Dear Interent,
8:12AM: Took 10mg of Adderall XR
9:24AM: Still waiting for something to happen. Take my morning lithium dose. Ask Kate, who is also on Adderall, how long it takes to kick in.
9:42AM: Low grade headache, still haven’t had breakfast yet, TheHusband has brought me a caffeine free Coke.
11:13AM: I’ve researched buying Nintendo 3DS’s and Manic Panic hair color; I’ve checked my bank balance, chatted with friends on Twitter and IM, but I can’t singularly concentrate on completing a a longer task. I have not had breakfast at this time. And I still have the low grade headache.
13:36: TheHusband had started taxes, food has been consumed. I’ve taken Tylenol to combat the headache but it keeps popping up and saying, “Hey.”
15:38: Called Dr. H. Waiting to hear back. TheHusband and I get frisky in the basement when we begin laundry cycles. Libido not completely squashed by all the drugs. Yay!
17:04: TheHusband and I have been going back and forth on our taxes today. Bottom line is that we can’t write off $10K in my student loan interest or my nearly $8K in medical expenses because we’re slightly over the threshold. Time to get an accountant.
17:16: Dr. H. calls back and says to up the Adderall to 20mg tomorrow. I’m to call tomorrow afternoon. Dr. P. returned my text and my appointment has been successfully moved to 12P tomorrow.
20:25: TheHusband made dinner (third night we’ve had some variation of Mexican food) and he’s now on an after hours call due to network troubles.
x0x0,
Lisa
Month: February 2013
Better living through chemistry, round two: Saturday
Dear Internet,
It was a little over two months ago I started taking my ADD/ADHD medications or as my friend Liz calls them, legal meth. I live blogged the first weekend diligently, and the experience convinced Dr. H. Ritalin was not the drug for me. Additionally, I needed medicinal help with my bipolar so the legal meth of any flavor could work properly. I was then started on to lithium and switched over to Concerta.
Ritalin is short acting and could be taken over the course of the day to keep the strength up. Concerta 36mg, on the other hand, is longer lasting but it needs to be taken before 9AM in order to allow me to sleep at night. On the weekends, if I woke up too late, I would take one 5mg of Ritalin instead of Concerta to get me over the hump I needed to get tasks done in a timely manner.
In the beginning of the Lithium/Concerta combo, it was fucking glorious. I was productive, I was focused, the quirks about my personality I always attributed as just my personality, turned out were actual symptoms of both diseases and were tempered with the drugs. That small period from end of December to early January was a golden age. Sure, there were some kinks in the process like no caffeine as it made me feel like I snorted 10 lines of speed even if I had caffeine in small doses and my anxiety would sometimes get out of control, but who cares? I was feeling really fucking good and I was productive.
Work started back up on January 9 and things were hopping. I could complete tasks, organize myself better, I wasn’t short with co-workers, and if a difficult situation arose, I could handle it with aplomb. Everything was awesome.
During the initial period of Lithium/Concerta, I was super productive with my writing because it was all done during the day when the Concerta was peaking, ergo it makes sense I was super productive at work because the Concerta would be peaking during those same prime hours.
Then, the downside.
When I came home from work, however, I didn’t want to do shit. No matter what time I got home, once the pants came off, at most I could handle was reading on the Interent or watching TV. Anything other than that was either too taxing, too long, or required absolute concentration from me which I couldn’t give. This also allowed
I kept up the Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes because that was an easy thing to do. Open a post, format, set the post date, and save the draft. Anytime I found something that fell into a CCC post, I just had to open up that week’s post and add it. Friday nights, I would verify everything was in order before it posted on Saturday and be done with it. Very little work was involved on my part.
I returned to work on January 9th. January 16 was my monthly follow up with my orthopedic doctor, who decided I needed to have surgery two weeks hence to explore the still open wound to find out why it was not closing after seven months. During that two week period, I was a frenzy of productivity at work but at some point the Concerta stopped working as effectively, so lithium was upped. The general idea is the more my mood stabilizes, the better the legal meth works.
Other signs started to illuminate the drug wasn’t working such as I was getting easily irritable and short with people again. My productivity at at work was beginning to slow down considerably and my former bad habits started to appear. I was staying later and later in the belief I had to do the work NOW and not that it could wait until the following day. This obviously effected my home life.
Dr. H. and I were in contact either via phone or appointment during all of this. If I was metabolizing the 36mg to the point of non-effectiveness, then it was time to up the dosage to 54mg and see what happens. The catch is with the 54mg dose, I’d need to take it at 6-7AM. He thought my recovery period would be good time to experiment with the 54mg to see how I do.
