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This Memorial Day will be the fifth anniversary of my stroke. My doctors never found the reason I had the stroke and while I’ve come to accept this, I’m still fearful it could happen again. Which is why I don’t double-lock the door at night. Just in case I can’t make it to the door and the EMT’s have to force their way in, I want to make it as easy for them as I can.
What I’ve been telling myself all these years is that it was stress that caused the stroke as I was working a job that was heavy on looking at metrics produced by its workers each month, which was a great deal of pressure. I was not accustomed to having to meet productivity goals and I was struggling. Management seemed to care more about the numbers than about the clients who we social workers dealt with.
I knew from my time as a social worker that people with mental illness tend to die earlier than others. One study showed that seriously mentally ill (SMI) patients die about 10-20 years earlier than others.
I know I definitely met the criteria for seriously mentally ill. I recently had to send a copy of my psychiatric records to a publisher for whom I doing freelance work so they could verify what I’d written in my article — that I’d endured multiple psychiatric admissions. As I was scanning the records and perusing them, which I hadn’t done in a long time, one phrase kept catching my eye: “severe personality disorder.” I knew my BPD was severe, but it had been a long time since I had thought about how ill I was, and thinking about this made me sad but it also made me think about how fortunate I was to have had access to the treatment I did.
Regardless, I digress. I was talking about this being Memorial Day weekend and the fifth anniversary of my stroke, etiology unknown. I recently came across a study which stated that adults in their 20s or 30s living with a mental disorder have up to a three-time higher risk of suffering a heart attack or a stroke.
These were the findings of the study in terms of specific diagnoses: "excessive risks of incident MI (myocardial infarction) and IS (ischemic stroke) were observed in patients with mental disorders including depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, insomnia, anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, personality disorder, somatoform disorder, eating disorder, and substance use disorder.”
While I may not have been in the age demographics of this particular study, now I can start at least to question if my stroke was caused by my many years of severe anorexia, major depressive disorder, and borderline personality disorder.
Thanks for reading,
Andrea
