Day Two: optimism becomes me...

"Come to the Dark Side, we have cookies..." -V

Still have the 'icks', as I like to call them. I look at food and say 'ick', the results of the food I manage to eat? 'Ick'. It's something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I guess I should be thankful that I was a bit overweight before all this started. If I was down around my target weight I'd be in the danger zone by now. Anyway, no more dwelling on the negative. I took the meds again last night (with some food) and managed to sleep without taking anything! I'm very proud of myself. I did make the mistake of taking something this morning because the anti-anxiety meds tend to help with the nausea (a little) and I was desperate to eat something. Big mistake. I am in a state of brain fog I wasn't sure was possible. The floor under my desk is looking like a very pleasant place to nap right now. But no naps for me today! I'm going home, I'm going to go for a 2 mile jog, then see if I can eat something for dinner. Wheeeeee!

Day One

My next few entries might bore others, but I'm blogging for myself, so you can just ignore these posts if you don't want to read about me whining. Posts will be tagged 'lexapro'
So I've been REALLY down lately, moreso than usual, and the anxiety is back in full force. It's that hopeless feeling that has you anticipating how crappy you're going to feel and then making it a reality. So I made the decision to give the old antidepressants a try. This time I chose one for myself, I did the research and decided that I was going to try lexapro. So I saw my psychiatrist yesterday and got my Rx and off we go...

He told me to start out by taking 1/2 of a dose (5mg) every night at bedtime. I did that last night and laid awake until I finally popped an anti-anxiety pill at 1 am to calm myself down. That's the problem with anxious people and meds. The act of taking meds so often causes anxiety symptoms that just so happen to be identical to the side effects of the medication! Imagine that!
So today I'm sleepy, and hella nauseous. Let me just say that none of this is new to me at all. Even on the nights that I get "enough" sleep it never seems like enough to my body. And the nausea is anxiety related. I have a hard time eating anything at all and if I don't will it to stay down, frequently throw up what I've managed to eat, or any water in my stomach. I spend all day thinking that I'll feel better if I could just empty my stomach, but that relief only lasts a short time. There are other digestive issues involved, but I'll leave that up to your imagination.
Let's just say nausea is NOT my friend but it keeps showing up anyway, bringing luggage that seems way to large to have been checked on an airplane. To give you an idea of the level of nausea, I'm 5'10", at my heaviest in March I weighed 198 lbs. I now weigh 165 and there has been no dieting and not much channge in the level of exercise that I do. Essentially I've dropped weight because I've had spans of time when eating is not on the menu (so to speak). So I'm very eager to get this medication in my system to a theraputic level where I can have some relief for the anxiety and depression (as promised by lexapro.com). I'm optomistic despite being unbelievably sick and tired of all this. Oh and my dad (who I love to death) told me to 'snap out of it' yesterday. That was helpful, thank's Daddy.
So tonight I'll be taking another half at dinner instead of bed. Yippee. See ya tomorrow.

Decisions

I had an "emergency" trip to the cardiologist today. It took me arguing with him (in a polite way, of course) for him to understand just what it was that had me worried. I've got random PVCs (premature ventricular contractions) that cause a feeling like my heart stops then the next beat is more like a thud. It's very disconcerting. But also TOTALLY HARMLESS. I was told (in no uncertain terms this time) that these PVCs while annoying are not symptomatic of anything serious and that they're perfectly normal for me. This is a huge relief for me. Also the fact that the thing that was worrying me is NOT the thing that he wanted to put me on medication for. He suspects that I have exercise induced tachycardia. No kidding :O) I knew that. He just doesn't know if it's the result of an arrythmia or just my hearts personal style. So I'm going in for a stress test, run on the treadmill like a hampster, to see what it does to my heart rate.
I am writing this down because it's GOOD news and finally my brain can start to believe it. I also discovered something that I never knew before. WHen you stretch your arms up over your head (big stretch) and then bring them back down, this causes a drop in blood volume, which causes your heart to pause because a smaller blood volume means it takes longer for the heart to fill in order to pump all those teeny blood cells around. Crisis averted. I'm very glad that this time I was proactive with the doctor and (even though it meant being a little argumentative) got across the point I was trying to make. Now I can calm down. *sigh*
Seacrest out.

the circle

Casey: It's a vicious circle.
Dan: Yep. Just keeps going around and around.
Casey: Never stops.
Dan: That's what makes it vicious.
Casey: And a circle.

quote from 'Sports Night'

Perfect

I wake up scared, I wake up strange.
I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever going to change.
I wake up scared, I wake up strange
and everything around me stays the same.
--Barenaked Ladies "What a Good Boy"

