Q. What’s happening now?

A. Just waking up.

Q. Now?   At 9 in the morning already?   Don’t you usually get up much earlier?

A. Usually at around 4:30.  But lately I’ve been getting up at 3, and this morning it all caught up with me.

Q. Why have you been getting up at 3?

A. Not tired anymore.

Q. What time are you going to bed?

A. That’s another thing.  It used to be, I’d go to bed at 9:30, and get a good 7 hours sleep.  Now, I don’t go to bed till 11.

Q. And you sleep till 3?

A. Yes.

Q. No wonder you’re so tired.   But doesn’t this remind you of something?

A. Yes it does, now that you mention it.   It reminds me of the time I always used to go to bed at 3, and get up at 7.   Very similar dynamic.   

Q. And when was that?

A. It was in 2003, right after Mom died.  Every night I stayed up till 3.   Every morning I got up at 7, and drove to the private school where I taught music.   That was the job that I lost in 2004.   I mentioned it in an earlier tuneup.

Q. Weren’t you having a first-time manic episode at the time?

A. Yes.  

Q. Are you afraid of having another one?

A. I don’t think “afraid” is the right word.   But I’m concerned.   I’m always concerned about this, as well I should be.   

Q. Is there any medication you can take to address it?

A. Perhaps.   I’m a little sensitive about it, being a runner.

A. What’s being a runner got to do with it?

A. My physiology is a lot different than someone who does not run.   So medications don’t have the same effect on me as they have on people who are more sedentary.

Q. Can you document that?

A. I can try.  I’m only stating my experience.   

Q. You haven’t always run, have you?   You’ve gone through periods when you don’t run much at all, right?

A. That’s right.

Q. How do medications affect you when you’re not running?

A. More like they’re supposed to, I think.  But check it out.  I didn’t run from about 2000 to mid-2003.   And I got super fat, by the way.   I was on 2400 mg a day of Gabapentin.

Q. Whatever for?

A. They believed it would be a good replacement for the Klonopin I had been on earlier, and less habit forming.

Q. But the Klonopin did not make you fat?

A. Not at all.  In fact, I requested they return me to the Klonopin, after I’d gained approximately 75 lbs.

Q. Did they accommodate your request?

A. Yes.  And then my Mom died, later that afternoon.

Q. So you think the combination of the medication switch and your mother’s death triggered the episode?

A. That’s my thinking, yes.   And psychiatry seems to agree with me, by and large, on this one.

Q. Does psychiatry often disagree with you?

A. I cant say that, no.   What I can say is — as a runner — I am always engaged in an experiment with my own body.   George Sheehan, in his book Running and Being, called it the “experiment of one.”  Since I continually experiment with my own body — that is, I develop theories, test them out, and draw conclusions — it disturbs me that someone who doesn’t know my body as well as I do should be experimenting with it.

Q. You don’t like doctors, do you?

A. I didn’t say that!  I just went to one yesterday, and I liked him very much.

Q. So what are you saying?

A. That I just have to hold this thing in check.

Q. You?  All by yourself?   Don’t you have a therapist?

A. That’s right, I gotta find a good one.

Q. Were you going to a bad one?

A. Can’t exactly say bad — he just seemed, kinda like, he thought too well of me.

Q. Can you clarify?

A. I think he thought I was a lot more on the ball than I actually am.  First session, he kinda looked down as though guilty, and said: “You’re about twice as intelligent as me!” He said it in a tone of great self-pity, as though he were about to quit his job or something.

Q. He was insecure?

A. Yeah.  And now we had TWO insecure people in the room.

Q. So you left that guy?

A. Actually, he eventually quit the job.  And when he was leaving, he told me I should open up a private practice.

Q. And where did you go then?

A. To my pastor.   

Q. How did that go?

A. It was different.   Extremely intelligent, insightful, compassionate.   But somehow I felt as though something was cutting into my core — almost as though trying to create a disruption within me —

Q. Why would he have wanted to do that?

A. Oh, he wouldn’t have wanted to do it — not intentionally, not by his own self.  It was just an inadvertent effect of the logical progression of our mutual thought.   I left eventually, once I felt that something sacred within me was about to be desecrated.

Q. Sacred?

A. Yes.  Like an inner temple.  An adytum, if you will.   Something inside me that is so critical to my being, that no other influence has any business there.  Nobody, not even me, ought to tamper with that inner temple.

Q. So you felt threatened by the pastor, and you left that room as well?

A. You have such a crude way of putting things.   Yes, I left — but only because I then found a Masters Candidate who could see me for free, three times a week for five weeks, in order to fill out her hours for her Masters Degree.

Q. How was she?

A. Excellent!   I learned a lot in those five weeks.   But then she was done.

Q. Can’t you continue to see her?

A. Do I have $150 an hour?   

Q. Well then, what are you going to do?

A. I believe there are psychotherapists in my vicinity who accept MediCare and MedCaid.

Q. You gonna look for one?

A. It seems the humble thing to do, yes.

Q. Whoever called you humble?

A. No one yet.   May I be excused?

Q. Why?

A. Time for my morning run — and half the day’s gone already.  

The Questioner is silent.

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