Nyx's Journal

Dear Ativan,

You were first prescribed to me on an as-needed basis for panic attacks, and you were so good to me. Other meds often do awful things to my system, but the worst you ever did was knock me out, which was nice when I was, y'know, too panicked for rest. So it made sense for the pdoc to put me on you when I needed a day-to-day med. Just a tiny bit, just a quarter of a .5 mg tablet. Barely a dose at all.

So why you gotta play me like this, Ativan? I thought we were going to have fun together! I thought we were bros! Instead you make me feel blah and tired all the time as if I'm not taking my antidepressants at all. You crash me hard into twitchy nerves when my dose wears off, reinforcing my insomnia issues in the process. You make me incredibly temperamental so I get angry for no reason. You fuck with my appetite/metabolism. You make me bump into things and drop stuff all the time.

Get your act together, Ativan, or I will drop you so fast you won't know what happened. I didn't even want to add more drugs in the first place.

-Nyx

My therapist has been making noises of getting my psychiatrist to change up my meds again. I'm really not sure I like that idea, and not just because I'm getting sick of the constant switching– four meds over four months– or because of my general distaste for being super medicated.

Meds and I, we don't get along great. I started out on Cymbalta and (after a period of violently nauseous adjustment) it helped for a while. But only a while. Prozac left me numb and aggravated my seizures to intolerable levels. The lorazepam I take as-needed for anxiety does its job, but knocks me out flat for a good ten hours, so I prefer not to use it unless I have to. My current Pristiq/Deplin cocktail, however, actually seems to be working, and doing so without any adverse side effects (save for my irritation at the idiots who decided that square was a good shape for a pill). My depression has been under control for once; my mood has been stable and in line with my actual experiences. I'm even able to get things done, when I need to.

My anxiety, however, is decidedly not remotely close to being managed at this point, and the recent absence of major depression symptoms and/or episodes has left me fairly at its mercy. Whenever one half of the problem is being dealt with, it seems, the other takes the opportunity to invade my conscious all the more aggressively. The anxiety issues have led my therapist to bring up possibly switching me over to some kind of anti-anxiety drug instead of the antidepressants. The thought of switching is fairly horrifying to me– it's been so long since I haven't been feeling depressed 98% of the time, and I really don't want to go back to that place. But trying to cope with my current levels of anxiety is not exactly a great prospect either.

I always feel so ambivalent about psych meds. This is really not helping.