Current status

I haven't updated here in a long time and while I still intend to take this down the depression has to go first.  So here's the story for now.  Yes, I am still severely depressed.  The hospital got my meds back to where they were when this episode started.  It wasn't enough.  After some confusion with Dr. Brain last week I saw her Monday.  We have a complicated plan.

She contacted my inpatient dr. to see if I am a good candidate for ECT (shock therapy).  I am rather hoping this is possible because it is something new and not medications. But there is still trickiness; we have to have some med to go on when the treatments are done that will hold me and keep me from just winding up back in the hospital for more ECT.  

For right now we increased Emsam to the absolute highest dose.  So now I'm on a strict MAOI diet which is weird after being able to be fairly lax with it for years.  I'll know if that is helping in about a week, so about Monday.  So far I've slept all day the last 2 days since increasing it.  I don't think  it's related.  

There are 2 new anti-psychotics on the market and Dr. Brain is checking into whether one of them might be helpful.  One of them I discovered last night has a high risk for the same problems I just got over so it's probably out.  The other is a derivative of Abilify which I had problems with when I was on it years ago.  So she has to figure out if the same risks exist for it.  Getting off Seroquel is one plan because it doesn't seem to be as effective as it once was.

If all that fails then I will go in the hospital and come off Seroquel and go on the last resort medication, Clozaril.  It's a big deal to go on that one; every week for 52 weeks blood has to be drawn and you get 7 days worth of medication after the labs are checked.  So it's a big commitment just for that and some of the side effects can be scary beyond the one requiring the blood draws (which is that your immune system can tank and you can get really sick if not monitored).  I am terrified of this drug but I'm also terrified of what it will do to me to keep trying and failing meds.  That makes me feel so very hopeless.

So I'm not sure what else is going on.  Dr. Brain thought she'd know about ECT yesterday to tell me but I didn't get an answer.  So either the hospital dr. didn't answer her or she ran out of time because today was Yom Kippur and she'd be off work for that.  I'm not even clear whether we'd go for ECT now or at what point in that plan we'd try that.  I know she wants to avoid the side effects (memory loss) if we can treat this otherwise but it's no secret that there aren't a lot of options remaining.

So the status right now is increased Emsam and something else will happen soon.Which is a lot better than waiting to see if my body would stabilize itself after the hospital made a lot of changes really quickly.  It did not.  I understand why we had to do that but oh the wait was awful.

9 months of this.  I don't even remember feeling good anymore.  And now I need to go change my patches and set my alarm to see Dr. Mind tomorrow.  Because I will forget and then everything blows up.