Life!

~ e.v. ~ 6 Comments

I haven’t posted for a while because I haven’t been spending much time lying in bed with my laptop. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not? We’ve been spending evenings doing things instead, like watching Downton Abbey from the start, playing a ridiculous computer game called Overcooked, and trying to protect my poor plants from Very Hungry Caterpillars 😟. Also, with working from home, I suppose I just don’t have quite as much interest in spending my free time at home on my own with a computer.

I’m still reducing my Citalopram but very, very slowly. I went down to 15mg (from 20) by alternating 20 and 15mg doses then kept it on 15 for a while. That seemed OK, so now I’m going down to 10 by alternating 15 and 10mg. It seems to be working because I don’t notice any withdrawal issues apart from occasionally being a bit irritable. I’m not entirely sure how I expect to feel when I’m off them; will I continue feeling how I’ve felt for the past few months, or will anxiety start creeping back? Although I started on them because I was having trouble with life circumstances which have now passed, the truth is that I’ve always had more anxiety than was healthy or desirable, and it’s only been in the later part of my life I’ve really understood that it was a medical issue that was treatable.

Maybe the medication and all the counselling I went through will have reshaped my brain and my thought patterns enough that that’s no longer who I am. I won’t know until I’m off the medication, but it’s possible that in a few months I’ll want to go back on it. We’ll see.

When I was prescribed the last set, the Doctor put it on repeat and I think she said that I’d need to go back for an appointment after two issues. Confusingly, the app has still shown it as being available for me to request, so I have tried it… but it doesn’t tell me when it’s ready. It just says “you can collect it from your pharmacy in 48 hours, your GP will contact you if there’s a problem”. And tomorrow morning it’ll be 48 hours. I’ll probably give it a few more days. I don’t need them for a few weeks anyway, I just wanted to figure out if I need to arrange an appointment or not.

In other medical news, I have something called a fixed retainer on the back of my teeth (a brace, basically), which I’ve had for many years, since I had my actual braces removed. Every few years the glue comes off on one of the teeth and I have to go to the orthodontist, who charges me £40 for the thirty seconds it takes him to glue it back on. He always remembers me though.

JUST MY LUCK that while dental care is severely disrupted due to COVID that my retainer happens to break. It’s not that the glue has come off, it’s that the wire is in two pieces. This has never happened before! I keep catching my tongue on the pointy ends. Then some food gets jammed underneath the end of it, which is very uncomfortable. I phoned them up last week and they said they’d put me on the emergency waiting list… but that’s probably quite a long list when they’ve got patients who are months overdue for brace adjustments. The receptionist advised me to try filing it down with a nail file if it causes me problems. How I’m supposed to get a nail file on something behind my front top teeth I am not quite sure… It’s not really causing problems though, it’s just a bit annoying.

15

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The update on my citalopram situation is that I’m now down to 15mg per day. I was alternating 15 and 20 for a week or so, and as of the past five days I’ve been on 15.

I feel… Mostly the same but definitely more irritable. I don’t feel unhappy at all, just sometimes more easily agitated. I should probably keep it on 15 for a few weeks and see if it settles.

Withdrawal?

~ e.v. ~ 6 Comments

So I have been alternating 20mg and 10mg doses of Citalopram for the past four days, which means I’m now averaging a 15mg dose. I was thinking I’d do that for a week and then go down to 10mg daily. I think I’m being too optimistic though. I think I should slow it down, which I can only really do easily by taking a half dose every 3 days (so two days of 20mg and one day of 10mg). But I’m not really sure because I know that citalopram has a short half life (36 hours from memory?) so I’m not sure if spreading variations over three days really has much effect.

The reason I think I might be dropping it too quickly is that I got really frustrated with something earlier and had a (private) tantrum about it. Now – a few hours later – I’m feeling quite emotional and teary about nothing in particular. This is all quite unusual for me lately, so I think it’s a withdrawal effect. Hmm. I think I’ll try the half dose every 3 days approach.

