Liz,
I feel lucky to have found your site. Congrats on the award for one of the best bipolar sites (thats how I found you). I was going to have back surgery Thursday, but I canceled yesterday and will resort to walking and lumbar stretches. I have had a degenerative back for years (I am 46 now) and I even brought up the depression/pain issue with my doctor which he absolutely believes in. But I am on a mission to stop the opiates which I have been taking for the past several months (because they are big time depressants).
Your blog is wonderful and I love your sense of humor. My wife and I lost our home in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and we live in a small town just outside of Lafayette now. She was able to transfer her job with Pier 1, but I have not worked as an architect/landscape architect in a long while. I receive SSDI for my bipolar I and I am afraid to go back to work because I always go manic in my constant asperation for quality design (and I'm afraid of losing my SSDI). I have been taking lamictal, seroquil and clonopin for the past couple of years and while my insane highs and lows have been manageable for the most part and I haven't been hospitalized in a long time, the medications put me in a no mans land kinda fog. Uninspired...
I think it's great you are able to hold down steady employment and looking back at one of your posts about if you would be missed if you died...well...you would be very much so missed by me and I don't even know you. Suicide enters my mind daily and if it were not for my parents, wife and brothers and the pain it would cause them I'd be long gone for sure.
To say "hang in there" is so trite, but your post is a big help in being able to hold on. Even if just for today. Take care and from what I've read, many people care about you. If nothing else, believe in that.