It all came to a head one July morning, with my husband sitting under the mayday tree in our backyard. No matter how much I coaxed, cajoled or threatened, he wouldn’t come back into the house. Wouldn’t talk to me. Wouldn’t look at me.
As the sun got higher in the sky, I started to envision either having to physically drag my six-foot-two husband back into the house or call him an ambulance for heatstroke. Determined to get him to hydrate at least, I filled a glass with water and picked my way across the dry grass.
“Giovanni? Sweetie?” Even though he was facing me, I called out well before I got close. “It’s hot out here. Do you want some water?”
“I’m not drinking that.” He still wasn’t looking at me but at least he was talking. That was good, right?
“OK, do you want something else?”
“No. It’s poison.”
Even in the summer heat, his words turned me cold. Maybe I hadn’t heard right. “What’s that, sweetie?”
“The water is poisoned. You’re trying to poison me.”
Bipolar disorder with psychotic features. That’s the diagnosis we finally got after months of white-knuckling our way through Giovanni driving at reckless speeds, racking up credit card bills and firmly believing he was on a mission from God — and not in the fun Blues Brothers way.
February marked 27 years that Giovanni and I have been married. We have the same challenges as any other married couple: financial stress, clashing parenting styles, his complete disregard for the basic rules of how to load a dishwasher. But where your relationship might run on, say, mutual respect or open communication, mine runs on drugs. Four times a day, my husband goes to the cupboard, pours an assortment of pills into his hand then tosses them down his throat. Those pills are the difference between the man I found under the mayday tree — vacant and suspicious, trapped in a nightmare of delusions — and the husband who came into the kitchen to make me a cup of tea as I wrote this. To say I love the people who created those drugs severely undersells my feelings.
But while this is my love letter to modern pharmaceuticals, Giovanni’s would fall more into the love/hate category. It would be just two words long, the first one starting with F and the second word being “you.” He calls his drugs chemical restraints. Says it’s like walking around in handcuffs. Sure, he can still get sad, but not too sad. Happiness, anger, grief — all of them are blunted. The medication that keeps him with me is also an emotional straitjacket that he must wear for the rest of his life.
Sometimes Giovanni wonders which version of himself is real. The guy he was before the drugs or the one he is these days — medicated but often fighting a debilitating lack of energy. Unmedicated Giovanni was unbeatable at Trivial Pursuit. On the drugs … OK, bad example. He’s still pretty amazing at trivia, but his thoughts are more like a dog let off the leash for the first time, one who might still come when called but who takes a long, winding route. Yet despite that, he still managed to go back to school and earn his master’s degree. We both cried at his graduation.
Drugs are not a panacea, of course. Bipolar still shows up more often than I’d like — especially when it’s daylight savings time or Christmas or a light breeze blows the wrong way. Drugs or no drugs, every single day Giovanni has to work to be healthy.
So, this is a love letter to modern pharmaceuticals, but it’s also a love letter to the man who makes the choice to take them. Every single day.
This is a series of essays by Edmontonians reflecting on human connection. Pitch your little love story to [email protected].
This article appears in the May 2026 issue of Edify
