Well-Ordered Chaos » meds

Blogging at the Lamictal Diaries for awhile

Addy — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:30:16 +0000

I learned something important during my bout with psychotic depression: Lexapro is the antichrist.

OK, maybe that’s not fair. Maybe you have ADHD and Lexapro treats you just fine. But for me, it was a complete disaster. I spent most of March and all of April sitting on the couch, staring at the wall. I’d say that it made me a zombie, except that zombies at least are motivated to eat brains. I wouldn’t have been motivated to eat anything except the damn drug made me crave carbs. As it was, making myself go to the store to buy frozen food, and then making myself put it in the microwave, was agonizingly difficult. All this while on 70 mgs of Vyvanse.

Anyway, that’s my excuse for not blogging in forever. I hope to be back soon, but in the mean time, I’ll be keeping a blog of my experiences with Lamictal (lamotrigine). It’s one of those drugs that can be great for treatment-resistant depression, as long as you titrate up slowly and avoid The Dreaded Rash. Since so many other meds have been disastrous for me, I’m keeping a diary of my moods, cognition, attention, etc, as well as any side effects I experience. It’s called The Lamictal Diaries. See you there.

One of them days, one of them weeks

Addy — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:25:20 +0000

My offline life has been pretty chaotic lately, so I haven’t been blogging much. My husband started a new job, I’ve been looking for work, and to top it all off I’m recovering from a TDaP shot (that’s tetanus, diptheria, and pertussis, which used to be a childhood thing, but I guess they decided I needed a booster for all three). My left shoulder, where I got the shot, is achy and sore. What I don’t understand is that my right shoulder is also achy and sore. What is this, a sympathy strike?

It’s occurred to me that if my shoulder hurts this much from a vaccine, how much worse would the pain be if I actually had tetanus? How awful would be be to actually die from this?

Anyway, as a side effect of the vaccine (my body, after all, thinks it’s fighting off mild versions of three different diseases) I’ve been tired and out of it the last few days. The first sentence of this post almost read “I haven’t been online much” — but I have. I’ve been giving my brain a break with some new additions to the Cheezburger empire: Wedinator, which features some of the most eye-watering dresses you’ve ever seen; Poorly Dressed, which mocks fashion victims from all walks of life (including fashion runways); and Ugliest Tattoos, which features, well, some really bad tattoos. Yeah, I’m enabling you to waste time. What can I say, I’m a bad person.

If you want some ADHD commiseration, check out Terry Matlen’s most recent blog post — her house is undergoing major renovation, and in the midst of the chaos she managed to forget Passover. I haven’t forgotten a major holiday (yet) but I have come close to forgetting my own birthday.

7 Tips for Saving Money on Your ADHD Treatment Expenses

Addy — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:40:57 +0000

Today I found a link to this article in my inbox. It’s got some helpful tips for saving money and recovering some of the costs of ADHD treatment for you or your child. Depending on your income and your insurance situation, you may be able to do the following:

Don’t know how to do these things? Read the article to find out.

Got meds? Got dry mouth? See your dentist NOW.

Addy — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:04:04 +0000

I’m leaving town for the holidays next week. Before I leave town I need to make copies of several keys, touch base with cat-sitters, and hopefully get my hair cut. I had a major deadline yesterday, another major deadline tomorrow, and another on Thursday. I have to go to a holiday party thrown by some of my husband’s colleagues this weekend and I have nothing to wear and I hate shopping. And we’re changing insurers at the end of the year, so I’ve been running all over town for eye appointments and such, so basically I’ve been going nuts and I don’t need any more on my plate just now.

But I got a nasty surprise at my dentist appointment this morning.

Let me start by saying that I’ve always had pretty good teeth. I didn’t get a cavity in my adult teeth until I was 27, and that was after six years of dentist avoision and eight years on a heavy dose of anti-depressants (to say nothing of daily antihistamines for more than a decade, ). After another six years of dentist-free existence (and continued medication) I got a check-up and was told I had one or two more small cavities. That was about eighteen months ago. I’ve been getting regular check-ups since then, and I’ve gotten a lot better about flossing.

A few days ago I had a dental cleaning, check-up, and X-ray. I was pretty sure I’d come out of it cavity-free, thanks to my newfound flossing habit. Imagine my shock when I was told that I have seven new cavities. Seven. That’s at least double what I already had. And not all of them are small either. Oh, and most of them are between my teeth. This will be fun.

My dentist works with a junior partner who was handling my initial exam. I first started to get nervous when she looked at my X-rays and said “Uh … I have some concerns here … do you floss?” I replied that yes, I do floss. “Hmmm,” said Dr B, “Well, let me get Dr. Y in here for a consult …”. Dr Y looked at my X-rays and said, “So. You’re on a medication that makes your mouth dry?”

