Good thing my favorite color is green

I still am liking loxapine.  But I had the dose increased and I am so nauseous for several hours every night.  It keeps me awake although I'm still asleep much earlier than before I started it.  

When I was initially on it the nausea passed after a few days so hopefully tonight will be better than last night.  I am not about to give up on this because it is working.  But it really is hard to take it knowing that I'll feel bad afteward.  I take it with food and last night tried taking it with MORE food but that didn't help.  I'm only on 20 mgs which is a tiny dose.  But it will work out.

I also finally figured out, I think, why I was so much worse this episode with psychosis.  I've never had a bad episode since diagnosis without lithium.  Last year after I was toxic and had to stop it I had an episode that responded quickly to a Seroquel increase and then I had a long time I was grieving/just sad about my brother but I hadn't had a bad episode that didn't respond to immediate med changes in a while.  This was the biggest difference in anything that I'm aware of so I'm pretty sure that it is connected.  Lithium always was good at helping me, I just had too many toxicities.  I guess it did even more than we knew.  I'm anxious to talk to my drs about this.

But that is over at least.  No psychosis for almost 2 weeks now and that is a blessing I hadn't truly understood before.  Before now psychosis has been intermittent and inconsistent and this time it was everything but those things.  Loxapine seems to have squelched it though even with my tiny dose.  So hopefully 2 antipsychotics makes up for no lithium although I suppose I won't know this until I have another episode.  The depressed phase of this one has hit so probably another couple of months before I'm over it fully.

I'm still not back to life as usual, mainly because of nausea and sleeping off the new dose of medication.  But it will get there eventually and I'm glad for that.

Loxapine

I know it's been forever.  It's been just too much to write with the paranoia, the agitation, the hallucinations, the sleeplessness.......I was in a very, very scary place for a while.  It was so bad that Dr. Mind told me I should go to see Dr Brain prepared to be admitted.  He has been really worried about admissions and that's come up a lot the last while.

Last week I started a new med.  It is actually a very old anti-psychotic.  Almost nobody uses it anymore and it's hard to find anything about it on the internet.  Most of what is out there just says the same thing that is written about all old antipsychotics. But occasionally you find that this one is a little different in that it turns into a kind of antidepressant (but not something exactly accepted as an antidepressant) on the way out so it has an antidepressant effect and Dr. Brain felt I needed that.  I was scared of it because old antipsychotics can be really scary and this one that nobody uses seemed especially scary but I am actually loving this med.  It's improved my sleep (I need a dose increase and sleep will be much better), it has stopped the psychosis as far as I can tell (nothing for several days but I've not been out of the house much), and I've lost 3 lbs in a week because it takes away my appetite.  I'm on 10 mg and you can go up to 250 so it also has a ton of room to grow.

So the risk of hospitalization is down to low again barring some weird problem and I'm feeling so much better than a week ago that I don't have words to describe it.

I still plan to take most entries on here down but I'm not really at the place where sitting and doing that sounds like fun.  I am going to keep some posts up and leave posts about loxapine up because I'd like to help someone else looking for anything about this drug besides the same generic profile.

So that's my story.