Side Effects, Symptoms and Psychiatry

It's been over three years since I have posted here and in that time things have not been particularly peachy. But rather than launching into the whole story of the woes of me, I'd prefer to discuss one piece: side effects. Yes, side effects. They are the quirks that arise when you have a problematic symptom and the solution is in a pill and you take the pill and lo, another problem crops up. Sometimes there is a pill to help with the new problem so you take a pill so that you can take a pill. Do you follow me? I will be more specific. A coupla years ago I was having issues which I would rather not detail at this time but since the point of the blog is to actually "Say Something," I guess I had better do some of  that.  I was so anxious that I could not eat.

When you are so anxious that you cannot eat, it is detrimental because your body needs food to survive. This is a basic tenet of human biology but it bears repeating here because of the great amount that I could not eat: the nausea, the difficulty swallowing, the cramping, the diarrhea was all extensive. As the song says, "there's a pill for that," and indeed, there was. The first pill was to help me swallow and after months of difficulty it truly helped. However, the side effect of that pill was diarrhea. Oh, joy. It was around this time that the doctor thought maybe I had celiac disease. Ha! But I was desperate, so I eliminated all gluten from my diet. It changed nothing except that now my food was limited, which I really did not need because I continued to lose weight. Food caused nausea, anxiety caused nausea, nausea caused a disdain for all things food-ish.

Now you may be reading this and wondering about the anxiety part of it. That is mysterious because at first I had only gastro-intestinal symptoms and stress at my now-former job. I did not notice any anxiety. Over the course of time the anxiety seemed to increase but I did not realize it. It was like the time when a doctor prescribed Percoset for my herniated disc and I asked why the strong medicine? "You're in a lot of pain," she told me, at which point I realized that limping around for months unable to sit in a chair was perhaps not the 'new normal.' So Denial, yes, capital D, not just a river in Egypt, etc etc. The symptoms of anxiety hit me before I realized I was feeling anxious. Plus my doctor was saying to me "you need treatment." I could not really hear her; or rather, I heard it, but it made no sense to me. When you do not eat, your brain does not work well (see aforementioned denial) and a lot of things do not make sense to you.

I kept saying "I hafta go to work" in response to the distant voice of psychiatry saying "you are sick."  I woke up in the mornings at 3 a.m. wondering what I would do, how I would manage the humiliating crap that was my job, which is another story called "The Humiliating Crap that was My Job." But back to side effects! Once I started the treatment that, yes, I did end up needing to start, they gave me a pill to gain weight and help me sleep. Great stuff. It turns out that eating and sleeping are both recommended activities. They actually gave me two pills because I was way too thin and sleep-deprived. Side effect: they worked. That would be a happy ending to the story if I no longer needed them and/or if any of my clothes actually fit me now. Who cares about my clothes fitting if I recovered from the awful anxiety and nausea, right?

It felt that way at first because I got back to my normal weight. You are thinking oh no I read all this just so she could complain about her weight? Well, kind of, yeah. When your clothes don't fit and you become an entirely other shape it is uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It is not like when you are going to have a baby and something exciting is happening. It is confusing, as in: what do I wear and how would I feel if I tried to come offa these pills?  And you learn that a "muffin top" is the sag of your belly over the low waist of the now-tight jeans. Last spring I tried to come off of one of the muffin top pills and that was not wise. A couple of months ago I reduced another by half so that is getting somewhere.

I am able to eat now and of course that is good and I no longer have any of those fairly repellent symptoms I had before. But the side effect, which was initially a desirable one, is that I am perpetually hungry. I know what you are thinking: there's a pill for that. I know! But I am not going to take yet another pill. My Inner Guide tells me to love myself the way I am, and to embrace my muffin top. My pants ask me if I have the dough to go buy new ones. So if I "go with my gut," at least I have something to really grab onto - with both hands.