roses

roses

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

My celebratory post was a bit premature. Oops.

I am on a run of almost a week of being awake for the majority of the day. It was not easy because the dosage of my new medication went up right after my last post and I was drop kicked back into the land of Nod. It was exceedingly frustrating because chores piled up, appointments were missed, and projects lay idle. I was grumpy and unhappy. I am feeling more alert and much better today.

I am really hoping that holds. The magnitude of the shift in my brain from this time two months ago is pretty huge. I was on the verge of suicidal depression in March when I talked to my psychiatrist who initiated this medication change. The last two months have been exhausting. Which is pretty ironic considering that I was sleeping most of the time. But, it was exhausting and uncomfortable. I was sleeping so much that my body was getting sore which ever position I slept in. I needed to be upright and moving to feel better but I simply couldn't do it. 

I am trying not to be resentful of all the stuff that didn't get done, appointments missed, and such. I am attempting to focus on gratitude and moving forward. I was having a really hard time summoning up the will to write a damn thing when I was awake. As such, blogs and journals were not updated. It is not a thing most people feel much about but I feel pretty bad about that. I feel like I let down my readership and I was failing to keep record of what going on in life around here.

At one point I had a therapist ask me why I keep a journal and a daily log of activities in my planner. I joked that I worked for the redundancy department of redundancy. Namely, I am terrified of losing my memory. The fact that my brain is an unreliable narrator is horrific enough. The idea that I would lose my memories and forget who my family are is bone chilling. I watched dementia consume my great-grandmother Hazel. I will never forget the day that I came to visit her at the nursing home and she didn't recognize me. My heart broke. I promised myself that I wouldn't let that happen to me.

Thus, I kept a scrapbook through middle school, high school, and part of college. And when it was safe to keep a journal, I wrote in it religiously about almost everything. Trauma in my life and my psychiatric illnesses have robbed me of memories that many people take for granted. I have spotty memories of my children's early childhood. If I were asked when they said their first word, I wouldn't be able to answer the question or necessarily tell you what it is on a given day. I rely on my journal to be my memory keeper. 

That said, I have spent most of the last two months sleeping and I'm hopeful that I will be only sleeping at night now. We'll see.

Thursday, April 18, 2024

Yay! I'm awake and functional!

I have had a rough couple of months. I thought that the depression was awful. It was horrid and I think it was one of my worst cases of it. The medication change helped a lot with that. It came with it's own toll. I found myself adapting to it slowly as I was titrating up to the full dosage. One of the most irritating side effects of the whole process was the utter exhaustion that had me sleeping all the time. Seriously, full night of sleep and then sleep the whole day. It was worse than the dizziness that happened.

Well, the dizziness cleared up. It looks like the utter exhaustion is clearing up. And now I just have to get my blood sugars under control again. I suspect that when they check my A1C, they are going to find it has gone up due to medication stuff. I had a consultation session with the diabetes education (they have a new one) and got some good news. My range of what I can eat is wider than what I was initially told. I can have snacks but they have to have good protein to them. This is my justification for my cheese snacks despite my lactose intolerance. (It's funny, between the CPAP and the lactose intolerance, my teenage sons have been running from me when I have gas. Which is rather frequently right now.)

I feel better but I'm not going to push myself too hard. This is the beginning of something new and I want this to work out well. I have a new plan for how to eat, some ideas for how to get exercise in, and how to get back to my writing stuff. It just takes time management and my doing things the smart way instead of my natural inclination for the hard way.