The problem with hope...

…is she can be a right bitch, or ask a really high price.

I know I’ve been radio silent for a couple of weeks now, but man is there a reason. So long a reason I might have to post this is stages, that way I can start getting it out there without needing to use up all the energy doing it in go will take up. Oh, and for those of you who normally get xmas cards from me and haven’t yet, this is why, I haven’t had it in me to finish filling them out.

The new medication is NOT a simple one for one swap as I was more or less lead to believe. No, the doc never explicitly stated “easy peasy, you’ll just stop taking the old meds and start taking the new stuff and BAM bob’s your uncle”, but frankly unless a doctor states otherwise I think that’s what we’d all assume. To make things easier I’m going to call the new med Bup/nal, that way I don’t have to type “med” or “new med” each time I mention it, or announce on here what I’m taking.

I’m going to write this more or less as it happened, without telling you everything I now know first. Hopefully that way some of how I reacted or how it effected me in the moment comes across okay. A last useful bit of information might be that I have anxiety, and while I’m on something, it really only takes the edge off.

Ready for this?

For the most part things started out okay, other than Bup/nal making me EXHAUSTED and needing to sleep a lot or nod off in my chair and feeling a tad wiggly limbed. That is aside from figuring out in the first couple of days that TWO of the medications that that doctor’s office has prescribed for me I’m really really really not suppose to take with Bup/nal. As in one of them is listed as basically so dangerous to take with Bup/nal as to have no medical benefit worth risking it. Why? Because Bup/nal can depress your breathing and you can’t mix it with anything that does the same thing. Which, by the way, seems like every fucking thing in the world.

Think about that one for a minute. I was given a medication that can seriously affect your breathing, clearly without anyone checking to make sure I wasn’t already on anything that could also do that.

I just… I just don’t what else to even say about that. Shocking from this doctor because she’s usually so very by the book and careful. That could have been a very bad mistake on her part. Thankfully I couldn’t sleep that night, but that’s also why I figured out something was wrong. Luckily the second thing I take from them that I shouldn’t be taking is basically useless and I only really use it to help me sleep, so after that first night I haven’t touched it. The Lyrica could have been bad, especially as I can not just stop taking because of the way it interacts with your brain. But all of this had a lot to do with how I perceived stuff later on.

Thank god for the internet, because it’s given us all the information we now have. The biggest kicker is I was started on this not long before the holidays. Worse medication swap over time ever, just take my word on it here.

Right before Christmas, I developed a stye, my first ever, exciting huh? It developed rather quickly, but the internet let me know what it was. Well, what it likely was, it also could have been an orbital cellulitis, which can be much worse. Here is about when my Anxiety started to become a problem because while I most likely had a stye, some of my symptoms where more cellulitis.

Christmas eve Kent goes to work and about halfway into the day something is wrong, something feels really wrong with me. My head feels weird, my chest feels off and I just feel like I can’t quite get enough air. I’m breathing, but it was almost as if my throat felt too thick or something. It pretty much has to be something crazy and big to make me feel I need to run to the urgent care or ER, but I knew at that moment that either I had Cellulitis, in which case I needed to get to help right then, or I was having some horrible interaction with the new medication. I call Kent, again, on Christmas eve when I know he actually needed to be at work and told him I needed help. Sadly my car is out of commission, so even had I felt it safe to drive I couldn’t have.

About this time I realized that maybe I should have taken my anxiety medication. Because my heart/ breathing had seemed so weird I had been afraid to take it or the Lyrica. I mean what if something was wrong with my medication interactions, I didn’t want to make things worse. Hey, it made perfect sense at the time. Sure I could have called my doctor’s office, but of course no one was there, at least no one useful to me.

We get to Urgent care and slowly, very slowly I start to feel a little more normal, I still sort of feel like maybe I’m not getting as much air as I’d like, but overall I’m better. Only because my eye was all gross and the nurse begged me to stay and have it looked at did I bother to stay. I felt a little weird and stupid, what the heck had happened? Had I really had a bad reaction that I got over? Bup/nal, seems to hit me in waves so that seemed very possible. Kent and I discussed about if it had possibly been just me taking my anxiety meds late, but I didn’t think so. I’ve had my version of a panic attack before and this really didn’t feel anything like it.

The Doc agreed that I most likely had a stye, but that one symptom bothered her too, so she put me on some antibiotics just in case. Since I was a tad freaked over that just in case I figured I may as well. Go figure the stye actually burst that night, but I started taking the antibiotics anyway, stupid move I think now.

Christmas went off fairly well even though I was still slightly off balance and tired from the Bup/nal, I’ll write about that in a separate post. So much has happened that the timing and whatnot is all a bit off, but I’ll try to keep it all together for you guys. I think I’ll post this first bit now so you guys can start hearing what’s been happening.

BTW, I think I’ve fixed the way the comments show up on here. You never did technically have to give your real name, and your email/website or whatever will not show up on the post, I have zero idea why squarespace does it the way they do. I’m not expecting anyone to comment or anything, I just know there were some issues and am trying to fix the problem.