The great thing about being a journalist in south Florida is you get some really weird assignments. Couple of years ago I went alligator hunting with some wounded vets courtesy of the Wounded Warrior Project. I’ve been assigned to go scuba diving to cover damage to coral reefs. Chased oil in the bayous of Louisiana after the BP disaster. Been to more crime scenes than I can remember and lived to write about three hurricanes. I walked on death row a few times. Watched a man die in the electric chair. Even sat in the electric chair during one visit.

So, last Saturday night when I walked into the newsroom for my occasional, obligatory weekend shift and my editor said, “I’m going to rock your world, I knew it was going to be an interesting evening: “You’re going to Mar-a-Lago to interview the governor and his wife,” she said.

Mar-a-Lago is the palatial, oceanfront estate and swank club owned by Donald Trump on Palm Beach. I’ve been there a few times. Once I rode my bike to a fundraiser luncheon and waited in the valet line with the Bentley’s and Roll’s. Amused the hell out of the valets.

Anyway, I went home, put on the LBD (Little Black Dress), lipstick and my red, patent leather, pointy-toed stilettos and headed over to The Donald’s. The thing about these $500/plate galas is you realize, immediately, that rich people – the top one percent of the ten percent – really aren’t that different from you and me. They have money. Lots of money. But that’s it. They are still people – human beings. We may think they are insensitive, arrogant, self-righteous, clueless bigots but I am no longer willing to write them all off as insensitive, arrogant, self-righteous, clueless bigots. They’re people who just happen to have a lot of money. A whole lot of money.

My meds FINALLY came in the mail. Amen. I take three meds, but I ran out of one before the refills came in the mail. Three days without one of the meds. Three days. My brain was starting to feel squishy. I had a horrible nightmare and I could feel a tsunami size headache building behind my eyes. Just a day after resuming the med I felt like my delightful self again.

Am I an idiot or what? I went to my nurse practitioner today and told her about my little refill snafu. She writes me scripts for three months worth of each of my meds. I send them to my insurance company’s pharmacy  and, voila, three months worth of meds arrive in the mail. She explained that I don’t have to wait until I am almost out of my meds to send in the refill prescriptions. I told her I knew that. She shook her head. I know. There is no excuse.

I like Pat, my nurse practitioner. I see her every three months and have been doing that for about five years, unless she changes the dosage.  Then I have to call her and visit her every week for awhile. Kind of a pain in the butt but I trust Pat with my life. She saved me, along with my therapist. You gotta trust the person writing your scripts. This is very, very important. It’s not like the kind of trust you put in the doctor who writes you a script for a Z-Pak and a couple days later that infection is gone.

I am talking about the kind of trust you put in someone to whom you have given your brain. Literally. You have to really, really trust this person because you have only one brain. We’re not talking about kidneys or eyes and ears. You lose one of those and you can still live. But you have one brain. That’s it.

Way back in the 1970′s, when I was a teenager, the only depression we knew about was the one in 1929 that made our parents and grandparents tightwads. Back then, teenagers with depression either hid it (like I did), self-medicated (like I did) or were loners – kids who did not fit in.

So when I heard a local couple who had lost their son to bipolar was underwriting Johns Hopkins’ ADAP program at local schools, I had to ask…”What if this had been around when I was in high school?”

The Adolescent Depression Awareness Program is brilliantly simple. It’s common sense at its finest. ADAP provides teachers with a curriculum to use on on how to teach their students about depression.“Through education we will increase awareness about depression and the need for evaluation and treatment.”

• Interactive lectures and discussions
• Video of teenagers describing their experiences with depression and bipolar disorder
• Homework and video assignments to reinforce key points
• Group interactive activities to teach the key message that depression is a common, treatable, medical illness.

This should not be controversial but teaching teens anything about their health can be absurdly controversial. Just say the word”condom” in in some parts of the country and you’re just asking for an inquisition by the PTA.

Let me just start by saying I was not a touchy-feely, self-help-book kind of girl. I was more of a You-want-a-piece-of-me? kind of gal. Comes with the profession – journalism – and the more time you spend in a newsroom, the more refined your sass. So, when I came out of my last major depression and my therapist suggested I do some “Inner Child” work I rolled my eyes, thanked God for our  confidentiality agreement. No one would find out about my “Inner Child.”

It seemed really silly at first. REALLY silly. I drew pictures, wrote letters with my left hand from my “Inner Child,” went through boxes of old picture and visualized my “Inner Child.” I have very few memories of my childhood. But after a couple of months of working with my “Inner Child” weird stuff started happening. Memories struck like lightening – totally out of the blue. I could suddenly recall the tile and and door knob at the swimming pool. I could see myself as a 6-year-old with long pig-tails, ridiculously short bangs and my favorite red check dress with the black velvet ribbon around the waist. My sister helped me remember the library with the creepy stuffed bald eagle.

(estrogen)

Have I mentioned lately that I’m starting the whole menopause “thing”? All I want for Christmas this year is queen-size sheet sets. Preferably very high thread count.  Seriously, I sweat more while I’m sleeping than I do at my kickboxing class. At least  when I’m at kickboxing I’m burning calories. I don’t think sleeping and sweating is going to make me thin.

