not that little blue pill
I, not unlike every other whiny blogger on the planet, have a propensity towards depression. Usually it's not terrible, just your standard emo moments, some sadness, some anxiety, some love of the jack daniels. Other times it's a scary inferno of fear, anger, deep disinterest and sheer exhaustion. It's not something I write about on here often as it's not something I really talk about to anyone.
It is also one of the myriad factors that led to the break up with my girlfriend 2 years ago. Not the only reason, but definitely in the top ten.
I have good months and bad months and I have a definite down turn in the winter though I am completely loathe to admit that because Seasonal Affective Disorder just seems so...psychosomatic and emo. The acronym doesn't help matters much.
During one of my internal struggles, my good friend Alan made a comment that stuck with me, "if you had diabetes you'd treat it, diabetes is a chemical imbalance just like depression" or something to that effect. He was not referring to me, we were discussing other things.
So fine. I sucked it up, got a new doctor (it occured to me that my doctor was a major cause of anxiety for me and that I had no reason to not just go get a new one!) and went to discuss my problems. We tried celexa with disastrous results. I was moody, edgy, more anxiety ridden than usual, completely unable to concentrate or motivate myself. I gave it time, but over time things just got worse.
So we switched to zoloft, the cute little blue pill with the cute little ad campaign. It seemed to be working really well for a while. I felt good, things made sense, I was more calm in crises. Now it seems it's not working as well. I'm back to being unmotivated, I'm tired all the time and it takes considerable effort to not punch my coworkers in the face on a regular basis. I don't normally want to punch them so I guess if we were making a rating on a scale, I might actually be worse off than before, at least in the "urge to skull punch" category.
It's also messing with my sleep. I suffer from insomnia anyway, but now it's a weird new version of insomnia. I have these crazy vivid dreams that wake me up and keep my brain working so hard I feel like I've gotten no rest at all. The sad thing is, I really like the dreams, they're so incredibly vivid and interesting, but also they seem to get filed into my regular memory so I find myself wondering where the mango tree was that I was frantically picking fruit from or whether I had actually bought a giant yellow sedum plant for the front yard.
When I was a teen I was on a number of different anti-depressants. My gp at the time was an overworked doctor with too many patients who didn't really spend a lot of time dealing with me. We tried all kinds of pills in all kinds of doses, moving things up and down and around. It was a really terrible time for me and to say I was hesitant to find myself in the same place again after 14 years would be an understatement.
It was determined that I didn't do well on SSRI's, but everyone loves them, they always get prescribed.
Now my zoloft isn't working.
I have a pre-op appointment with my doctor on friday and maybe we switch drugs again? maybe the best time to start a new drug is while doped up on painkillers.
It's strange and naked and unnerving to me to make this sort of public display of my head. There's so much that I don't say. Somehow it just seemed important to say it.
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