The Beginning..

Well.. I decided to start a blog to vent my feelings, explain myself and also just write about random things. First things first.. I am bipolar. Depressed. And have a sleep disorder. That is mostly what I will write about is dealing with all of that and trying to be "normal".
A little history on the issues..
I was diagnosed Bipolar when I was about 10 years old. My mom has known that I have had it my whole life. She just didn't want to take me in and have me misdiagnosed as ADD, ADHD, Depressed, etc.. So she waited until I was old enough and then we found out. When I was younger.. I used to have really bad fits of anger as my "manic" of bipolar. I would get so angry that I would black out from me and then rip pictures off the wall and throw everything around. Once I returned to myself, I wouldn't know what had happend but everybody would be mad at me. Before we knew that I was bipolar, we would just call that "the other shantel". And they had thought that maybe it was multiple personalities. In my opinion, that would have been more fun! :) But the fact of the matter is.. I'm bipolar. I'm not gonna deny it because that's who I am and it's not my fault. So I just roll with it. And also, when we went to go get tested for me being bipolar, we found out that my mom is Manic Bipolar. So we are opposite.. kinda. Bipolar is when you have extreme mood changes and can go from super hyper to super depressed. She is mostly manic and has TONS of energy and can run on little sleep. Where as I am mostly depressive and don't have a lot of energy and I need LOTS of sleep. This also ties into my sleep disorder. But that just means that when I just wake up, she knows now that she shouldn't strike a full conversation with me and talk really fast when I'm not even fully awake. So we have it figured out now..
I have a very rare sleep disorder called "Klein Levin Syndrome". I started sleeping a lot in 3rd grade where I could sleep for like a week at a time and just wake up for like a half hour everyday and try to fit everything in like shower, food, pills, family time.. We really didn't know what it was so we went down to Children's Hospital in Bellevue and had a sleep study done. Pretty much after that, they told me that I didn't have sleep apnea. Duh! But luckily, after we told the nurse all the problems that I had, she told us that she did a paper in college on something called "Klein Levin Syndrome" and that sounded a lot like what was going on with me. So throughout the night, she printed off about 200 pages on it off of the internet. My mom read that within the next week and said," OMG Shantel!! This is YOU!" And we took it to our doctor and he diagnosed me. I just want to give a big thank you to the nurse at Bellevue Children's Hospital for actually knowing about it and giving us an answer!! When I was diagnosed however many years ago, there were only 500 people in the WORLD who had it. They recently featured a video on MSNBC that was about a girl with the same sleep disorder. I was so happy to see something on it because it is so rare! They had said that there are only about 1,000 people in the world who have it. And there is no cure.. which we knew. You just have to wait for it to pass.. But anyway, throughout 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade, I only went to about 1/3 of the school year. I could sleep up to 10 days at a time and when I would actually wake up, I still wasnt fully awake. And that makes it kind of hard to go to school. Thank goodness that I am smart or else I would not have made it through all those grades! I really had some GREAT teachers that actually tried to understand me and help me! So thank you SO MUCH to you guys! And then I had some really crappy teachers who didn't care and told me to get an alarm clock! First of all, I get that you have like 200 students during the day so you can't give anything special to one student.. but I can't wake up to an alarm clock stupid!! It's like I'm in A COMA!! And sorry if when I wake up after so long, I would want to maybe take a shower or spend time with my family and see what they have been up to for 10 days while I was sleeping. School was not my top priority, especially when the teachers were jerks! But I continued and finally got my GED in December of '08 to finally be done with school! I was so happy when that day finally came! :) Point of the matter is- It's a rare sleep disorder. I can sleep a lot. I don't sleep for 10 days anymore but I still sleep a lot! I sleep about 12 hours a night and am still tired all day..
Ok.. now I really don't want to write a whole paragraph about depression.. So this is what I'm going to say:
Bipolar depression is like 500 time worse that when normal people are "depressed". I really hate when people are like, I'm so depressed, I don't wanna go to school. Suck it up people! I get so depressed to where I can't even get up off the couch because it hurts my whole body!! I'll be starving and the kitchen is like 4 feet away but I can't make myself get up and walk there because it is a lot of work and my body just can't do it. And I have to live like that for weeks at a time for months! Have you ever been so depressed to where you physically can not move? No? Then don't even talk to me about being depressed. Thanks.

So that's my first blog post. Probably later in the day or tomorrow I will update about medication and how much I hate it and how frustrating it is.
But this is my life. If you have any questions, ask me.
And thank you for taking the time to read this! I really appreciate it! :)