On not going tharn

Decisions have been made and plans are being enacted. The great year long experiment of trying psych meds is over. I quit.

Well, to be scrupulously honest, I am quitting the systemic Buproprion and keeping the as needed Ativan. I have designed my step down program (and was told I was being too meticulous and to hasten) to get it out of my system. I will be done in fourteen days or less. (As opposed to the twenty-one days or more I had proposed).

So in future, while I still may be snotty, I will have the opportunity to experience other emotions as well. Which is all “hurrah for me”, as having a totally flat affect except for anger and anxiety was really, really, harshing my mellow, cramping my style, and all those other, turd in the punchbowl, type euphemisms, analogies and metaphors.

Now to be again, perfectly honest, I am being encouraged to try a different approach once my system has cleared out and normalized. Cymbalta was suggested. I have to admit that those commercials give me the green envies. All that “depression hurts” (yes, yes it does,) “Cymbalta can help” (Oh really? Ya promise?) does tweak my “I wish this was just fixed already, deep down, Stepford is bliss, can’t this be simplified so I can just do my bills like a normal person” jones.

I am however, taking a wait and see approach. Because as much as I am terrified of withdrawal from this fairly innocuous script, I am really terrified of SSRI’s. There are few things worse than coming down and/or withdrawal. It just takes all the fun out of drugs.

Chemical Castration

I’ve been having a bit of a “flat affect.” You may not have noticed.

So “we” are trying some new things. Massive doses of vitamin D3 is one. Three weeks after taking 5000 IU’s a day my levels are up into the bottom ranges of normal. Therefore I assume, that there was in fact, a previous deficit. Even though it’s one of the least expensive supplements I’ve ever gotten I am glad to say I can now drop on down to 3000 IU’s. Every little bit it helps.

Also it would appear that somewhere a hypo-thyroid thing appeared. I am being told that this nifty new pill will put some zippy in my pip. Am I pzipy yet? You tell me.

Then there’s the perennial favourite, which is that it is no longer February and early March in Michigan. This winter was a straight out bitch. What a long drawn out drag.

And there is the slow burn, subtle furious-ness at government and their insistence and propaganda that as a fat smoker I am THE embodiment of THE problem. Slow burn hatred is never good for my productivity. But again, I’m sure noone noticed.

And there you have it, the word castration is coming from the Greek word kaezein.
And that’s a cheesy movie reference, if you don’t get it it really can’t be helped.

Tis the season

For an awful lot of family friendly television. While I know this is a day late and a dollar short, as they rerun a bunch of “family classics”, here are my thoughts on one.
As much as I adore you Johnny Depp (and that is fairly embarrassing, as I don’t generally play the celebrity game), this time you fail. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory completely bites. Because I may love you, but you know who I love more? Both Roald Dahl and Gene Wilder.
And by the way,
There is no need to edit out the drug references from Willy Wonka, (Family Channel). I saw this, in the theater, at age 7 and did not jump from the mast of any tre jolie boats into a chocolate river and die because I thought I could fly.

Dream reality?

Last night in a dream, a (in real life fairly demure) friend of mine told me, she and her husband were “trying a lot of anal and I’ve been doing cocaine like a Maryland whore.”

Do Maryland whores have some reputation for this or did I, as usual, make this up out of whole cloth?

Cold turkey, will sure give you the runs

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my checkered, chessed, and parcheesi’d past, it’s to step down, over cold turkey, whenever possible.
Now for some people (court ordered, boneheads, recalcitrant) or in some circumstances (Jail, rehab, de-tox) or with some substances (me & tobacco so far) it’s not likely to work.
But cold turkey is for that brand of people who say things like “Go ahead, punch me as hard as you can, right in my stomach”. And I guess if you’re just a flat out pain freak it might even be fun.
But my step down program has always worked (other than tobacco) every time I’ve needed it to and it’s relatively painless. It’s based on halves and doubles. Either cut the dose in half each time or double the time between or if you really need to be macho, both.

