I started Antabuse over the weekend.
Antabuse reacts with any alcohol that enters your system, making you extremely sick. Among other things, it removes the possibility of even keeping down any alcohol, which means I literally cannot drink. If have even an ounce of vodka (or beer or wine or mouthwash or cough syrup or...), I will just throw it back up. It's enforced sobriety.
Unfortunately, I'm experiencing appetite loss as a side effect. This is not a common, or even occasional, side effect - it's one of the contact-your-doctor-immediately side effects, because it could mean my liver is failing. My liver, despite what I've put it through, is extremely healthy -- the last time I got a liver panel done, three weeks ago, all of my numbers were excellent. But I am now on five daily meds, and that might be a little much. I'm going to ask for another liver panel the next time I see one of the doctors at the treatment center.
Stay tuned; sometime later in the week I'll be publishing a long post about the difficult decision of whether or not to start biologically transitioning. The pros! The cons! The bewbz! The wtfs?!?
(P.S. I have a bottle of seltzer here in my bed with me, and I keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye and panicking! My subconscious jumps to the conclusion that it's my usual bed-companion, a bottle of vodka, before I can consciously step in and correct it. Wow.)
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Saturday, February 22, 2014
A Return
Treatment worked.
That's the two-word summary of my experience on the psych ward. I ended up going to Suburban Hospital, not PIW. I got Wellbutrin (a dopaminergic antidepressant often combined with other antidepressants in order to make them work better) and Baclofen (a muscle relaxer, because I needed one) added to my meds, and both are working wonderfully. The Wellbutrin, in particular, has completely changed my life. That is not an exaggeration. Each day is an adventure, as I am relearning what my capabilities and limits are from scratch. The subconscious dismissal "that's a thing I can't do" honed over eight years of mental disability gives way to the conscious "I couldn't do that before, but let's just try it because I might be able to do it now." This is still a learning process, of course - even though I can do certain things now, doing them often fails to occur to me because I am so used to being unable to. But here is a list of things I have done since getting on Wellbutrin, that had been difficult-to-impossible before:
1) Showering all by myself, without even having to be told to.
2) Washing dishes. And not just a couple dishes here or there - entire sinkfuls at a time. (This is HUGE!!!!!)
3) Signed up for a class to get my Group Fitness Instructor certification, so I can have a marketable skill with which to eventually enter the workforce.
3.5) Actually had the confidence to believe I could handle obtaining and holding a job! Couldn't handle either of these things before, that's for sure.
4) Started filling out several applications - and finished a couple! (To adopt a dog, to get said dog certified as my ESA, to get myself inside the tangle of red tape around needing, acquiring, and owning a service dog, and to go back to school for my MA in Education!
Exciting, exciting. But there are still things I haven't yet worked up the courage to attempt, including the extremely important matter of checking my email, and the slightly less important matters of figuring out Amazon Payments so that I can retrieve the money currently trapped in my account, finishing the KickStarter campaign for publishing Freight Special, and doing any work at all on my two novels, The Life Mechanic and Care. Oh, and I also haven't been able to quit drinking, though I am making progress on that front. I'm going to 3-4 AA meetings a week now and have developed a group of sober friends, and my lapses are now actual lapses, rather than several-month-long continuous binges punctuated by single days of sobriety.
As far as my diet... I expected anorexia or bulimia to automatically swoop in to replace the drinking, because I always need to be doing something addictive and self-destructive... but that hasn't happened. I am still constantly making plans to starve myself, of course, but in practice I am eating normally and maintaining my weight.
So on all fronts, my mental health is currently better than it has ever been in my life, even better than it was when I was a kid (because back then, even though I was much more functional than I am now, I was also much more suicidal, and I had an active eating disorder too.)
And guess what -- I still bore the hell out of myself. My life is still bland, pathetic, and mostly confined to a single room. And now I am more bored than ever, because I don't have nearly as much screwed-upness consuming me (not that I'm complaining about that!) For now, "healthy" seems to be just "lack of unhealthy." And for me, "lack of unhealthy" is essentially lack of anything at all. But if the Wellbutrin keeps working, then that will change, eventually, as I welcome little productive bits back into my identity and build a self of which, someday far in the future, I can be unashamed. Maybe even proud.
That's the two-word summary of my experience on the psych ward. I ended up going to Suburban Hospital, not PIW. I got Wellbutrin (a dopaminergic antidepressant often combined with other antidepressants in order to make them work better) and Baclofen (a muscle relaxer, because I needed one) added to my meds, and both are working wonderfully. The Wellbutrin, in particular, has completely changed my life. That is not an exaggeration. Each day is an adventure, as I am relearning what my capabilities and limits are from scratch. The subconscious dismissal "that's a thing I can't do" honed over eight years of mental disability gives way to the conscious "I couldn't do that before, but let's just try it because I might be able to do it now." This is still a learning process, of course - even though I can do certain things now, doing them often fails to occur to me because I am so used to being unable to. But here is a list of things I have done since getting on Wellbutrin, that had been difficult-to-impossible before:
1) Showering all by myself, without even having to be told to.
2) Washing dishes. And not just a couple dishes here or there - entire sinkfuls at a time. (This is HUGE!!!!!)
3) Signed up for a class to get my Group Fitness Instructor certification, so I can have a marketable skill with which to eventually enter the workforce.
3.5) Actually had the confidence to believe I could handle obtaining and holding a job! Couldn't handle either of these things before, that's for sure.
4) Started filling out several applications - and finished a couple! (To adopt a dog, to get said dog certified as my ESA, to get myself inside the tangle of red tape around needing, acquiring, and owning a service dog, and to go back to school for my MA in Education!
Exciting, exciting. But there are still things I haven't yet worked up the courage to attempt, including the extremely important matter of checking my email, and the slightly less important matters of figuring out Amazon Payments so that I can retrieve the money currently trapped in my account, finishing the KickStarter campaign for publishing Freight Special, and doing any work at all on my two novels, The Life Mechanic and Care. Oh, and I also haven't been able to quit drinking, though I am making progress on that front. I'm going to 3-4 AA meetings a week now and have developed a group of sober friends, and my lapses are now actual lapses, rather than several-month-long continuous binges punctuated by single days of sobriety.
As far as my diet... I expected anorexia or bulimia to automatically swoop in to replace the drinking, because I always need to be doing something addictive and self-destructive... but that hasn't happened. I am still constantly making plans to starve myself, of course, but in practice I am eating normally and maintaining my weight.
So on all fronts, my mental health is currently better than it has ever been in my life, even better than it was when I was a kid (because back then, even though I was much more functional than I am now, I was also much more suicidal, and I had an active eating disorder too.)
And guess what -- I still bore the hell out of myself. My life is still bland, pathetic, and mostly confined to a single room. And now I am more bored than ever, because I don't have nearly as much screwed-upness consuming me (not that I'm complaining about that!) For now, "healthy" seems to be just "lack of unhealthy." And for me, "lack of unhealthy" is essentially lack of anything at all. But if the Wellbutrin keeps working, then that will change, eventually, as I welcome little productive bits back into my identity and build a self of which, someday far in the future, I can be unashamed. Maybe even proud.
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