I don’t think I’ve really explained what we’re dealing with over here, the particular constellation of things we have to negotiate in our daily lives. So in the interest of contextualizing the rest of the conversation, here are the highlights.

Catharine’s main diagnosis is bipolar I with psychotic features (specifically, she heard voices). Her bipolar tends to the depressive side, but she’s had some mania, hypomania, or mixed episodes here and there. She also has anxiety, PTSD, and ADD. We’re lucky that her mental illnesses have been very responsive to meds, and that those same meds have kept working. (We’re also very lucky that my work gives great insurance, that we’ve been able to find excellent psychiatrists, and we’ve been able to swing paying them out of pocket when they didn’t take insurance.)

She didn’t get all of these diagnoses at once, of course. The bipolar diagnosis and treatment came first, and once that was basically stable, it became clear that other things were in play. She’s only been effectively treated for the anxiety since January, and ADD meds have only been in play for two months. Both of these have been game changers, but it’s early days.

On top of all of these things, she’s got physical limitations — dicey lungs because of pulmonary emboli, knees she sprained and injured multiple times without effective recovery, so that now they’re painful a lot of the time, and various other aches and pains and issues, some of which are related to her being fat, but none of which are simply reducible to her being fat. (Hey guess what? Fat shaming isn’t a thing we do here, just in case you were wondering.)

Me, I have the kind of chronic health problems that are both debilitating and vague, so that it’s hard to pin down a diagnosis or find effective treatment. My sinuses are consistently inflamed and congested. I get migraines, complete with prodrome (neck aches, moodiness, and vision changes) and postdrome (fatigue). I have varying levels of fatigue, and when the fatigue gets past a certain point, it comes with brain fog, muscle pain, and sensitivity to every damn thing. I have the characteristic Post-Exertional Malaise of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which means that instead of exercise gradually enabling me to do more, as is true for most people, going beyond my very narrow limits actually puts me in a fatigue flare that severely limits what I can do for several days or longer. I have endometriosis, which was fairly debilitating until I cut dairy and gluten out of my diet, but even though I don’t have the pain anymore, it’s still causing all kinds of wreckage to my abdomen. And, as one of my doctors once joked, I’m allergic to everything green and growing.

We’re a really fun household, is what I’m saying.