heeeere we go

For a librarian, I'm kinda shit with the categories. I don't really notice from my stats whether people gravitate to them--they're useful if you want to check out all my recipes (nurture thyself) ... other than that, I'm not especially interested in doing a detailed subject analysis of each entry. Sorry!

But as I move deeper into my current drama (now in previews!), I thought it would be useful to do a diary-within-a-diary of my experience with the stims. Uh, confession. Mostly I'm putting this up here on the blog because this is the only place I really write, and it seemed kind of like a good idea not to set up a self-expectation to start, and keep up, something new to maintain. Because I appear to have, probably, ADD, you see. And I'm really trying to anticipate and prevent getting into situations that stink of my past failures, right? Anyway, I'll be recording observations about how the stims may be affecting me, and also of my being hyperaware and imagining that they are affecting me, and also of my mistakenly attributing effects that are, in fact, caused by other factors to the stims. It would be a great deal easier to study 'me on stims' if someone were to lock me up and chain me down and strictly regulate all my inputs, but then I wouldn't be able to pick my daughter up from the bus on school days.

day 1 This first week I'm on one-half of the lowest dose on the standard clinical range. It's a time release drug, an odd-looking tiny white cylindrical pellet, and the flyer the psychiatrist's office gave me minutely described the time-release mechanism. When I swallow it I imagine a little Dr. Seuss-type illustration of a Whoville factory squeezing little puff-clouds of stimulant into my gut. The insert notes that the 'shell', the capsule containing the drug, 'may be seen intact in the stool', and that this is nothing to fret about. I'm not one of those who usually turns around and studies for a while before flushing. I mean, not usually. Sometimes, though, there's something so startlingly two-toned that ... wait a minute. I didn't intend to be going there.

Anything happening on this low a dose is fairly subtle. I notice that I'm looking in the rear-view mirror while driving a lot more, suggesting I'm thinking more about driving than the usual group sex and musical dance ensemble scenarios that occupy me while behind the wheel. Is it really wrong that, at times, I've been driving for about twenty minutes before noticing that the rear-view mirror offers a clear perspective on the dome light of the car? Is there any way that my driver's licence could be revoked because of something I wrote in my blog?

I had one startling though brief phenomenon: the three of us in the car going out to dinner, with Howie driving; and he and I are deep into a spirited and detailed discussion of the neighborhoods in the place we lived when we were first married. We are driving in the mid-winter darkness down a residential street not three miles from our home. Suddenly, for almost two seconds, I have not the slightest idea where we are—what town, what state—at that moment. I don't know whether to attribute this to the stims and adjusting to a different way of making cognitive transitions (thinking about someplace, thinking about where I am now), or rather to hungry worms eating my brain. The only other effect I can possibly identify is the perception that time passes more slowly while on stims.

day two Not a good night's sleep, so it's difficult to make accurate observations on the meds ... Also any abnormal cognitive effects today might alternately be explained by the circumstance of having lunch with my mother-in-law. Feeling slightly jacked-up; on an ADD book shopping spree in the B*rnes&N*ble, was hyper-aware of my desire to get away from abrupt, staccato background noises.

day three When I left the house today to have lunch with Jo, forgot both my knitting (Ammmmberrrrrrr ...), and the eyeshadow sample I was going to give my preggy but vain young friend. But I remembered the book I wanted to give her. That's a fairly normal forget-to-remember ratio for me, so I am unimpressed with today's gains in de-ditzification.

Stay tuned for more stims diary-ing, which will appear impulsively! sporadically! irresponsibly! lazily! immaturely!

Comments

[Jo]

Ha ha ha, you look at your doodoo too. The pills just draw the eye though, don't they?

Also: my mother's rearview mirror is permanently aimed at her face, for the purpose of lipstick application. Permanently. I'm not kidding. I suspect this is related to the thing where, immediately after leaving the plastic surgeon's office after having Restylane shots to repair cosmetic damage from smoking, she LIT UP A CIGARETTE.

En fin: is it okay if we imagine you looking like Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream?

No?

God, sorry.