So, when Dr. Jennifer Payne was introduced as our next speaker at the recent luncheon for Hope for Depression Research Foundation I sat up at attention like my dog when he thinks he hears the refrigerator door open. Her topic: Women and Depression – especially women going through “the change.”

Menopause? Did someone say menopause?

I have a friend who loves malted-milk balls.

The girl can eat a half-gallon carton of Whoppers and not gain a pound. Me, I eat Whoppers and you can literally see my butt expand: Whopper size fat dimples all over my hind quarters.

She tells me she has always been this way – able to eat anything she wants without gaining weight. A perpetual size 2. She says she has a fast metabolism. I don’t know what it is but she doesn’t have to work at it. Me, I gotta work at it and work at it and work at it.

I realized yesterday – while staring at the muffin top puffing over the waist of my jeans – that some of us have to work just as hard at our mental health as we do our physical health. Other folks are lucky. They don’t have to work at it – just like my friend who can eat Whoppers with muffin-top impunity. Stress, anger, sadness, jealousy don’t trigger a chemical reaction in their brains that makes them curl up into a fetal position or rage against the machine. They deal with it and get over it.

Amen. Hallelujah. God bless America.

Health care passed.

I am one of the few taxpayers who does not care how much I must pay in taxes to guarantee that everyone in this country — and I mean everyone — receives the medical care they need when they are hurt or sick.

To me, this is not a political battle. It is common sense. We take care of each other. When someone is hurt, sick or in pain, you help them. That’s how I was raised. My mother called it The Golden Rule: “Do unto other as you would have them to unto you.” It is that simple.

I think I would like to go to rehab.

I didn’t go to rehab when I got sober in 1998. I went to the local AA clubhouse, which was a former Shriner’s clubhouse with a spiffy wood bar (promptly converted to a coffee shop) and a meeting room that seemed large  enough to drive around in little cars. I love my AA clubhouse and have had some wonderful times there. It had a major overhaul a couple of years ago and now features a nice pool table, a flat, large screen television above a fireplace, pin ball machines, a public access computer, and a lovely little cafe. Did I mention the coffee? We have cappuccino, too.

Still, I think it might be kind of nice to go to rehab. I don’t need it but I hear other recovering alcoholics talk about their rehabs like they’re sororities or  spas and I think I could use 30 days to “work on myself” … and my tan. I got the idea while trying to plan a vacation. I wanted to find a resort or spa for recovered alcoholics. A place where we could go and continue and expand our programs with lectures and seminars and yoga and massages and pedicures and really great healthy food. Meetings morning, noon and night. Movies. Tennis. Group meditations and long walks on the beach. Wouldn’t that be great?

I went to the symphony Wednesday night. I haven’t been to the symphony in years. I don’t know why, because I love the symphony and I can walk to the performing arts center (and you can get a ticket really cheap if you wait until the last minute and they haven’t sold out).

Anyway, I got to the symphony a few minutes before it began and, of course, my seat was in the middle of the row and everyone had to get up so I could get in. I was tired from working all day and didn’t need any more dirty looks. I really wasn’t in the mood.

And then it happened. I looked at the program and saw two of my favorite words: cello solo. A beautiful young woman from Vienna took the stage in a flowing emerald green gown, sat on a little dais and began to play her cello.

I went to bed last night at 1:30 this afternoon.

I spent the night doggin’ a Miami man charged with gunning down four people – including his twin sisters and a sleeping 6-year-old – at a family Thanksgiving dinner in Jupiter, Florida. I went to the Palm Beach County jail at about 1 am but he wasn’t there. So I drove north about 30 minutes to the police department where investigators were questioning Paul Merhige. The police wouldn’t let the media park within sight of the sally port (the garage where Merhige got in and out of a police car.) So, we staked out Merhige from a hedge across from the sally port until 4:15 am. It was 43-degrees, which isn’t cold if you are a Packer’s fan, but is damn cold if you are a Floridian.

I followed Merhige back to jail and then to court. Then I raced back to the newsroom, then back to court and then back to the newsroom. I finally hit the pillow at 1:30 pm – about 30 hours without sleep. In my college days I pulled all nighters during exams and drinking marathons and bounced back quickly. Not today. Sleep is to my mental health what my heart beat is to my physical health. Can’t function well without a nice, regular pattern.

During my last major depression, as my psychiatric nurse practitioner evaluated whether I needed to be involuntarily commitment to a psych hospital, she said I needed sleep. Actually, she said it was “the first thing you need.” Sleep? She explained how disruptive sleep patterns and lack of sleep fueled my depression. I knew my depression caused my sleeplessness but I did not know my sleeplessness worsened my depression, which worsened my sleeplessness and on and on.

She gave me a prescription for a drug called Seroquel and I slept and slept and slept. I was in a fog, stared off into space but I was sleeping. It took a couple of months before I crawled out of my black hole and a couple more months before I tapered off the Seroquel. Now, I take my antidepressants and mood …