Nortriptyline updates

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I’ve been at 30mg of nortriptyline for 6 days now, and I’m trying to figure out if this is how I felt on it before. Going through my nortriptyline tag I see that I actually was up to 40mg on my initial tapering, and after sitting there for a while I decided it wasn’t doing enough for my pain and that’s when I tapered down to 20. In one entry I complained that it wasn’t helping my sleep at all, and how it was making me constantly dizzy and tired and headachey.

This time around it’s definitely helping my sleep, and I’m not dizzy, although I am quite tired (despite actually getting a full 8 hours of sleep every night, for once!) and today I had a headache all day. Also plenty of nausea. But at least I got a nice long walk in.

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ADHD and fibromyalgia and nortriptyline

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Yesterday I finally met with a new psychiatrist (having lost access to my previous one back in, oh, March), with the intention of figuring out what to try next in terms of ADHD medication.

As a recap, the first medication I tried (Concerta) just made me irritable and gave me tachycardia, and the second one I tried (Adderall) worked really well for my brain but also made my blood pressure skyrocket.

Anyway, on Tuesday I had also met with my pain doc and the decision we came to was that we should try increasing the nortriptyline again, since 20mg is doing something but not enough, and I couldn’t really remember why I felt like 30 was too much. He wants me to target 40-50mg for my eventual long-term dosage.

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Surprise frustrations

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So, I am using way more soap than usual when washing my hands, which has been drying out the skin a lot. To try to counteract that I’ve been using lotion a lot more. But it turns out that this leads to more tactile stimulation on my fingers (basically I constantly feel like I’ve just been soaking in the bathtub for an hour) which in turn leads to a sensory overload/pain flare, and it doesn’t even help with the dry skin anyway, and the dry skin also leads to its own level of sensory issues too. And Fiona’s insistence on sitting on my lap while I work isn’t helping at all. Just before lunch I had a bit of a meltdown because of it.

I guess I need to figure out a better way to periodically clean my hands without leading to other issues.

I could also really use a haircut, because my wild scraggly hair getting in my face is making this worse. Of course all the hair stylists are (rightfully) closed right now. I suppose I could break out my Flowbee but that feels like it’s taking the “mental stress due to isolation” look a bit too far. (Plus I don’t want my hair to be that short right now. I need every femininity cue I can get these days.) Maybe it’s time to finally learn how to use hair clips, but I suspect feeling them bouncing against my face would make me flare too.

Why is my brain like this? Ugh.

Why I’m open about my mental health (and other things)

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Back in 2015, I was a complete mess, and I did everything I could to hide it. I was still having panic attacks regularly, and they would be brought on by the slightest provocation. But I felt, working in tech, that I had to be quiet about it, and just let things pass and things would get better if I ignored them.

One day a coworker did a thing that triggered a pretty big panic attack. It wasn’t anything malicious on his part, just a cavalier, morbid joke in gestural form that happened to tread upon one of my biggest triggers.

I felt awful, and I wanted to keep from feeling that way again.

So I messaged him on our work chat, and told him that the gesture he made happens to be a huge trigger for me and I was having a pretty major panic attack as a result. And his response was incredibly helpful: he didn’t realize, he understood, and he wouldn’t do it again. And he stuck to that.

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ADHD

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So, this post about signs of undiagnosed ADHD showed up on one of my fibro communities and so much of it seemed PRETTY FAMILIAR, and I also found out that fibromyalgia and ADHD are highly comorbid, and then I was realizing that I stopped being able to focus on work and Getting Stuff Done when I had to go cold turkey on caffeine when my panic disorder started in 2011, and, wellp.

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Feelings

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So, the last few days have been feeling a lot better overall. I’m not sure how much of that is reducing my nortriptyline dose or how much is because I’ve been taking magnesium regularly. But either way, I’m just like… in less agony. My wrists still hurt most of the time, especially after I’ve been working for a few hours, and I’m still driving to work more often than I’d like, but all in all I’m feeling, I dunno, better?

I was in a pretty dark place about a week ago and now things are just feeling like how they are on average for me in general, so to me that’s a pretty big improvement.

This weekend I’m going down to Portland for IndieWeb Summit and I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully I can improve my understanding of the current ecosystem, and maybe make some contributions to it which are important to me. In particular it’ll be nice to chat with Aaron and Jamey about our respective areas of overlapping interest, and talk everyone’s ear off about Publ and what I’m trying to do with it. Maybe I can even get others to want to contribute to it! Also definitely looking forward to meeting Jacky, Darius, and everyone else I’ve interacted with in IndieWeb stuff!

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Stuff, and things

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Last night I had another mini-spiral, brought on by making a joke in someone’s chat that didn’t land at all well. Which set off a cascade of bad intrusive thoughts. But I’m over it now.

I did decide from that to cut down on the spaces I’m chatting in. I’m spread too thin and need to focus my attentions on the things that are important to me, rather than the things that simply take up time.

Today the Dove Self-Esteem Project posted another Steven Universe short, this one about social media, and it reminded me that I’m long-overdue for cleaning up my Twitter follows. Given that I have, um, rather a lot, it’ll take me a while to KonMarie my way through them, but I think it’ll be worth it.

This also comes back to a lot of what I’m dissatisfied with in social media and modern communication these days. Everything’s about instantaneous updates and push notifications and micro-posts and conversations and so on. It’s a big reason why I’m not a fan of ActivityPub. It’s also the part of the IndieWeb focus that I’m less thrilled about (granted, IndieWeb is about a lot of things, and it’s not like I have to participate in every part to still make a meaningful impact). I keep saying how someday I’ll get around to writing a blog entry about impedance mismatches between what I like about blogging and the ActivityPub/Webmention/etc. world. This isn’t that entry.

Anyway, this is the… third? I think? day of my nortriptyline reduction. Which is to say I’m still at 30mg. My doctor agrees that we should try something else. Gabapentin will probably be the next thing I try, since it’s something that a lot of my spoonie friends have said works well for them (with caveats). I probably won’t be starting on that until August, though; it’ll take me a few more weeks to taper off nortriptyline, and then I’ll be doing Song Fight! in Madison (and hopefully not being in complete agony between the travel and the playing guitar all weekend). Meanwhile I think the magnesium might be helping as well.

Tonight I did practice a bunch of my Song Fight! material and actually managed to play for a decent amount of time without suddenly finding myself in agony. Which was a nice surprise. So I’m feeling a lot more confident in being able to play a full set in a month. And meanwhile I’m still doodling around with music for games and stuff. So maybe this is a good sign of things to come.

I guess I’m feeling cautiously optimistic for now. Which is better than how I felt two days ago, I tell you what.