When Margaret’s mania began, she impulsively flew to Paris without a passport, talking officials into letting her board the plane. “I had houseguests coming – my friends were coming from England to stay, and I’d completely forgotten. Poor Pierre. All of a sudden, this family shows up, and I was gone.”
After spending several months travelling and fruitlessly searching for an old boyfriend, she returned home and plummeted again into depression. “When I crashed after coming home from Paris, I couldn’t stop crying. I just cried all the time.” She was hospitalized and put on lithium, the standard treatment at the time for bipolar disorder, but the side effects were dramatic. “I had uncontrollable shaking of my hands, like Parkinson’s almost, and feeling really uncomfortable all the time. It turned me into a cow, quite frankly. I had no ambition. I stayed in my house for nine months.” Finally, she took herself off the drug, and gradually her natural sparkle returned.
By this time, Margaret and Pierre had separated. They shared custody of their three sons, and for several years she remained stable. “I hoped that by living in a red brick house with my boys and my own kitchen I would find happiness. And I did – sort of – for quite a while.”
After several years, she found love again, marrying Ottawa developer Fried Kemper and having two more children, Kyle and Alicia. She says, “I was fine, just having a very sane, ordinary, balanced life with my young children, a quiet life. My husband and I were just devoted to the children and to the good life. We skied, went to the cottage, did a lot of fun things.”
But she started to go into another depression following the accidental death of their 14-month-old black Lab. After such a tragedy, some sadness is normal; extreme prolonged desolation is not. “I was almost inconsolable, and it was out of kilter,” she says. Antidepressants helped her climb out of the depression but did nothing to prevent the next manic episode that followed.
It happened in Vancouver in 1998, when Margaret went to visit her mother and other relatives. She recalls, “I was trying to sell my family on a pyramid scheme, convinced that they would make money and I would make money, and they’re going, ‘What?’ It was all a scam.” As the mania escalated, she started taking death-defying risks. “I went out skiing and I stopped turning. I just bombed down all the hills, and that’s not like me. I jumped off cliffs. I was just flying. I just thought I was the best skier on the mountain.”
Margaret was hospitalized once again for several months, distressed because she wanted so desperately to deal with her problems on her own. Worse, she received poor medical treatment. “I was given the wrong drug in the hospital and I lost 80 percent of my liver function,” she says. Only through fierce determination and health food supplements, including milk thistle and desiccated liver, was she able to restore her liver function completely, amazing the doctors by her quick recovery.