That’s right, folks. Ten months of Vyvanse and seven (seven!) freakin’ cavities. I’ve been on psychoactives before, and I’ve had dry mouth before, and I noticed this was worse than usual. But since I was sick of having to pee every half hour I learned the difference between dry mouth and actual thirst. And even if I had kept drinking like the proverbial fish, simply drinking water doesn’t replace the anti-bacterial and remineralizing properties of saliva. I knew that dry mouth was correlated with tooth decay — that’s why I was flossing. But seriously, seven #@$^%&! cavities?

“I see this a lot”, Dr Y explained. “I have a lot of doctors as patients and they get maybe one lecture in med school about teeth. They don’t know about the full effects of some of these medications. When they prescribe these meds, they should tell their patients to see their dentists ASAP to talk about prevention. There are things dentists can do to prevent this, but we have to know about it first.”

To keep my teeth from falling out, Dr Y gave me some high-octane fluoridated toothpaste, to be brushed on gently and left on my teeth for a few minutes. I will now be flossing after every meal. And I will also be chewing gum with xylitol, an alcohol sugar that can’t be metabolized by bacteria but stimulates salivation. I hate gum. But I hate dentist drills more.

So, all you ADHD folks out there, if you’re on meds, please, please see your dentist. Even if you’re not aware of having dry-mouth, it can still be there, wreaking havoc on your pearly whites. Getting cavities filled is painful, expensive, and yet another way to disrupt our precious schedule and equilibrium, and that’s the last thing we need.

Hyperfocus. What a time waster.

Addy — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:01:23 +0000

So, I’m doing this art project that required me to buy a certain number of items. I go to Home Despot, I buy the items I need, I carefully put them in the shopping bag. The self-checkout device has a meltdown over something, as it inevitably does. While I’m offering it kleenex and saying “there, there” in a comforting way, one of my items stealthily slips free the bonds of my shopping bag, never to be seen again.

Tonight, I had forty minutes in which to get something productive done in my art studio. I decided to attach item A to item B with epoxy, since forty minutes seemed like a good amount of time to sand said items and glue them together. But did I? No, I did not. Because of the damned Home Despot self-checkout machine and its little con games, I spent 40 minutes looking for an item which is not there, which I should have realized sooner could not be there, because I refused to admit that the item in question is just gone.

I suppose it’s a good sign that I can now see myself hyperfocusing, even if I can’t yet make myself stop.

Angry at Astrophysics

Addy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:20:24 +0000

I realized today that for the third time in a week, I forgot to take my meds this morning. This is not good.

When this realization struck, I took a few minutes to think about the ways in which my self care has gone off the rails the last few weeks My appetite has been all over the map, so some days I’ve been eating enough to sustain me through a long hibernation, while others I just haven’t been hungry at all to the point of forgetting meals. My sleep has been even more effected. I’m exhausted in the morning, and if I don’t set an alarm I will sleep until noon (and could sleep longer if I don’t force myself out of bed). My energy is low all day, and doesn’t pick up until 10 pm, making it hard to get to sleep before 3 am.

Of course, the whole thing is a cascading clusterf***. It begins with oversleeping, so if I remember to take my meds I’m taking them at noon, meaning they don’t wear off until late evening, and then my meals are all off by a few hours, and forgetting to take my meds wreaks havoc with my appetite, so I’m a bit spacey all day, until I hit my late-night energy surge and can’t go to sleep when I’d like.

Now, I’m of a pagan-y turn of mind, which means that I like to mark the turning of the seasons in some way, however simple. This year, I haven’t done my equinox ritual. Pondering this fact, I realized that it’s due at least in part my reluctance to engage with the diminishing sunlight. As the daylight fades, so does my brain, and I resent this like hell.

Resentment does not change the earth’s axial tilt, or any other inconvenient fact of astrophysics. But pretending the resentment isn’t there just because it’s irrational doesn’t make it go away. I know from past experience that if I don’t stop and take stock every now and again, if I don’t realign myself with the natural world, if I try to pretend that my non-rational spiritual needs can just be reasoned away, there will be hell to pay.

So I did my equinox ritual. I sat in my art studio, which has the least natural light in the house (yeah, I know), and fixed myself a healthy lunch because I needed to eat, even though I wasn’t conscious of being hungry. I lit some candles and sat in front of them. I made my lunch into a ritual meal, and as I ate I focused on my need to take care of myself. I admitted to myself that I’m angry about the shorter days, that I’ve been sort of in denial about this fact, and that I was trying to carry on as if nothing was happening. I admitted to myself that the world around me is turning inward to rest up for Spring, and that this has very real and profound effect on my body. As the world around me slows down, so must I; I must be slower and more conscious in my daily habits. I need to take care of myself.

As the fog rolled in, slowly dimming the sunlight and making the room even darker, I sat and enjoyed my lunch. Instead of framing my thoughts in terms of what has to get done today, I thought about what might be in the best interests of my body. I rested. Then I closed the window against the cold, damp autumn, and withdrew to the warmth and light of my home.