest guy in Boston. That's why he moved to the top of the national organ transplant waiting list.

And I was out of it for the whole thing. The photo is me in the hospital. Joe visited me and took that picture, It's weird to look at because I have no recollection of it, don't know that I had visitors, nothing. There's nothing behind those eyes. Nothing.

So yeah. Comparatively speaking, I'm doing okay.😷