Month: September 2024

Medication Roundup

All I know is the steak tastes better, when I take my steak taste better pill

My regular appointment with Dr. Psychiatrist was today. I’ve been checking in with her regularly while medications are being adjusted. The good news is, there are no more adjustments planned. The bad news is, I have to do the rest of the work myself.

The only part of the current regimen I find unusual is the dextromethorphan. As previously mentioned1, it’s part of a recently approved combination with bupropion. It has a brand name, but the brand name is somehow harder to remember and pronounce than dextromethorphan/bupropion. At some point I intend to look up how teh fook it’s supposed to work and, perhaps more curiously, why someone decided to try a cough suppressant to treat anxiety. I have not, however, done anything about it. it’s not high on the priority list.

I think Dr. Psychiatrist is likely correct in that I’m probably about as stable on meds as I’m likely to get. Life still needs to get easier and who doesn’t wish for a magical cure-all pill. The challenge is remembering I can’t try to fix everything else all at once.

Edited to add – Doing things, and fixing things. These are vague to the point of uselessness so I’ll try to narrow it down a bit. Doing things would mostly include activities outside the house. Shopping and such. The ultimate goal would be something outrageous like being able to hold a job. Fixing things at this point mostly means putting the environment back together after two years of the entire house turning into a depression nest. Both of these things are requiring different approaches than they have in the past and it’s a bit of an adjustment.

  1. I know it was only a few posts back but I’m still not going to bother looking it up. Scroll back a bit and I’m sure you’ll find it. ↩︎

Non-Linear Progress

On Friday, [$_random_thing] reminded me of [$_random_patient]1 from a million years ago and I’ve felt a bit off ever since. I have been assured that events like these are more “speed bumps” than “setbacks” but it is difficult for me to not see it as something of a step backwards.

I’ve been feeling quite tolerable over the last week or so, Friday through today (Sunday2) excluded. Good enough that I had been pondering what the next step might be. Among the steps somewhere in the region of “next” is, of course, going back to work. I admit, in the past, I have had some unrealistic expectations about my ability to go back to work. This most recent event has helped to once again clarify my thinking on the issue.

I won’t pretend I’m not frustrated about the whole thing. I think a great deal of difficulty is coming from my overall mood improving somewhat. I feel okay most of the time, so why aren’t I doing anything? Because when I start trying to do things, I stop feeling okay most of the time.

Frustrating.

  1. I am aware of, and could provide the details of both these random events but this was one of those patients where explaining what was wrong with her and what we were trying to do would take longer than it would to tell the relevant part of the story. Take my word for it, she was a doozy. ↩︎
  2. I know all these posts have dates on them but I thought I’d save people the trouble of looking up what day it was when I posted this. Except now you’re distracted by looking at a footnote. Alas. ↩︎

Timeline

There have been some events recently that have prompted me to think about what happened when. As I have mentioned previously, my memory of the period between Fall 2019 and Winter of 2021-2022 is pretty vague. Kind of a big blurry smear. Blurry enough that when I sat down and started thinking about this, I was sure I had misplaced an entire year somewhere in there.

Completely by accident, I stumbled upon a possible explanation for why I might have expected there to be an extra year between 2019 and 2021, and why the first six months of the pandemic seemed like a lifetime. The possible explanation came in the form of a BBC News article about how, and why, children and adults perceive time so differently. The TL; DR, as I understand it, is that memories are more likely to come from new, interesting, or unusual experiences. The whole world is new for children, so their brains take a lot of memory snapshots. As we age, the novelty wears off and long stretches can go by without much film being used up. The TL; DR for the TL; DR is that children’s brains work more like high-speed cameras, running at 5000 frames per second, while adult brains tend to run at closer to 60 frames per second. Adult’s brains are still capable of running that fast, but it takes unusual, exciting, interesting, or otherwise high-alert types of situations. Like a global pandemic for example.

Below (I hope) will be an attempt to un-jumble some of this in my head. I make no claims about accuracy. A lot of these dates I had to look up because I couldn’t narrow anything down enough just by memory. It will also include some non-pandemic related events, just for reference. This is also incomplete. I may try to add more later and I might not.

Okay, fuck it. I’m done trying to get this damn thing to format in WordPress. Here is a link to a pdf. Share and enjoy.