I used to think withdrawal was meritorious in that it would make one think thrice about picking up. But then I used to enjoy a bit of pain as well. And the reality of pain is one of our most fleeting memories. (Thank you brain chemistry for that at least.) I am so over that bit. And I have also learned that if one is determined to pick up, nothing is likely to stand in the way, other than a bullet ot something of that ilk.
People who are in that headspace don’t call their sponsors. That is one of the big ass problems of 12 stepping.

I mention all this because I will be off the caffeine by Monday. I started at the level of one cup tea, one cup coffee on Weds. Thurs. I had one cup tea. Fri. 1/2 a teabag. Today 1/4. Tomorrow a few grains. So far, no debilitating headache. Sweet.

So if I can painlessly get off it, compared to the pretty severe pain it causes me, I’m ahead in the game. Of course when the memory of the pain it gives me has fleeted, I could easily forget to not pick up..... Cuz coffee, tea and chocolates are such sweet poizens.

I smell sex and candy

We have a new olfactory observation regarding medications:
Buproprion smells like sour milk with citrus peels.

Since the Number 1 search on this blog has consistently been from my searing series on the smells of medications, I expect this profound revelation will shoot my stats right up the ladder.
So let’s review:
Metformin smells like fish
Glipizide, if I recall correctly I decided smelled like turpentine and, bread was it?
Lantus smells like wet cocaine

So that should bring all you metformin searchers right up to the front page and current events.

Earworms and more

Yesterday, Dennis Moore - Monty Python
Today, God Save The People - Godspell.
Yes, more Godspell. For about 18 hours now.
This drove me so crazy I decided to look at some of the articles. Since it had been brought up recently on NPR I figured there would be a goodly number to peruse.
Sure enough, there were plenty.
The gist of it is: The most susceptible people are musicians, obsessives and women. So there you go, I am apparently doomed.

I also appreciated Oliver Sacks freely copping to having taken “mountains of amphetamine, mescaline, and cannabis”. In future I will use this as ammunition against those who try to discredit my credentials and experiences. After all we all just LOVE Oliver Sacks, don’t we?

So this is how it’s just gonna be...

So tired, the store job kicks my ass. When I first started it kicked my ass also. Then I started getting stronger and stronger. I got some decent shoes. I started getting some muscles and stamina. I did better and better as the years went by. Then I had a couple surgeries the first of of which went kinda wrong, the next of which went really wrong. The horribly expensive shoes wore out. Now if I do a four hour shift I have to sleep 3 hours.

On Mondays, cuz I’m a homework slacker, I get off work then play drums until I’m really, really tired and usually quite frustrated. Then go to drum class. Then I can crash for awhile. While I tell myself its for just a quick, rejuvenating nap it invariably turns into a long stupefying nap, then I spend the rest of the day being a schlub.

This last month adds to the stultifying mix, extreme tension in my home life. The result is the house is dirty, the energy levels are all fucked up, and it doesn’t seem worth it to get up and do a damn thing. However something has to change the energy, I can no longer sit and stew. (I am so good at stewing, I meant what I said about grudge holding.)

So while I didn’t go about solving the problem the super high road way, I also didn’t take the lowliest low road. I, at least, addressed an individual face to face for the 15 seconds requisite and decided to skip the “preserve the friendship” part. I got some support for that approach from a few people who said if I didn’t want the friendship to just go ahead and remove the pain source.
Done.
Its not like I had zero interest in the friendship, but when alcoholism is the factor, what’s the point?
This is something like the 10th friendship of some significance that has terminated in the last 10 years or so, where I trace the real source of the problem to addiction. Not mine, someone else's. If we went back farther in time, the numbers would grow exponentially.

It’s just getting so very old. But when there is little or no return for your energy, so little actual dialogue, just boozy, stale monologues repeated over and over while someone breathes alcohol in your face what's left anyway? It won’t change until it changes and that's nothing you can control at all, so rather be done.

