Breaking Down The Walls Of “Can’t”

Alright, kids, confession time.  I have been feeling incredibly sorry for myself recently.

Oddly enough, it was another person validating all I have been going through this year, telling me I’m not getting all worked up over nothing, that I have had it incredibly rough that snapped me out of my funk.  This person was trying to help me, they said sometimes we all feel sorry for ourselves, we can’t help it.

This is absolutely true.  And I have been dealing with — let’s just keep things short and say a whole lot of crap

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The Perfect (Medication) Cocktail

click to read DeeDee’s bio

It seems like almost everyone who has been under long-term psychiatric care has embarked on a quest for the Holy Grail: the perfect medication cocktail. And it also seems like a lot of people never find it.

But I’m pleased to discover–my therapist and psych nurse both concur–that I’ve finally found mine. It treats a biological failure to produce enough of a couple critical substances: dopamine and progesterone.

My perfect cocktail includes sinus treatments, a slew of vitamins and supplements, a couple of psychoactive drugs, low-dose naltrexone, and progesterone (not pictured).

I’ve known for years that dopamine was to blame for my mood and attention issues because only dopaminergic drugs ever helped. But there’s no “dopamine deficiency disorder” in the DSM, so they’ve labeled me with ADHD and Major Depressive Disorder. Although Wellbutrin XL and Adderall XR is a bad combo for most people–it makes them anxious, wired, and twitchy–it’s exactly what I need.

When Illness Becomes Traumatic

Hello to all you amazing Canvas readers!  Remember me?  Maybe?  Just a little?  Clearly it has been a long time since I showed my lovely face around these parts.  Some of that has been life, part of it has been Blog For Mental Health 2014, but most of it. . .  Well, here goes.

The last post I wrote for Canvas, well, I started composing it at the end of 2013, moved on to actually writing it into March 2014, read and re-read the 1,800 words I had managed to knock it down to, and after all that I finally shelved it.  You see, as some of you know, I was incredibly ill from September 2013 well into January 2014.

Fat and Crazy

I’ve got nothing against being fat, or being crazy. I’ve been both, and I know that there are a million, zillion causes for packing on the pounds or losing your marbles. It’s not always due to factors under our control, but more often than not, lifestyle choices are a significant factor.

I’ve come to suspect that being fat was a major part of what made me crazy–or at least made it much worse. Well, not the ADHD – that’s been a lifelong struggle and there’s a super-obvious genetic link.

This Is My Brain On Pain

As you likely know if you read my posts here regularly, I am no longer taking any real mood-stabilizers for my bipolar disorder.  It isn’t an anti-medication stance, it’s actually just a place I ultimately came to through very little choice of my own (you can read a bit more about it here).

Now, being Bipolar I with psychotic features, unmedicated is a pretty daunting place to be, and I’m learning all the angles I need to cover.  Some I already knew and had accounted for: exercise, sleep, stress, and situations I knew were very high on the potential trigger list.  Others I knew, but didn’t really think about planning for, because they just didn’t come to mind when thinking of the day-to-day and what I needed to be vigilant about.

Thank God For People Like You

The Best Little Gingerbread House in the World

I’m guessing it’s no secret that I have been very absent from the blogging world at large lately.  The mono has me exhausted, my sciatica has kicked up so I’ve been in a great deal of pain, and my migraines have been pretty nasty as well.

Then there are the good things that have taken what little time and energy I do have.

Ruby Has Mono

Yay and hooray for me.  I’ve been feeling tired and crappy for a while, now I am official.  I wanted to write a note here, because I’ve done this before a few times (had mono, I mean), so I know I’m going to be about as useful and productive as a box of rocks for a little while.  Probably more than a little while.

I have been meaning for some time to write up a series of posts for this month’s Let’s Talk About.  A number of things made me decide that for this month, it would be a good idea to talk about the ten topics already in our arsenal.

It’s all semantics, you say?

I try not to think about my days as a medical doctor too much but sometimes I can’t help it.

That was the case today. My mind drifted back to when I was an intern at the same hospital where I trained as a student. A big third-level referral centre* with the faculties of Medicine, Nursing, Microbiology, Physiotherapy and Nutrition Science  attached to it and the off-campus Ophthalmology and Cardiovascular hospitals a stone throw away.