bigc wrote: Mon Jul 29, 2024 9:03 am

matttkkkk wrote: Mon Jul 29, 2024 8:45 am Good luck, this will be hard I’m sure, but even a sad resolution is still a resolution. I hope you can put your energy into good things for yourself now that you’re not hoping for an outcome that wasn’t likely.

I've been playing more music, picked the cello back up after 25 years, have been expanding my friend group, staying relatively sober, and exercising almost daily since she moved out. I'm having a hard time coming up with new ways to positively engage myself at this point.

Don’t force it. It sounds like you are doing everything you can, and you don’t want to burn yourself out with positivity. It’s ok to just let yourself grieve.

I’ve been laying off of my meds, mainly because of the aforementioned heat tolerance issues. As expected, I’m doing better in the heat. This will have to do until I go to the doctor and see about alternatives.

It amazes me how quickly things come unglued when I quit taking my adhd med (ritalin, low-dose). I was scheduled to work today, and I misread the scheduling spreadsheet. Ended up contacting my boss and apologizing profusely. Excel spreadsheets are an ADHD/dyslexic’s worst nightmare. I keep mixing up numbers and making dumb mistakes. I end up being late for everything. I guess I’ll go update my scrip.

I have never been diagnosed with depression, nor do I think I have chronic depression, but I'm definitely prone to occasionally being depressed. Sometimes rather intensely. Today is one of those days.

I went into work today because I really needed to get something done but want nothing more than to just go back to bed. The worst part is having to interact with colleagues and either trying to put on a happy face and hating myself even more for being fake, or being honest but then feeling guilty that I'm being a fucking drag.

I fucking hate guilt.

jfv wrote: Tue Jul 30, 2024 8:59 am I fucking hate guilt.

Same here. I wear it like a steel wool suit sometimes. Shame and guilt, guilt and shame. I chalk it up to coming from a family of Jews-turned-Catholics. A double dip of shame and guilt!

Doc's Thursday morning. Clinging on. Fucking hell, what a grind it is.

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck, I had a full-on panic attack an hour before my robot presentation in Taiwan yesterday. Was tired, had a headache, felt dizzy, and was having difficulty focusing. Got concerned about that, which made physical symptoms worse. That went around in circles as I paced back and forth and then I got to thinking that these people paid for me to travel here just to do this presentation and what happens if I am not able to do it and/or fainted in front of 200 people and then I fucking panicked.

The organizers of the event and the other speakers graciously changed their schedules and put me several hours later, giving enough time for someone to calm me down and I was able to do it. I'm forever thankful.

I did everything RIGHT. Fuck. I slept 10 hours the night before, was well-hydrated, had limited my caffeine intake, and had abstained from alcohol.

How in the hell am I going to prevent this from happening again?!

Beta blockers were a godsend for me. Non-narcotic and it helps curtail the physical symptoms of panic, which makes the thoughts a little more easy to bear.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 9:00 pm Beta blockers were a godsend for me. Non-narcotic and it helps curtail the physical symptoms of panic, which makes the thoughts a little more easy to bear.

I don't actually recommend medication to my clients, but I encourage them to learn about Propranolol.

A_Man_Who_Tries wrote: Tue Aug 20, 2024 8:53 am Doc's Thursday morning. Clinging on. Fucking hell, what a grind it is.

No word of a lie, I could have done that doctor's gig today, and I'm not a fucking doctor.

Faced with a tricky one here, or maybe it isn't and I'm just wavering because it's an added load of bullshit I don't have the bandwidth for. Regardless, some wider opinions would be handy.

After a particularly rough spell I've decided that not only are my current medications no longer helping, but they're actively accelerating a downward spiral. To this end I went to the doctor to express a desire to come off them and to try something else. There's one particular medication I refuse to try again as I had such a bad experience with it last time around, but I'm open to any alternative family.

I should say, at this point, that this is a new doctor and my first time in with him, and I'm not confident with his manner. I suppose I should appreciate what looks like thoroughness when your doctor is literally Googling things in front of you as you talk, but I'd feel better with a sense that the knowledge was already there. Either way, I'm not feeling that confident about him.

He suggests a medication after some Googling. It's something I've never heard of and I'm good with giving that a go. He prescribes it and I ask him about the timings and general procedure for responsibly tapering off what I'm on, before starting this. He tells me he doesn't want me to taper off the other drugs at all, but to take this on top and come back in some four-to-six weeks 'to see how you are feeling then'. This gives me a little pause because it's a lot of medication on top of each other, and he doesn't seem to have acknowledged, even if not immediately, my desire to come off the current meds.

When I get home, I Google the new medication. I should say I'm not the sort that trawls through WebMD and becomes hysterical at every last listed side-effect, but I haven't felt good about the experience with the doctor and thought I'd at least Google and read what he had read in the surgery. Down the page there is a particular paragraph dedicated to this new medication not always playing well with one of the families I'm currently on.

Today, at the suggestion of my housemate, I call the national hotline just to get a second opinion. They put you through to a working pharmacist where you can explain yourself and get an opinion from them. We speak and the pharmacist is literally, "He said WHAT?!"

I am urged in no uncertain terms to not take this medication atop of my current load, under any circumstances.

On the one hand this is straightforward - I will taper off the current regimen before adopting the new one; on the other hand I should surely do something about this, right? I really don't want to expend even more energy and stress on another ballache, but it's at best negligent and at worse malpractice.

Has anybody here any experience in handling something like this?