I wrote a lot about my schizoaffective voices when I was hearing them, but I haven’t written very much about what it’s like to no longer confront them. Let me tell you what it’s like to get beyond those auditory hallucinations.
I used to hear voices about once every two to three weeks. This started with my first psychotic episode back in 1998, in the middle of my sophomore year at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). For years after I moved back home to attend The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), I saw a psychiatrist who refused to put me on a mood stabilizer because, for whatever reason, she was convinced I had schizophrenia and not schizoaffective disorder, a condition that is a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Finally, after I graduated from SAIC and began working on my master’s degree at Columbia College Chicago, I switched to a psychiatrist who asked me if my “schizophrenia” was accompanied by mood swings. When I said yes, it was, she put me on a mood stabilizer with the updated diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type.
However, for many years, I was on too low a dosage of the new medication, so I still heard voices. After a blood test showed how little of the medication was in my system, my doctor raised my mood stabilizer by a lot and I stopped hearing voices for good.
The change in dosage and symptoms came at the right time because, shortly after I stopped hearing voices, my beloved psychiatrist who had changed my life for the better retired and I started seeing my current psychiatric nurse practitioner. She wanted to cut back on my as-needed anti-anxiety medication, which I took when I was hearing voices and still take for anxiety. We compromised on that. I need the medication but not the long-term outcomes that can sometimes be associated with it.
It's been wonderful not hearing voices, as you can imagine even if you’ve never had the symptom yourself. However, I did hear voices when I was taking a narcotic painkiller after my knee replacement surgeries. They weren’t as bad as voices previously had been. They sounded as though someone in the other room had the TV on rather than feeling that my brain was levitating out of the top of my head. I didn’t feel light-headed. By the way, another brutal thing about being on the narcotic painkiller was that I couldn’t take my anti-anxiety medication while I was on it.
Hearing voices made me have to bail on a lot of outings. I’m mainly thinking about going to the Renaissance Faire with my husband, Tom. Now, however, my bad back and bad knees even after surgery make it hard for me to walk around the Renaissance Faire. Luckily, there are a lot of places to sit down. Tom claims my knees and back are worse than the voices were, but I disagree. I hate to admit this, but I was embarrassed and even, yes, ashamed when I heard voices in public. People can understand needing to sit down a lot. People are downright scared of you with the kind of panic you can display if you’re hearing voices. So that’s one reason why I had to bail when I was hearing voices in public places.
It sucks that I had to go through all that, but at least it’s over. I can’t help but feel that my voices have been replaced with bad knees and a bad back. I know I just said those things aren’t as bad as the auditory hallucinations, but they still make things very hard. Before I was cursed with my physical problems, I prayed to God that since I had a severe, debilitating mental illness, could I please not have anything else be wrong with me? I can’t help but feel like He just didn’t listen.
Photo by Thomas Allen
