Hello Unhinged fans and listeners. This is Ed, co-founder and co-host of the podcast. As you may have noticed, we haven’t posted much in the last few days. There’s a reason for that, and it’s unfortunately not great news.
As many of you have seen, Doug recently posted about his two-month remission and how he’s been cautiously optimistic about recovery. As a matter of fact, our next show, episode #16, which is scheduled to be released on July 12th, is all about his remission and some interesting new facts he learned about the origins of his mental illness. The show has already been recorded, and it’s a mostly positive discussion.
However, for the past several days, Doug has taken a turn for the worse and is again experiencing debilitating symptoms. He is very angry, depressed, and frustrated to say the least. He has no energy to move and even skipped out on going to a baseball game that someone gave him tickets to, which he was excited about just last week. I’ve been trying to motivate him to change his routine to no avail. We’ve talked, but all that comes out of his mouth is negativity and anger, which makes it very difficult to have a productive conversation.
Underneath it all, he knows and understands that it is the disease talking, and I get that too. But I won’t lie and say it’s easy to take. It’s not. I miss the real Doug, the one who had me in tears laughing when we recorded some of our silly bits in episode #13. I miss the Doug that I can talk to for hours about music and comedy. And I miss the Doug that is positive and thinking about how well he is doing fighting to get his life back. The Doug I’ve been talking to the last few days is a false one, taken over by an evil beast of a disease. The hardest parts are those fleeting moments where his true self bleeds through, if only for a sentence or two. Like he’s fighting to get a message out to me that says “don’t listen to him, that’s not me!”
I hear you, brother. And I’m still here for you, waiting.
In the meantime, I am trying to get an update recorded and added to our next show to explain to our listeners that the remission has decided to take a little break for now. Not sure what we’ll do for the show after that, but we’ll take it one day at a time.
Thank you all again for your continued support.