A week before my surgery, all extraneous medications were stripped from my regime except for Concerta and Lithium. On the day of my surgery, January 29th, I did not take my morning doses of either drug and when I came home that evening (it was outpatient surgery), I only took my evening dose of lithium. I stayed off of Concerta for the rest of the week because I didn’t want to interfere with my antibiotics and my pain meds (sweet, sweet Vicodin). I decided the second week to stay off the legal meth as well and gloried about in the ability to drink caffeine. I spoke with Dr. H. via phone on February 8 and he upped my lithium to 1200mg and I was to start back on the Concerta the following the week.
During that week, Concerta and anxiety wrecked my sleeping. Some days I would get up early enough to take 36mg, and others it was a Ritalin kind of day. Every day was always in flux.
I went back to work on February 20th and started the morning with 36mg of Concerta, my morning lithium dose, and half a Klonopin. While this combination worked well mood wise, not so much for the focusing and concentration part. At least, not as well as I had hoped. I had still not taken the Concerta 54mg because I was afraid if I did, I’d never get to sleep.
After a month of all over the place mentally and being laid up physically, I finally got to see Dr. H on Friday to go over my therapies and talk more about what was going on. The ramped up anxiety, the heightened ability to not sleep even when sleeping aids were produced, were driving me crazy. I knew as I was on/off drugs for the better part of the last month had much to do with the problems since there was no consistency, but even attempting at consistency became problematic.
So we try another experiment, this time starting with the Concerta 54mg.
I woke up on Saturday at 6:30A to take Concerta 54mg, and then napped for a bit. At 8AM I became wide eyed and bushy tailed and started writing this post. I had a hair appointment at 10AM that would end up lasting five hours. I spoke with Dr. H. in the afternoon and he suggested I try Adderall on Sunday depending how the rest of the day went.
TheHusband and I rearranged some afternoon plans to get my Adderall script filled. Dinner was had. Shopping was done. We were home by 19:00.
The way I explained it to Dr. H. earlier was Concerta 54mg was giving me alertness for several hours, then it ebbed for a few hours, then picked up again, so when I spoke to him at about 15:30, I felt pretty together. But by 18:00, I was crashing pretty hard and falling asleep at the dinner table. I was not expecting the crashing or how hard I would much so that I needed to drink a can of Coke just to keep going for a few hours before falling asleep around midnight.
I started this post early Saturday morning and finishing it late Sunday night. Perfectly illustrating even a simple task can become highly complex when the drugs don’t work.
x0x0,
Lisa
Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: February 23, 2013
During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
Dear Internet,
Please forgive me for this week is fairly light. On Wednesday I went back to work after my three week medical leave and I’ve become obsessed with taking my work home and doing very little else. My ADHD drugs have been up/down as we try to figure what will work since I can’t seem to get back to that sweet spot I had at the end of December/early January. My moments of focus are shortened and often hitting at the very wrong times. Saturday I’m changing up the drugs again to see if we can find another combination that works.
Watching
Weekly watching: Stella, The Vampire Diaries, Dancing on the Edge, Mr. Selfridge, Banshee, Portlandia, Top Gear UK, House of Lies, Elementary, Spartacus, The Americans, Archer, and Project Runway
Links
- Indie booksellers sue Amazon and big publishers over DRM (but have no idea what “DRM” and “open source” mean)
- Three related articles that all came out around the same time: Discrimination Against Childfree Adults, In defence of choosing childlessness, and Why the Choice to Be Childless is Bad for America
- A Dictionary of Victorian/Edwardian Slang circa 1909
What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa
Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: February 16, 2013
During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
Dear Internet,
Another week of lots of television watching, and less of doing much else. Dr. H. pulled me off of Concerta last week, upped my lithium and thus a week of drug experimentation went by. Of course, as I was temporarily off the legal meth, I took that as invitation to drink as much caffeine as humanly possible. Which gave me all the speed of the legal meth but none of the focus and concentration. When I look back at my browser later in the day, I would have no idea what the devil I was doing to get me there. Porn? No, but close. My mind is all over the place, and when I did one thing, I would have to do something else at the same time.
No reading, no writing, no letter writing, nothing was done this week.
I worked from home for a bit this week, but like personal work projects, I was all over the place and unable to really complete anything.
For the follow-up call a week later, Dr. H. said I should go back on Concerta gain, so today we start at on 36mg dose. Hopefully this means less sounding like I snorted massive amounts of drugs when I’m writing these posts.
