September Slump

Some years ago, my late boyfriend would say that I would have what he would call my 'September Slump'. He said that around fall, I would 'slow down' my actions, my working on things, my work, etc. At the time he told me this, fall would be the time that I would try to catch up on work, and courses at work for yearly review, to improve my yearly rating, which was abysmal. I would also be worrying about fall things, such as fall performances that I would like to go to, scrimping what money I could; Xmas and Thanksgiving coming up and having to be around my mother; and present buying, which my boyfriend would budget for, usually stealing money from other bills; various other things. I've noticed that I have not had that happen in the last few years, except for maybe this year.

Over the last few weeks, starting around my birthday, I've noticed that I'm not getting much done at work. I'm not focusing as well either. I'm not keeping up with where I've spent time working, and having to fudge the numbers on my timesheet, because ultimately, I didn't spend much time accomplishing tasks. The only consistent thing that I'm doing is watching the two Perry Mason episodes that I record every weekday. That, and now 90 Fiancé shows.

 

This is a conversation that I had with a fellow Bipolar victim here at work around this time in 2018, right after I took over the admin duties of our SCM application.

I had this happen to me last year

Last year, I spent a lot of time working on a big project that we had going on. About the middle of the year, I was working until 11pm/12am/1am. On Fridays, I would work until about 8am the next morning. The last few years, I've taken to sleeping very late on the weekends, mainly because I didn't have my late boyfriend wanting to run errands and shopping trips. I then stated sleeping all day Saturday, not getting up until Sunday morning. The week of my birthday, in September, I woke up on Tuesday, and thinking that I was late for work, I sent a Teams message to my boss. She informed me that I was not late, and that I was still on vacation. I asked her what day it was, thinking that it was still the weekend, and she told me that it was actually Tuesday. It seems that I slept through four days, at least it seemed that way; I later discovered that I was up on Saturday, but didn't remember it. Over the next few days, on the weekends, I would sleep for days, missing work. Twice, my boss and her boss, came and checked in on me. My boss wound up taking me to a care clinic and they informed me that I had a UTI. I spent a week in the hospital. I called my sister that lives here and she spent the week with me. I was then sent home, and I worked the next week without any problems: I had some errands to take care of that next weekend. I worked another week, however that next weekend, the same thing happened. Another week in the hospital. Another week working. Then that Saturday, a team lead called me to sign into work with an implementation issue. I kept falling back asleep, so my boss called my sister, and she came over. Seeing the same issues happening, she then took me to another hospital, thinking that the first hospital didn't clear out the UTI. It turns out that I no longer had the UTI. (Also, during the hospital stays, I gave them all my meds, for my blood pressure, bipolar mania, and ADHD. They said that some head meds that I was taking were old, such as Wellbutrin, and they wondered why I wasn't taking something newer.) During that week, my sister called her twin and our youngest sister, who both live out of town, and they cleaned my apartment, a deep clean. I mean there were some cruddy spots. The next week, my sister set an appointment for me with an Internist, to review my meds. A few weeks later, I had an appointment with my shrink, and I told him about the comments and about my possibly switching meds. We reviewed my meds and remembered that I am taking the ones that I take because I had issues with the newer ones.