Day 2 of Nortriptylene

I took my first dose Monday night, and I had some incredibly intense dreams, and I was very aware that I was dreaming but kept on switching between like six different parallel threads, and was also very aware of my various apnea events. I was sort of awake and asleep at the same time and wasn’t really sure what was a dream and what was reality.

All day Tuesday I was drowsy and in a fog, and did absolutely nothing with my day except basic things around my home. Fortunately, it was also a day off because of the snowpocalypse.

I was kind of worried that my second day on it would be much the same, but aside from feeling vaguely like I was stoned all morning, I made it to work just fine (although I was in sort of a zombie mode on my way there), and then during the day I actually had a fairly productive day. In particular, I finally looked into modernizing the lab’s website (which was originally running Movable Type, just like this one), and realized that a quick-ish path forward would be to use Publ. However, the lab’s site had a lot more hackiness with templates and layout than my own one did, and I quickly came to the conclusion that the best path forward would be to finally implement better support for pure-HTML entries – so I did.

So far I’m not finding any major reduction in my pain levels (and if anything I’m noticing the pain I do have much more acutely) but I mean I’m only at the starting taper dose.

I’m getting a couple of cavities filled tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to finding out how that interacts with this current mental state.

In one of my online communities there’s a bunch of disability mutual support, including a few other folks who have fibromyalgia. A couple of them have been on nortriptylene as part of their regimens, and they had some insight as to what to look out for. None of them remained on it long term because it didn’t actually help with their pain levels and they never got past the drowsiness. Also apparently for some people it really increases their appetite, although so far if anything I’ve been having less desire to eat.

I’ve also noticed that my senses feel a bit more intense, especially taste and smell. I had a piece of decent Swiss cheese and I ended up tasting a lot of complexity in it that I hadn’t noticed before, like smoky, peaty undertones. And things just seem more satisfying, too, which is interesting.

On Friday I get my CPAP machine (and I have to go all the way to Redmond to do it, dunno if I’ll be feeling up to driving that soon so I’ll probably take a Lyft over) and hopefully that will make my sleep go better and help me heal. Frankly I’m expecting CPAP to be much more useful for my overall pain and well-being than the nortriptylene. But they’ll definitely complement each other.

This week I’m probably going to forgo Thursday night karaoke, so I’ll probably go to my drawing group instead. I haven’t been doing it that much lately for a number of reasons but it’ll be nice to do it, I think. Although I’ll probably still be numb from my dental procedure, and who knows how else that’ll affect me.

Meanwhile, even with my brain feeling numb and detached and dissociated, I still enjoyed jumping in on Tetris 99 and doing pretty well:

tetris99-1stplace.jpg

That was a great feeling, although I still felt a little robbed because in the seconds leading up to my triumph I had set up an amazing combo I didn’t get to act on. Oh well.

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