Finally

The Master of Irony Med List has been updated. For those keeping track at home, psych med #30.....

Today was my psychiatrist day. I am officially declared allergic to lamictal. I don't get a second try. I think she was surprised I'd asked about one. But it worked.......

So we considered the tiny number of options and decided I could increase my lithium or increase my depakote. I don't want to mess with lithium unless it's dire, and summer isn't the time to try it out if we can avoid it, so I now take 3000 mg of Depakote. That is 6 of them per day, and will mean that I will be given 3 bottles full of huge pills every month. That is assuming my body doesn't reverse it's recent trend to go lower on my blood level no matter how much I take and I have a too high level later this week.

I also am going to try switching multiple doses of low dose atarax for ativan. Ativan just doesn't cut the anxiety I deal with, it only helps. It is a good "take this to not fall totally apart" med, but from moment to moment it isn't great.

These changes mean that I will get to add yet another side effect drug to the list. That will be colace, and if you don't know what that's for, look it up. Enough said.

So, all told I'm going from 11 pills per day to 16-18 per day. Yippee. Good thing I can swallow pills these days....Way back I was on 23 and had to take each one individually. It took at least 30 minutes per day to take pills.

I was really happy about part of my conversation with my doctor. I was telling her about a conversation with my manager where I realized my manager has no clue about my illness and isn't bothering to try to educate herself at all. She's upset with me over things that if she'd read one webpage or article on bipolar she'd know. If she'd trust me to tell her about my illness she'd know. Instead she's assuming and she's wrong. My doctor agrees that it sounds as if there are issues and that my company may be trying the "let's subtly make it not happy so maybe she'll leave" dance. I need to address some of this stuff with the manager but can't do it right now because I'm too emotional.

However, I also feel educating herself about this is part of the manager's job and I was pretty frustrated when I realized she knows nothing. Anyway, my doctor volunteered to speak to my manager and tell about about bipolar and the type of bipolar I have. The really neat part is that she said she would tell her that I am one of the most motivated patients with the degree of illness I have that she has ever seen. That made me feel about a thousand times better about myself than I have lately. Not always a loser after all.

My next trick will be learning to take pills 4 times/day instead of 2. For a very long time we kept me on bedtime meds only because I had a really hard time with remembering AM meds. That lasted several years. Then I started Provigil to help me wake up and obviously needed that in the AM. I had to set an alarm, take it, sleep until it kicked in, and I'd get up. Then I had to start thyroid replacement and that has to be taken in the AM so that got added to the AM list. This summer I've had terrible allergies so that's also in the AM. I take all those together at 4 AM, sleep a few more hours, then get up. Now though I'll have 4 AM meds, a 9 AM pill, a 3 or 4 pm pill, and bedtime meds. That's going to be a challenge. If you see a very confused looking person trying to figure out why her cell phone is beeping, that will be me with a med reminder going off.