My diagnosis: Hypomania

I had an “event” on December 15. Simplistically speaking, I spent about five or six hours throwing things, shouting swear words, and generally being obnoxious. Out of this was born about three (3) weeks in the hospital and two (2) diagnoses.

The current best diagnosis: Hypomania (Cleveland Clinic). The recently rejected conclusion: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). TLE means seizures; hypomania does not include seizures as a symptom.

Certifiable

In some sense I suppose being certifiable sounds okay. Trust me, it is not. My issues are minor, I am incredibly lucky that this is so. But the process of your brain stripping a few gears while jumping between shifts without the benefit of a clutch can be particularly harrowing for your family. My wife, Irene, has carried an immense load dealing with this whole process the past few weeks.

The impact on others around me is the biggest impact I’ve observed about my brain change. Inside however,, I’ve been basically mentally reborn. Kind of like an OS change: maybe an unplanned upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. The UI Is all screwed up, you can’t find things, and for some reason AI keeps popping up everywhere. Something, most likely a lot of things, is / are definitely wrong.

“Long John” Baldry has a song that expresses a lot of my feelings about the whole situation. And it also often makes me laugh, which is much needed.

Keeping it short

There are a lot of questions that this all raises. Why has TLE been rejected now? What tests have been done? Why suddenly develop a problem like this now? Can the illness be detected? Or can a potential upcoming incident be predicted and avoided?

I’m intentionally not going to answer all those questions in this post. I’m aiming to try a new thing with my blog in 2026: I’m going “bite sized” in terms of content. 500 words or thereabouts, no more.