Unbalanced: The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Bipolar Woman

By Lisa M. Fina

From a youth filled with abuse, the author joins the US Coast Guard as an RN and is shipped to Baltimore, MD with her young son. Here, she finds a gay and lesbian community and discovers a side of herself she did not know before. Under the influence of a delusion, she makes an unsuccessful suicide attempt and gets diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which is a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The author loses her nursing license due to her mental illness, and she gets her heart broken and goes back to her hometown. Here, her depression lifts, but her psychosis remains. In 2004, the author has a spiritual experience and converts to Catholicism. Her son acquires paranoid schizophrenia, and in 2011, he commits suicide. Her psychiatrist prescribes a third antipsychotic medication, and along with her own coping skills, she is today free of all mental illness symptoms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532059414

Lisa M. Fina

Lisa M. Fina is an author, composer, music producer and entrepreneur who lives in St. Louis, MO with her devoted and loving cat, King. She enjoys prayer, yoga, meditation, piano practice, reading, social media, and volunteering.

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Copyright © 2018 LISA M. FINA

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-5940-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-5941-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018911876

iUniverse rev. date: 11/17/2018

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

CHAPTER 1

I was born and named Lisa Myrtle Fina on a very cold, snowy day in St. Louis, Missouri. The snow was piled to the top of the door frames on the farmhouse where my mother’s parents lived and where my mother was staying when my father was in Greenland, on tour of duty in the US Marines.

My tiny, dark-haired, light-skinned, short-haired mom had toxemia during her pregnancy with me. She was very close to death during her pregnancy, and it was my birth that saved her life. I was four pounds, zero ounces, when I was born, and that was considered immature. I had to be in an incubator and stay in the hospital for a few weeks until I got bigger.

My blonde-haired, blue-eyed aunt, who always looked like a movie star to me, stated that she and my mom had to dig themselves out of ten feet of snow just to go to the hospital to see me every day. My aunt reminded me of this every time she saw me for the rest of my adult life. She looked like a movie star up until her eighty-fifth year, when she died.

When my mother brought me home from the hospital, she kept me on a very strict bottle-feeding schedule, and I soon grew from a spindly, skinny little thing, with longish light brown hair, into a very fat baby. I think my mom was in seventh heaven taking care of me on that farm near St. Louis, Missouri.

When my big, dark-skinned, six-foot-tall, almost obese Latino father came home from Greenland, he told my mother when he saw me that I was the cutest thing that he had ever laid his eyes upon. Never mind that one of my eyes was crossed.

My mother told me that I was a very bratty child before the age of three. She told me that it was due to my crossed eye. She says that, according to the eye doctor, I saw double and that that made me poorly behaved because I was so frustrated with my vision. At the age of three, I had surgery on my right eye to correct this condition in a marine-base hospital. I remember it very well. I remember they sent my mother home. They wouldn’t let her stay in the hospital with me. My mother thought this was very cruel of the hospital staff. But that’s the way it was back in those days, in the early 1960s. I remember being in a baby crib, and in the morning, a nurse walked toward me with a hypodermic syringe. I remember screaming when I saw that syringe. Being a military brat who traveled overseas a lot, I was well acquainted with syringes. I remember the nurse holding me down in my crib, and I don’t remember anything after that until the moment when I was in the operating room and a doctor was holding a gas mask over my face. The next thing I knew, I was walking down a hospital corridor with an adult holding my hand. There were children lying around in beds everywhere. We walked toward an outside door, where my parents were waiting. I remember being introduced to the doctor who’d done my surgery. I remember shaking his hand. Then we got into our car and drove home. I had an eye patch on my right eye. I had to wear that patch for about a week. My mom always said that I was a model child after that surgery because I wasn’t seeing double anymore.

When I was four years old and my dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed sister, Linda, was three years old, my mother threw a birthday party for my sister. My mother made a big orange cake with coconut icing, and there were lots of homemade decorations. My mom really got into crafts. Mom invited all our friends from the neighborhood, which was the immediate vicinity of the marine base where we lived. There were games like pin the tail on the donkey, musical chairs, toss, and other games that we thought were so much fun. Everyone got prizes. And there was candy and punch. Mom really got into us kids. She threw birthday parties like this every year throughout our childhoods and into our teens.

My sister and I played outdoors a lot. The dirt outside where we lived was light red. My mom would always sit outside with us as we played with each other and with other kids in the neighborhood. Yes, she was overprotective, I think. She did this throughout our entire childhoods. My sister and I were traditional girls. We liked to mostly play with dolls and play house. We were great friends as kids. We grew further apart as we got older. I don’t really know what happened. However, we’re friendlier in our old age.

Our father, being in the military, was gone most of the day on the job. We dreaded when he would come home. Sometimes he was happy and playful. Sometimes he was full of rage, argumentative, angry, abusive, and paranoid. And we never knew what side of his personality would present itself. Our whole family was afraid of him—including his wife. He would verbally abuse his wife, but he would physically abuse both his daughters, getting out his belt all too often, usually over minor things and often over nothing at all. It was frequently due to his paranoia. He held the whole family in utter terror. His voice was also loud and scary. We girls were only little ones. Even as young as two and three years old, we had to contend with the likes