The road to recovery

Ok, I'm going to start this with an apology. I abruptly departed twitterland some months ago, no warning and no explanation...like a magic trick - one minute I was here the next I was gone. Now I am ready to offer some sort of explanation for this.
I start this post with a certain amount of humour, this is because what I will write next isn't really that funny and will probably be quite hard for me to write. So I thought I'd open with an attempt at lighthearted humour before hitting you, dear reader, with the dark truth surrounding my twitter absence.
I returned to work 2 weeks ago after a very long, 3 month absence from work. During this time I went to a very personal and very frightening version of hell. I have come away from it having undergone a long hospital admission and with a new diagnosis to apply to myself....

I am nqnurse and I have bipolar affective disorder. I have survived a period of mania, a period of depression and an acute psychotic episode, which the man in uniform (no longer my man-we have sadly separated) described as the worst he has ever seen. I spent 3 weeks in a psychiatric hospital and am now keeping my fingers crossed that lithium, the third medication I have tried, will return me to some level of "normality" (though I have a totally different view of normality to the one I had at the beginning of the year).
Today is a good day, which is why I feel able to try and write this post. I feel it is important that I am able to be honest about my diagnosis. For many complex reasons I refuse to be stigmatised. Yes I have had moments when my behaviour would seem to others to be crazy, even to myself some of my actions have been, to put it bluntly, extremely bizarre. I have heard voices and I have been driven to self harm. I have both physical and emotional scars, I have days when my future terrifies me, never knowing what mood I might wake up in-will I be ok to look after my children, do the school run or will I be on the phone to my ex husband (now also my informal carer) blood pouring from my legs, scissors in hand, hysterical because the dark cloud has, without warning, descended?
I joke about my diagnosis, referring to myself as crazy, just so others have less reason to do it. The reality of it is far from funny, yes I have returned to work, yes to those around me I now seem better than I was but the truth is I am dragging myself from day to day because to let go would mean slipping into a dark place. And I don't want to go there. I'm still far too fragile.