Late January 2007 Monte Report
In October 2005 I had the pleasure of enduring a kidney stone. If you're unfamiliar with kidney stones, then you may be unaware that they cause unimaginable pain. I've encountered women who say there's no comparison between childbirth and kidney stones -- the latter hurts more. My kidney stone kicked in early on a Sunday morning. I thought it was food poisoning at first, then I thought it was my appendix. Soon, I was convinced that there was an vicious alien creature inside me that was preparing to hatch and eat its way out of my abdomen. The most remarkable thing -- and the point of this tale -- is that at every moment I reassured myself that at least I was at the very limit of how much pain a human can experience. That is: it can't get any worse. Funny thing about kidney stones though -- it continued to get worse. Every moment was worse than the last, much to my amazement and dismay. How I managed to drive myself to the Emergency Room without fainting I will never know.
My depression seems to be following a similar course. Though it is drawing itself out over a period measured in days & weeks rather than minutes & seconds, each day is worse than the previous, and I'm finding that it's all that I can do to get myself showered and off to work each day. On days where I don't HAVE to get out of bed, I generally don't. When I get home from work, I go straight to bed. When I'm at work, I struggle to hide my mood, and strive to be a productive employee. But it's getting harder every day.
As I mentioned in my last post, my doctor increased the dose of my Abilify. Maybe I just need to give it more time to "kick in." I also asked him about other treatments I'd heard of -- ECT, Vagus Nerve Stimulation, and "rechallenging" my depression with my Parnate (going off the Parnate for a while and then reintroducing it, a strategy that for some reason tends to be successful with this particular medication). None of these strategies seemed to him to be promising avenues to pursue for one reason or another (though he did mention an experimental treatment method at Stanford involving high doses of magnetism applied to the brain -- something I in
tend to investigate).
For now, though, I'm counting down the days until my trip to Hawaii. I leave just three weeks from today, but getting from here to there sounds like it's going to be hellish.
Finally, in my quest to always include a graphic of some sort, I present you with a drawing of a strange South American critter called a "Montito del Monte" (I kid you not). With apologies to the unknown artist for using his/her work without recognition . . .
My depression seems to be following a similar course. Though it is drawing itself out over a period measured in days & weeks rather than minutes & seconds, each day is worse than the previous, and I'm finding that it's all that I can do to get myself showered and off to work each day. On days where I don't HAVE to get out of bed, I generally don't. When I get home from work, I go straight to bed. When I'm at work, I struggle to hide my mood, and strive to be a productive employee. But it's getting harder every day.
As I mentioned in my last post, my doctor increased the dose of my Abilify. Maybe I just need to give it more time to "kick in." I also asked him about other treatments I'd heard of -- ECT, Vagus Nerve Stimulation, and "rechallenging" my depression with my Parnate (going off the Parnate for a while and then reintroducing it, a strategy that for some reason tends to be successful with this particular medication). None of these strategies seemed to him to be promising avenues to pursue for one reason or another (though he did mention an experimental treatment method at Stanford involving high doses of magnetism applied to the brain -- something I in
tend to investigate).For now, though, I'm counting down the days until my trip to Hawaii. I leave just three weeks from today, but getting from here to there sounds like it's going to be hellish.
Finally, in my quest to always include a graphic of some sort, I present you with a drawing of a strange South American critter called a "Montito del Monte" (I kid you not). With apologies to the unknown artist for using his/her work without recognition . . .
posted by Monte at
5:39 AM
