The nurses are starting to recognize me
The crumminess I was feeling the night before last eventually got much worse. John came over, which kept me calmer than I would’ve been, but I (we) still had a pretty shitty night.
Yesterday I went back to my doctor, and she checked me out and told me that the cause of my misery was almost certainly stress. So I’m doing it to myself, in a sense, which is good because it’s fixable, but bad because it’s up to me to fix it. The good FAR outweighs the bad.
I was going to say that there’s not a magic pill for stress relief, but I’ve been prescribed four of them. Two of them are for my stomach problems, actually, (which is what bothered me most the other night): something like Zantac that I take twice a day, and another quick-acting one for acute attacks. The list of side effects on the quick one is loooooong, so I’ll have to be feeling pretty awful before I try that one.
I also have Ativan, which is supposed to calm me down quickly, though it’s apparently rather addictive, and I’ll probably start taking Lexapro, an SSRI (like Zoloft). Hey look, I get to check the “Brain Pills” box again.
We’ll see how this goes. I’m not thrilled to be on so many pills (okay, one now and two eventually), but if I don’t like them I can always quit. Just knowing that my symptoms are caused my stress (and not things like imminent heart failure or a giant brain tumor, which are ridiculous but seem quite plausible when I’m alone in the middle of the night) has been a tremendous stress relief already.
Where did all this stress come from, you ask? Well, school a bit, but I’ve been in school for years, and this semester isn’t dramatically different. Grad school apps a bit, too. The biggest stressor in my recent life, though, has clearly been the surgery. It made me very anxious; the physical symptoms appeared in force the day before I went under. My acute illness after that, whether it was caused by the stress itself, the medications, or my being dropped off the operating table onto my head*, only perpetuated the anxiety.
In short, I am generally anxious about my health, and now, thanks to the acute trigger of surgery, the anxiety is making me unhealthy. Which makes me anxious. You see the problem.
I’m feeling okay now, buoyed by my doctor’s assurances that my occasional bouts of fuzzyheadedness, cold sweats, and chest/stomach pain will not progress to sudden death. My stomach has still been acting up, reducing my appetite—I weigh six pounds less than I did a month ago—but hopefully the pills and stress reduction will help with that.
In the meantime, it’s Thanksgiving week! I have school today, but after that it’s tasty, tasty family time.
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* My dad’s theory.
Tags: brain pills, NaBloPoMo
November 26th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Paul has offered to make you more cookie of death for your weight gain. But we seem to not have a pie pan for that…