Three days before I was planning to leave town, I discovered that my prescription for lamotrigine was out... okay it wasn't precisely out. I had 1/2 a pill left. So I called to refill, but it turned out that there were NO REFILLS without contacting my doctor's office.
The automated reply told me that they would happily fill my prescription four days after I had left. A week out. So I called and talked to a real person who suggested I get an emergency three-day supply and call the doctor (actually Psych NP) directly. Then I forgot to do that during the day and ended up talking to answering service... that told me they could not get any messages to Psych NP until AFTER the long holiday (U.S.Independence Day). So I panicked. Then I called the nurse care line for my regular health care and poured out my whole sob story. She tried telling my about the 3 day emergency supply... which is intended when you need to wait for 3 business days for all the paperwork to catch up. It is not for when you screw up on a holiday weekend and then skip town for a while. Alone. With your three children. (Okay, so not technically alone.) Here is what this felt like: I'm pretty sure that my skin is burning me from the inside out. I can hear my heart beating in the tips of my hair. The hair itself is on fire and I can feel it crawling on my head. Is this what it feels like when mania starts and I wonder what will happen if they can't get my medication. I will suddenly become worse. Worse than this. My hair will crawl off my head. My skin will catch fire. Everyone who sees me will know instantly that SOMETHING IS WRONG. And that will suck because usually I have an invisibility around me. A certain lack of opacity. I can pass. Pass for eccentric and just a bit off. Sometimes even pass as just quiet and aloof. Or overly loud and interrupty. If I can't get my medication-- and I don't even know if it is really therapeutic because it is the one that made Psych NP think that I needed to take something else. The other one. The antipsychotic one. What if this is a precursor to a psychotic episode. What if neither of the medications works? What if they all stop working? What if they never worked? What if I write this and I look at it later and forget that things got better and I don't remember that the problem was resolved and I got the medication and I managed to calm down. I hadn't taken the medication for 1.5 days. Or more. Something like that. Was this feeling an indication of what I would be like unmedicated? Or was this an indication that I was having ANXIETY. Big anxiety. The kind that blots out reality. My heart beat so loud it woke me up. It beat so loud it knocked Spouse out of bed. Beat so loud it woke the children from their lair in the basement. Caused the neighbors to report the noise to the cops. Beat so loud that the ground shook and the tectonic plates shifted so that a fissure formed even though we are NOWHERE NEAR the edge of a plate in this most geologically boring area of the planet. My heart beat so loud it drowned out the sound of my thoughts and I was just stuck with the beating. And all this while I was supposed to be getting ready to go out of town. Supposed to be packing and preparing and making lists. But all I could do was panic in this beating heart sort of way. And beat myself up because this entire problem was of my own making. WHY DID MY PHONE DELETE PSYCH NP's CELL NUMBER? (For this certainly would have been a fine time to call her. When talking to anyone about this issue I was careful to appear calm. To sound as if I had everything under contol. But underneath it all was the skin-burning, hair-crawling, heart pounding terror. It sucked. I simultaneously assumed that everything would turn out some how. This was quite stressful to write. I have not had internet access until now, which has made it difficult to write. I will try to catch things up, but not all in one post. DO NOT WORRY. ALL IS WELL. Comments are closed.
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |