Disclaimer: This entry discusses mental health, including medication and some clinical jargon I'm likely to get wrong because I am not a doctor nor do I play one on TV. This is not meant to be taken as medical advice nor given any more weight and credence than any other personal anecdote. Everyone is different.
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| The lack of data on Friday is human error. I forgot to wear the watch. |
To put this image in perspective, some context. At the start of the new
year, my doctor suggested that I may not have depression (at least not
anymore, or exclusively...?), but instead a manic disorder. I won't go into
the semantics over what a manic disorder is in relation to bipolar disorder,
schizophrenia, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, or any other
(dis)similar conditions. Suffice to say, as a rule, you don't treat it with
antidepressants (alone). What's offered instead (or in tandem) is what's
broadly called a mood stabilizer. I'll spare you the details of the first
one I tried, if only because I don't remember it at all and it was thusly
written off as ineffective. I'll also spare you the details of the second
one except that it made me sick to my stomach, and not in the principled
sense. It was written off as intolerable.
The Charming Third
stands in stark contrast to the first two in that those medications
are typically used to treat epilepsy, their use as mood stabilizers
being somewhat serendipitous. Charming Third is what's known as an antipsychotic. I have no idea what it would
do for epilepsy, but let's leave the happy accidents for another
time. 5mg of Charming Third was taken Sunday
before bedtime, a time bumped up in case the drowsiness listed as
the most common side effect made getting ready in the morning a
bother. On a side note: due to the tummy troubles from Terrible Two, as of this writing, I haven't touched coffee in over two
weeks.
As the song goes if you slur your speech in the right places,
waking up is hard to do.
Not only was it a struggle to get up and get ready for the day, but
I spent the entire day at work on the edge of nodding off. I worried
constantly about either shutting my eyes for too long or leaning too
far back in my chair and dozing off right then and there. A solid
8.5 hours of sleep but with nothing to show for it. Fortunately,
nobody seemed to notice, so I guess my anxiety filled me with enough
nervous energy to counteract the sleepiness. After getting home, I
immediately fell asleep on my bed. I slept for 3.5 hours, got up to
change clothes and get into bed properly, and then slept until 5:30
the next morning, with the drowsiness finally wearing off around
7:00.
Did I mention this was a single dose?
Having literally slept through the window during which I would have
taken my second dose, I naturally informed my doctor of what
happened, full timeline of events included. By the way, special
thanks to Fossil for making an alarmingly accurate
fitness tracker
despite being fairly low tech as trackers tend to go. Being me, when
my doctor called, I apologized for missing the second dose. To her
credit, she was extremely understanding, but wasn't ready to give up
on Charming Third just yet. After all, as side effects go,
drowsiness isn't the worst thing ever, unless you operate heavy
machinery, which I don't. Problem the first was there didn't seem to
be a lower dosage available. Problem the second was the makers of
Charming Third not making their tablets breakable in
any reasonable way. There's typically a good reason for this,
Big Pharma
skulduggery
notwithstanding: Put simply, any lower and the medicine isn't
effective at all at what it's supposed to do, much less what it does
as a side hustle. A little more digging did turn up a 2.5mg dosage
available, in small tablets obviously not meant for splitting, but
far more inviting to the notion if we grade on a curve.
Nevertheless, it was recommended I wait until Friday to take
this new dosage, lest the sleepiness did not degrade along a curve.
It was somewhat academic because I took the day off to get my car
fixed, but I didn't want to tempt fate and reschedule a second
time.
It was suggested that, like any medication, there may well be an
adjustment period, a time when the body has to recalibrate its
various chemical processes to adapt to the new material in the
carbon-rich macromolecular soup. The track record thus far was that
Terrible Two got worse each time and
Charming Third hadn't made the best first impression. Put
simply, if 20/48 hours asleep was A New Hope, what will happen when The Empire Strikes Back? As of this writing, I've
taken two doses of the 2.5mg. The first stuck to the statistics and
resulted in 10/24 hours of sleep to awake, with only the most
minimal of drowsiness to shake off afterward. The second took a
little off the top with a more typical 8/24 proportion, though the
drowsiness has been a bit of a slow burn throughout the day. That
said, this is all completely ignoring the mood stabilizer portion of
the meds, which I can't make any meaningful assessment of because it
hasn't been long enough. Terrible Two's collected anecdotes
mentioned the medicine's turnaround time of noticeable results being
in the "months" range, to which I channeled all the
Will Smith I could muster to utter an emphatic, "AW HAIL
NAW!" Charming Third doesn't make any real note of when it
begins to take effect, but I'll take a lack of detail as a sign it
rarely tries anyone's patience.
Time for Return of the Jedi.
Goodnight, and good luck.