That song has been running through my head for the past few days and is scarily exactly how I'm feeling.
Today has NOT been a good day. Mood swings, you want 'em? Too bad, we got 'em, check 'em out.
I journal when I'm really upset, with mixed results. Today's blog is going to be excerpts, because on top of everything else, I'm lazy. Go figure.
Today has been really frustrating. Everything just seems so dire when I’m in a funk like this. I find myself very frustrated by the thoughts that it may never get better than this. That this might be my life from now on. I just can’t seem to stop dwelling on the negative today. I want to feel better, but the myriad of books that have been suggested I read and the techniques that I can’t seem to stick with are weighing me down because on top of the way I feel I’m guilty for not sticking with anything long enough for it to help. The problem is that part of me must not believe that it will help me. I’ve always been this way for the most part but it’s worse when your mental wellbeing is at stake (or feels like it is).

At times like right now it feels like every other moment I’ve been “faking it” and this is the real me. Now I understand why people seem to gravitate toward medication as a fix for this condition, and then get stuck. If I didn’t know that there was a little pill that will make me feel much better maybe I wouldn’t be this bad off. Maybe. Probably not. I just signed up for the mindfulness stress relief class which starts in less than a month. I’m very hopeful that it will help me. I really need to slow down my brain. It seems to change at the drop of a hat lately and unfortunately my mood does, too. One minute I’m just hanging on by a thread and the next I could feel much better. Right now is not one of those times. It’s hard to look back on the past few months and really understand that I’ve improved. I know I have, but when I’m feeling bad it doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t grasp the concept that things are looking better because in my heart it’s not good enough. Nothing short of actually feeling better for an extended period of time is going to satisfy me. Is that wrong to want? To feel better? So much of what I read is telling me that I need to come to terms with the sensations, I need to be in the moment with the feelings. Well I’ve been there…what’s next, when do I start to feel better? Or should I say, when do I start to think better?

The imperfect future

I've been looking inward for so long now and it seems like the only answers/relief that I feel is fleeting. I want to believe that what I've done has caused the improvement that I've seen over the past months, but another part of me is worried that it was a natural cycle and that badness is once again on my plate. I think that I've always anticipated a future time when everything in my life will be perfect. I'll get over this constant health anxiety and somehow deal with everyday aches and pains the way that "normal" people do. I will feel like getting out and doing more things, and feel less like just sleeping away the day to avoid. I won't feel so tenative all the time, like I'm perched on the edge of a very steep slope. I don' t say cliff, because it's more like I'm afraid of taking that first step down the hill that will then claim my momentum and soon have me running uncontrollably down, unable to stop or slow down and just trying not to fall. I will make more friends (again, like "normal" people), I will find something that I'm passionate about and make it my life's work. All great things to hope for. But the problem is that this perfect future is one which I can neither define nor find a path to. I really do want that "better life". I just don't know what it will take to make that better life. *sigh*
I'm just going to pimp a website I've been using. I've read bunches of books on cognitive behavioral techniques and meditation techniques and techniques that I'm pretty sure are a bit hinky. This site's content (in the form of mp3s downloadable) is the same as all the rest, but for the first time it's acutally getting through to me. It's making sense. selftherapy.org Just figured I'd throw that out there into the cyber ether.

Were it not that I had bad dreams....

I rarely remember my dreams. Ever. The only times I can even remember dreaming in the first place tends to be when I fall back to sleep in the mornings or if I take a nap in the afternoon. Well, this morning I had a very strange and real dream. I woke up about an hour before I had to get up and I was nervous for some reason. I tossed and turned for a half hour and finally fell back to sleep and had a dream. I dreamt that I woke up and went to take a shower but the lights in the bathroom wouldn't work. I'm not sure why this scared me so much. If it had been reality, I would have been fine because the window in my bathroom provides enough light, even at 5:45 in the morning. But in this dream it was dark and I was paranoid that something would happen if I took a shower in the dark. I'm pretty paranoid about someone knocking out the power in my house in order to break in, so this paranoia isn't new...but in the dream the only lights that wouldn't work were the ones in the bathroom. I called my sister, but got a 'can't connect' message. Why I didn't try to wake my roommate up who is right down the hall is beyond me. Anyway, lo and behold my sister arrives and reassures me and I wake up. I'm not sure why this bothered me so much, but that paranoid, out-of-control feeling followed me as I took a shower (with the lights on) and got ready for work. Where's Freud when I need him?
Well, no real issues to report, other than the fact that I had a hard time going back to sleep this morning when I hit the snooze, laying there listening to my heart beat and feeling like I was about to take a calculus test I was unprepared for. Forget about the fact that today is a normal day in a normal week with nothing whatsoever to be nervous about. I guess I can take comfort in that fact.