Listening
Reading
Watching
- The Toilet: An Unspoken History
- Stella
- The Vampire Diaries
- What the Romans Did For Us
- Hamlet
- Dancing on the Edge
- The Town
Also weekly watching: Mr. Selfridge, Banshee, Portlandia, Top Gear UK, House of Lies, Elementary, Spartacus, The Americans, Archer, and Project Runway
Links
- Saving Lives in Serenity: Can a Fanboy and Physics Change a Movie?
- The importance of WikiLeaks and why we should be defending it as a media entity
- Do you speak Java Jive?
- A Short, Incomplete History of American Traditional Tattooing
- Pompadour — “A woman’s hairstyle formed by sweeping the hair straight up from the forehead into a high, turned-back roll.” Named after the Marquise de Pompadour.
- If you wanted to see Beowulf in its original glory, but can’t make it to England, here is your chance
- Beowulf wet your whistle, you can also view Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks online at the British Library
- Europe’s oldest town, dating 4700 – 4200 BCE, has been discovered in Bulgaria
- Party like it’s 599
What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
Lisa
Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: February 9, 2013
During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
Dear Internet,
Another week of bed rest, another week where I watched too much TV in a variety of guises. This week, I finally ended my round of post-surgery drugs, started taking my ADHD medicines again, and for while, the two overlapped. I was all over the place in my head that even doing anything more than browsing the internets or watching TV was tasking. Definitely no writing, and I’m behind on several writing projects as it is. My brain definitely fees like it is on fire. And that is all about to change again.
Watching
- Andrew Marr’s History of the World
- Calf’s Head and Coffee: The Golden Age of English Food
- Food in England: The Lost World of Dorothy Hartley
- Jonathan Meades: The Joy of Essex,
- Breakfast, lunch and dinner
- How the Devil Got His Horns: A Diabolical Tale
- Sinbad
- Mr. Selfridge
- Wartime Farm
- Banshee
- House of Cards
Also weekly watching: Portlandia, Top Gear UK, House of Lies, Elementary, Spartacus, The Americans, Archer, and Project Runway.
Links
- The waitress responds, Tips are not optional, they are how waiters get paid in America
- “I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being – even if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no one can see till I’m dead.”
- The Tiny Transforming Apartment: 8 Rooms in 420 Square Feet
- If you tend to take a lot of pictures, remember that camera angeles are critical
- “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.” The bones of Richard III have been found
- This does not link to The Onion: Parisian women now legally allowed to wear trousers
- Tor put together a list of the most commons words used in SciFi/Fantasy titles
- See the Real Models for the Archer Characters
- Apparently if you’re a librarian, and you have an opinion about a publisher’s offerings, that publisher will sue if you if it disagrees
- Coming soon to a heaving bossom near you, an Upstairs/Downstairs version of Pride and Prejudice
x0x0,
Lisa
Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: February 2, 2013
During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
Dear Internet,
This past week, I had surgery to fix a permanent “squirrelly suture” that was a result from my surgery last summer. Since Tuesday, I’ve been spending most of my days in a lovely drugged haze, in which I have just enough attention to watch a lot of vaguely bad TV in between my gentle snores. The recovery is, fingers crossed, planned to not be as exacting as last summers. I go back to the ortho docs on February 18th for follow up, with hopes to go back to work on February 19th. I’m zero weight baring, so the knee scooter is back. But I spend my days in bed, foot elevated, zoning in and out depending on when I’ve taken the drugs. Shortly after I came home from the surgery, Kristin and I had to write up a proposal for conference submission and it was the hardest thing I could ever do, because I could not concentrate long enough to cobble two sentences together. Somehow we managed to get the proposal together, but the sheer amount of will it took to write that proposal told me I was not cognizant enough to do anything serious this week. Give me a few days, and I’ll have more of a proper update for you.
Watching
Hyperdrive
I plowed through the entire series in one day. Quick, short, and dripping in sci-fi cultural references, it’s great fun!
Red Dwarf
Beloved cult classic, I started on season one this week and mixed it up with Hyperdrive.
Fringe
Another show I missed when it first aired, so playing catch up via Amazon Instant Video.
Also watching: Spartacus, The Americans, Archer, and Project Runway.
Links
- Downton Abbey as envisioned as a SNES game
- For sale: a Hemingway story, never written
- William Shakespeare gave the English language over 2000 words, here are 20 of them.
x0x0,
Lisa