12th May 2020

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This is just going to be a big summary post.

1. I’ve decided to try coming off Citalopram. I feel happy. I’ve felt happy for months. I feel stable and settled. I’ve been on it since August and I think it’s time to say that I don’t really need it anymore. I’m currently on 20mg per day so I’m going to bring it down to 10mg for a couple of weeks and see how that is. I’ll do it slowly. I’m going to keep a log of the dosage along with heart rate and stress data from my watch, which should be interesting.

2. I watched Belgravia. I didn’t like it to start with, but it’s only six episodes long and by the end I quite enjoyed it. To begin with it just seems like a bunch of dislikable people scheming against each other, though.

3. I ran another half marathon distance on Sunday. It went much better than the last time and I finished five minutes faster. I was pleased with that.

4. I seemed to be doing better with the iron tablets, but I took one this evening and now I have stomach aches. Hmmmm.

Iron

~ e.v. ~ 8 Comments

I’m back on the iron tablets because I haven’t been on them for a while. What happens with my iron levels is that I’m on iron tablets for a few months and my iron levels go up. Then I stop taking them and my iron levels go down. I’m self medicating this time around because I haven’t been tested since December so I don’t actually know what my iron levels are. I feel a bit guilty about that, because they’re not the weedy little vitamin tablets you find on the shelf at Boots, they’re proper 200mg turn-your-poo-black ferrous sulfate iron tablets. But you don’t actually need a prescription for them (and it’s cheaper to buy them over the counter than pay for the prescription!) and the leaflet says you can take one per day for prevention of iron deficiency anaemia, so it’s fine really.

I had forgotten how unpleasant the first few days of iron are. I took it at about 6PM yesterday and woke up with painful indigestion at 3 AM.

3AM is a strange time. I received a rather immature and maybe sightly spiteful message on LinkedIn a few days ago from someone from the past I didn’t want to hear from. (Actually it was a few weeks ago, but I didn’t see it until a few days ago). It didn’t upset me. I just deleted my LinkedIn account because it’s not like it’s useful. I don’t generally ‘do’ social media under my own name so it was a bit of an odd thing for me to have anyway. I didn’t find it at all useful when looking for jobs, and now I’m not looking, it makes no real sense to have an account. So, I got a message which I won’t dignify with further details, I shrugged and closed the account. Problem solved. Fine.

Not fine at 3AM. Very upsetting at 3AM. I felt very upset and anxious about the whole thing.

Also upsetting was that I need to cancel my Amazon Prime trial before they charge me. It was urgently important at 3 AM, so I got my phone out and saw to it.

Anyway. I took the iron tablet with lunch today, so hopefully I’ll sleep better. I’ve had a somewhat uncomfortable gastrointestinal tract since then. Urrrrgh.

From memory this only lasts a few days, so hopefully it’ll be settling tomorrow.

Furlough #2

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

So I spoke to my manager this morning and he revealed that three of my colleagues will be furloughed. One graphics designer, one sales support and one technical support. No developers are being furloughed (at this stage). I am currently very busy, whereas I suspect the three colleagues have been twiddling their thumbs quite a bit lately.

It’s a shame, especially for the sales support lady who started here about a year and a half ago after being made redundant from her previous job of twelve years (which sounded a bit traumatic to me). I feel a bit sorry for her.

But I feel happier now I feel like I know what’s going on.

In other news, I have a blister on my foot. I’m going to ignore it and hope it takes the hint 🤔

Furlough

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

I haven’t been furloughed, but I had an email today from the managing director saying that the company will be applying for the government furlough scheme and some of my colleagues will be furloughed, though my role is deemed to be safe.

When I spoke to my manager this morning he seemed quite grumpy at the start of the call, which is unusual, and I guess that’s why. I don’t know who is getting furloughed yet, but I could take a few guesses…

I’m a bit upset though. It’s worrying. I don’t know why though. The practical reality if I was furloughed is that I’d probably enjoy relaxing. The reduction of income would be mildly annoying but would have no material effect on my life. So it shouldn’t worry me really. But it does.

