I bumped into one of the nurses who saw me through ect the other day. She told me not to let depression get me down. If that isn’t already a medication advert catchphrase in the USA, it really ought to be. It should also be permitted for me to smack anyone who says it to me. Not that nurse though, because ag shame she was being genuinely nice.
Don’t let depression get you down, don’t let conjunctivitis spoil your view, don’t let syphilis drive you mad…
PS thanks for all your lovely comments on my last post. And my blog just turned two. Happy birthday, blog.
So my ECT got delayed yet again. I went into hospital on Thursday to have it on Friday, but the nationwide taxi protests resulted in things like felled trees burning across roads and so doctors didn’t get to the hospital… To cut a long story short, I left on Saturday and refused to go back. Shrink one then arranged for me to have it as an outpatient, so I’m going in by 6am tomorrow for the first of 12 sessions.
If you read my previous entry, you already know why I found the hospital stay intolerable. What stood out most glaringly this time, was a lot of pressured speech and psychosis all around. Friday night’s dinner of two slices of brown bread and a half litre of maas (fermented milk) didn’t cheer me up either. I kept quiet and just ate the bread, another woman bitched hard and the nurse said, “eat now, complainlater!”
Anyway, I’ll write about the ECT over on OLE and repost it here on Wednesday, I just thought I’d do an interim update here. I feel like I’ve been through the wars guys. I just don’t feel like writing it at length.
Fortunately lamotrigine trained me in advanced acid reflux, so clozapine’s little onslaught hasn’t been too terrible, except for the night it made me puke a couple of times. See, usually those are the sort of details I blog, for my own record of it all and the very welcome fact of your sympathy and empathy about it. I haven’t been whining as much lately though, because disclozapine has been sedating me in ways seroquel can only dream of. My days have been two thirds coma and one third agitated as fuck.
I saw shrink one the other day, and as my voice slurred strangely, she said, “ah, hypersalivation,” and yes folks, that’s another lovely side effect. When I examined what afternoons on clozapine have been like, she said,
Pfffft. I happen to know that ward 13 is full, never mind the fact that… Ag. Stuff. Metaphorically speaking, I have a far nicer padded cell in the form of my dog and my house.
So the workaround is splitting the dose of clozapine and using the prn sulpuride in advance of the afternoon agitation. So far so good, the downside being nasty RLS at odd times of the day.
200mg down, another 150mg to go, and then ECT gets scheduled.
Boring. So much about bipolar is so fucking boring.
The first question I ask on being offered a new approach to palliative care for bipolar disorder, is can it be found in a cool context (academic, historical and or popular for preference)? I did some sensible reading too, especially around its use as monotherapy, which is where I’m at. It passes muster as an option.
We have presented evidence and arguments that huh?, or more precisely a short questioning interjection with the function of other-initiation of repair, is a universal word likely to be attested in similar form in all natural spoken languages. The similarity of this interjection across languages is unlikely to be specified in our genetic makeup and we argue that it is the result of convergent cultural evolution: a monosyllable with questioning prosody and all articulators in near-neutral position is the optimal fit to the sequential environment of other-initiated repair. source
I’m going to contest their findings, because I have a lot of huh? in my genes. They’re actually more huh than denim now. I’m also going to make a t-shirt out of my post title, perhaps a bored Sherlockian would buy one.
blahpolar 