So much for Wellbutrin

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Yesterday I was feeling pretty off, in a “wow I think my blood pressure is spiking again” way. And I happened to have an appointment at the pain clinic, and they measured my blood pressure at 160/90, which is, you know, Pretty High. At the time I chalked it up to having walked over there in a hurry, but throughout the afternoon and evening I kept measuring it and it remained that high.

And then all night long I had a hell of a time sleeping. I only got around 3 hours of sleep total; most of the time I was just lying awake, blood pounding in my ears, feeling like I was going to die. At 3 AM I also checked my blood pressure again and it was 160/100. Yikes.

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The sorry state of medication reminder software

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I use an app called Medisafe to give me my medication reminders. It’s useful because it tracks my doses and also tracks how much I have left so I know when to order refills and so on. I’ve been using it for years.

Unfortunately it has a critical problem in that it only sends three easy-to-miss reminders spaced ten minutes apart with no way of configuring it. So often I’ll end up taking my medication a few hours later than the scheduled time, because I head to bed and notice the pending reminder that I meant to fulfill.

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Adderall pluses and minuses

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So, on the plus side, Adderall XR has been helping me quite a lot with my focus and executive functioning.

On the minus side, I’m having several of the unpleasant side effects: greatly increased blood pressure, numb toes, migraines/nausea (starting yesterday or so), and constipation.

I was really hoping I finally found something that works for me. Maybe I should stop taking it for a couple days and see how I feel. Because right now I just feel bad.

Day 2 of Nortriptylene

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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.

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