Halves

~ e.v. ~ 7 Comments

Today would have been the Stratford Half Marathon, if it wasn’t for the fact that nothing is happening at the moment. I decided to run the distance this morning anyway, just because.

It was absolutely dreadful and I have no idea what I was thinking. Obviously it’s not comparable to an actual race because you’re not doing it on closed roads, and, more importantly, there’s no excitement and adrenaline from running with people and having spectators cheering you on. But it was both my slowest half marathon and one of the hardest runs I’ve ever done. The weather when I left was supposedly a cool 7 degrees, but it was a clear sky and bright sunlight so it was really a lot hotter.

The first 10k were fine and I was sticking to a 5 minute per kilometre pace pretty evenly, but by about 15k I’d had enough and I slowed down. I didn’t have a route planned, so I ended up going onto the nearby cycle track and doing kilometres 19 and 20 running around in circles. It seemed like the kilometres were getting longer and longer and I was slightly worried the GPS on my watch was under-measuring the distance in a circle, but it also said I was getting faster so it was probably just my perception of time. There were a few people around on the cycle track, which was energising and I was able to pick up the pace a bit.

In the end, I averaged 5:12 per km and finished in just under 1 hour 50 minutes. This is approximately 18 minutes slower than I was in October (almost 1 minute per kilometre!), which is OK because I certainly wasn’t aiming to beat that, but it wasn’t OK because I felt fine at the end of it in October, whereas today I lied on my living room floor in a sweaty mess and had to stuff two bananas, two croissants and two cups of tea into my mouth and have and a cold shower before I started feeling normal again. Only a week earlier I’d done 17k at only a slightly slower pace and barely felt like I’d broken a sweat, but it was cold and wet that day. The weather makes a big difference. I wish I’d weighed myself before and after to see just how much sweat I lost.

Overall it was great, 10/10, would do again. But maybe not for a while. I think tomorrow will be a rest day.

More dreams

~ e.v. ~ 7 Comments

The other night I woke up at the dreaded four o clock after having a dream about work. Except, it wasn’t my work. I’ve been watching Star Trek Picard, and the blonde robotics doctor Agnes Jurati was my coworker. But she didn’t like me much and was quite mean to me so one day I walked out. I woke up really stressed about a job I don’t even have.

Later, I went back to sleep and I was on the bus going home from work (I don’t even travel by bus). Part way home I decided I should go back to work, so I got off the bus and walked back to work with a man who for some reason I met along the way. When I got back to work, they’d decided to close the office early, which also meant I couldn’t work my hours. One of my co-workers (real co-worker, blonde, coincidence?)) was there and she was looking at my timesheet (we don’t even record timesheets) saying things like “well, it’s whether you think you can explain to your manager why your hours aren’t complete…”, which stressed me when I woke up.

I have more stress in my life from imagined jobs than I do from my real job. 🤨

Pain is in the mind

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

And also in the shin, apparently. My shins have been very sore this afternoon but I iced them this evening and now they feel a lot better. Perhaps I won’t need to take one of those dreaded rest days tomorrow after all. Fingers crossed!

I realised that I forgot to take my tablet (anti depressant) yesterday morning. Oh well, it happens. I find one day doesn’t really make a difference. But when I came to open the packet this morning, I realised that I probably forgot to take it the previous day too. I’m not 100% sure, but I’d only taken one tablet from the tray, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t open it on Friday… There is something to be said for the packaging that has the days of the week marked on each tablet.

So I think I went 48 hours without it, which is a first, and might explain why I’ve felt a bit angsty and nauseous today. Or maybe I’m just tired from running too much and frustrated with my shin. I don’t know…

This is actually a lockdown problem. I never forget to take it when I’m at work, because it’s just part of my getting-ready-for-work routine and I have an alarm on my watch set to go off a couple of minutes before I leave, just in case I’ve forgotten (which has never happened). I need to get more on top of this…