This whole giving your whole life to a THING is freaking me out. You just hand over everything you are, could be and will do, to an inanimate object. What the hell is that? I’m not saying I haven’t had my skirmishes with such slavery, but I seem to have a finely tuned sense of personal freedom. When a stupid thing starts requiring my very core self and values, I turn and run. I don’t care how much fun it’s promising. I don’t care if its a substance or a job or a relationship.

The other part that's bugging me, is the age of these people. I can see how in your twenties you haven’t figured it out yet, but the people involved are in their thirties, forties and fifties. One of them had already done over 20 years in prison as payment and just took another twenty to pay for just a couple months of getting high. Yet it’s his primary relationship and he’ll apparently never, ever, put anyone or anything ahead of it. It, an inanimate object, a thing.

I can’t think of a goofy, cheery, twist to end this on, everything about this is so annoying. I suppose the the best I can do is mention that at least I’m mostly over the furious and into the sad.

"It’s a thin line between love and hate"

“She opens up the door and lets you in,
never once asks where you‘ve been”

Here’s the thing about me and caffeine.
In the early 80’s I was, among other things, a serious tweaker. I have noticed this trend, ecto-morphs who use tend to become Junkies, meso-morphs who use tend to become tweakers. Cerebretonics seem to be fair game to all kinds of things but frequently it turns out to be sex.

Why did I become a tweaker? Well, I always suspect it was due in large part to my relationship to caffeine. I adore caffeine. I am highly allergic to caffeine. To this day I have not been able to kick caffeine right out of my life. Imagine my dismay when in ‘93 I went to visit my dying Grandmother in Seattle, and found a cappuccino machine in a Burger King. This was my first foreboding of the caffeine culture soon to reach across the country and now the world. It feels very much the same as being a nondrinker in this alcohol fueled culture. (Which is, for the most part, also one of my struggles).

So, given that I needed to work 3 jobs and party incessantly, and that caffeine compromises my immune system and severely aggravates one of my genetic illnesses, what other recourse did I think I had at the time?
Needless to say it was another in a series of really bad ideas.
I had no idea at the time that crank is the very devil, that one only has to smell it to know that it comes straight from the pit and that putting something in your body that looks, smells and tastes exactly like you scraped it off the bottom of the cat box is inestimably stupid. But it wasn’t caffeine, and it was so much stronger! How exciting was that?

I did gain one, single, boon from it, in an indirect manner, I met Uncle Bunny because of it.
I was sent to him by my friends who said to me;
“Stella, darlin’, you’re psychotic, and we think you should go talk to this guy who can help you. Tell him what idiot shit you’re up to and he’ll sell you some supplements to counteract that and you’ll feel and behave ever so much better.”
They were right.

I probably can’t get away with saying what he suggested, and what worked for me or the FDA will arrest me or something. But once I was assisted to stop being psychotic, I realized that caffeine, for all it’s problems was at least a known toxin. So I gave up the other and never went back. However, it didn’t end there, as I discovered that among other things my metabolism was now supremely fucked. It takes years to recover from that stuff. I still have some issues and its been what, over 20 years now.

So given those extremes I have decided that known toxins are generally the better choice. Like sugar. I happen to be a chocoholic diabetic. How pathetic is that? Its the caffeine thing again also, only in chocolate its the double whammy. When I work at the store, I stand right next to a huge stack of super-fudgy, chocolate-chocolate chip brownies, some of which I’ve found to weigh over a half pound, made at the restaurant by the fantastic baker. And, they just reek of chocolate. It’s like being madly in love with a married man, that you have to see socially, who doesn’t love you, but who occasionally uses you for sex.

But, in my distrust of Nutra-sweet, Splenda, other chem-sweets and chemicals, at least I know where I stand when I go back for more chocolate and tea. I’m making that perfect cup of properly brewed, black tea with milk, with my eyes wide open.
Someday I'll get what I want out of this relationship, someday it won’t hurt like this.
Then there’s tobacco.....