Posts tagged medicine

When you look in your almost-empty bottle of pills, of which you were prescribed to take 2 per day, and you find an odd number are left.

Here’s hoping they gave me one extra.  Heh.

Just to try and taper it off again more slowly.  I swear I don’t get the whole intentionally taking recreational drugs thing.  This is consistently a miserable, annoying part of my life, and has caused more days of missed work and school than physical illnesses and plain bad luck (flat tires, etc.) have.

This is what I am, according to the billing codes submitted most recently by my therapist.

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I have a piece of cast iron sitting on my stove with water in it to ensure that I’ll make this quick (this kind of hostage-taking is necessary to keep me on schedule.)  I’m doing the longitudinal study!  It lasts 10 years, not 5, and I’ll pretty much break even or be slightly on the side of “spending money” rather than “making money,” but whatever.  I’m scheduled to be in Ann Arbor on the 9th.  First time I’ll have been there since I was about 11 years old.  There’s going to be a blood draw (boo) but I warned them I’m a hard stick and tend to pass out, so they should be ready.

They also, by the way, let me call them instead of the other way around, which is good for my social anxiety issues since I never answer the phone.  And there’s free parking, which is sweet given that I’m going to have to get a hotel room.  ^_^  Anyway, off to making dinner with me.

(Is anyone else curious to see whether somebody has used the tag “trypanophobia” on Tumblr before?)

On the very long list of things that should have given my parents and doctors a head’s up that Demeter isn’t just kind of goofy but actually has, like, brain issues, is the fact that I walk funny.

This is actually a common thing in ADHD (and a bunch of other developmental disorders.)  I was a toe walker continuously - to this day I have to remember to walk heel-to-toe and if I’m the least bit excited or nervous or distracted I don’t.  I had to teach myself to swing my arms when I walk when I was in my late teens.  I also walk much, much faster than most people do - even though I’m quite a bit overweight, and am pretty darned scared of people, I can zip through a crowd at a fair or a theme park and leave everyone else in my party wondering how it was possible (and how long it’ll take me to notice that they’re not with me anymore.)  As long as it’s not a straight run in open country, I have a decided, and totally unintentional, advantage.  The fact that I wobble and am actually landing on a different place on each foot each time I take a step is, well, secondary (you should see what happens to my shoes.)

Anyway.  If you also walk funny, don’t feel bad.  It’s actually a thing; you’re totally not alone.

youmeadhd said: much luck on the math skills for the grad. school test prep! will you be requesting accommodations for your testing?

This is a really tough one for me.

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I cried when my therapist, who we will now be calling J, said I might have ADD.  I hate the feeling that I’m getting yet another “Demeter is defective” label stuck on me.  She introduced it after we’d been talking for over a year about self esteem, about my feeling like I never get stuff done, about why I only get myself to take out the trash about once a month, about the enormous piles of undone filing in my office.  We actually had to stop using the “Self Esteem” book series because I kept coming up with valid, sensible reasons for hating myself and feeling like a failure.

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Part of me hates, hates hates that I’m on any kind of medication at all.  It feels like a daily reinforcement of my failures as a person.  It reminds me, constantly, that I am not whole, which leads straight into the dangerous complete lack of self-worth thing that I struggle with whenever I’m not actively hypomanic.  And they taste bad, are inconvenient, cost money, and are difficult to remember to take, obtain, and locate within my house (thank you, ADHD.)

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