I took such care to prepare for my appointment with Dr Yasar on Tuesday. I made a list of my symptoms, noting relevant details. I listed the changes to my meds re: hormones. I did copious amounts of research comparing different mood stabilizers and their pros and cons in terms of interacting with the hormone stuff. I called pharmacies, pricing medications that I thought were options. I brought all of this with me to the appointment. I never learn.
I got about halfway through the symptom list before the doctor was interrupting, saying that we would be putting me on Geodon. Geodon is expensive, even though it went generic very recently, and I told him that I could not afford to take Geodon, not when my insurance only covers it at 70% and leaves me with $140 a month in cost. Even with a copay assistance card, it's still prohibitively expensive. This is scaring me, taking a drug I can't afford. I started crying, and didn't stop for the rest of our appointment. He insisted that he had enough samples on hand to give me two months worth and that I should try it. I caved.
Dr Yasar loves to do this thing where he takes away all the medications at once to try something new with a clean slate. So he starts telling me to reduce my lithium. I refused. I'm not going to let everything change at once. Let's do one thing at a time. He already was taking away the drug that I felt was giving me my sanity back (Seroquel), and replacing it with these expensive sapphire-blue capsules. It was not going to happen that way.
He finally agreed. Lithium stays the same. Lamotrigine is also staying the same, much to my chagrin. I'm taking half of a 100mg tablet every morning. I don't really want to take any lamotrigine thanks to the whole headaches/aseptic meningitis/breaking out in the sun shenanigans, and also because hormonal birth control will double blood levels of lamotrigine. That's fine, but having it fluctuate dramatically when I'm on my "off" week is scary to me. Makes me afraid that I'll have a seizure. The more I think about it the more I just want to stop LTG altogether on my own. Just start taking 25mg next week, and then after that go down to nothing. I do want to have a mood stabilizer, just not one that is constantly worrying me about side effects. I want to try Zonegran, because it might help me drop some of this weight, and it has such a broad range of actions that it could maybe eliminate the need for lithium. We'll see.
In any event, today was my first day on Geodon. I took 40mg this morning with food, and by 1pm I was totally unable to stay awake/stay standing. So I crashed for a nap. Three hours later, I wake up feeling better about life, and put on real clothes to go grocery shopping at Target with Kris. Now, even after taking my PM dose of Geodon, I'm awake. I think I'm going to finish up this blog post, take a long-since leftover Sonata and try to get some sleep.
As a final note, I've been thinking a lot lately about my mental decline. Not just since the psych meds got intense, but in general...my intellect and critical reasoning capacity peaked at age 18 in some ways. I wrote poetry, I read continental philosophy. I was a passionate depressive with a voracious appetite for knowledge and concepts to more readily define the human experience. I mentioned it in therapy, that I used to write great poetry. I found some of them, from my late junior and early senior year of high school. I also found old papers that I wrote for my wonderful comparative literature classes at Oregon. Just read them over, and now feel sad and mournful that I've yet to make anything of myself. Once upon a time I was talented, and now I'm an insomniac psychopath who can't keep her shit together without copious numbers of pills. ...sigh.
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