Changing Medications (Level of Trust Required)

[mlooney 3,417]

7 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Damn. I started off the day feeling somewhat better than Monday, but now my coffee has given me nausea. Phenergan to the rescue.

/* brain starts fogging over */

Lousy side effects. I had stuff to do today. Now I can't drive without getting pulled over for a pharmaceutical DUI.

That really sucks.  I know about the pharmaceutical DUI and feel for you.   When I was on lithium I was flat out told "do not drive".   Due to this I never renewed my drivers license. I found I really don't need it.  The fact that I have developed a fairly high level of Enochlophobia (fear of crowds) and/or Agoraphobia doesn't help in wanting to get it back.  

[PSadlon 88]

Take coffee to reduce foggy feeling,,get nausea.

Take Phenergan to reduce nausea, become foggy.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sorry it's kinda funny even though it isn't

[ijuin 572]

Well, if your brain is feeling fogged, then it's probably best not to trust it to be alert enough during a traffic incident . . .

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

Yeah, it's a vicious cycle (or circle, depending on how you implement the phrase). Timing has a lot to do with it. I usually need some food before I can stomach coffee, but I can't have food with or near coffee. Only tea works there. After some digestion, I can start considering coffee, but if I drink too much my stomach gets out of balance and starts to rebel.

It's been worse recently. My gastric-bypassed stomach used to be able to handle a double-Keurig cup with Equal, creamer, and a couple of SToK black coffee booster shots (a.k.a. "WTFU Coffee"). Now, I can only handle a single Keurig cup with creamer and Equal. Anything more and I run the risk of getting nausea from quantity.

I don't know what's changed to cause this. Maybe it's my Trintellix prescription. Maybe my stomach just got tired of abuse. Not even my doctor knows. I suspect I'll be sent to a gastroenterologist if I go back to the doctor with the symptoms I had last time. I hate barium milkshakes.

[ijuin 572]

When I am in serious need of staying awake, I usually just skip the coffee and go straight for the caffeine tablets.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

2 minutes ago, ijuin said:

When I am in serious need of staying awake, I usually just skip the coffee and go straight for the caffeine tablets.

I can't do that, unfortunately. Tried to back in the 1980s, with Vivarin. Extended exposure (once daily for a few weeks) gave me vasospasms and turned my left hand blue-ish. I wound up leaving work and going to the doctor's office. I'm not doing that again. Especially not with the other drugs I'm taking (including one to keep my heart from throwing PVCs).

[Don Edwards 548]

Yeah, your heart should not be throwing plastic pipe...

[CritterKeeper 1,102]

1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I can't do that, unfortunately. Tried to back in the 1980s, with Vivarin. Extended exposure (once daily for a few weeks) gave me vasospasms and turned my left hand blue-ish. I wound up leaving work and going to the doctor's office. I'm not doing that again. Especially not with the other drugs I'm taking (including one to keep my heart from throwing PVCs).

 

1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

Yeah, your heart should not be throwing plastic pipe...

PVC = Premature Ventricular Contractions

Normally, the blood goes into the heart, into the atrium at the top, then the atrium contracts and sends the blood into the bigger, stronger ventricle below, which then pushes it off to the rest of the body.  Well, left side to the body, rght side to the lungs.  In a PVC, the ventricle doesn't wait until it's full before contracting, so it's not sending as much blood out to the body, and the atrium can't empty itself and get ready for the next beat's worth, so it's not happy either.

We see occasional PVCs on pets under anesthesia sometimes, but they're not supposed to happen more than once in a blue moon, so to speak.  If we get a bunch of them, we know there's a problem.  Since some blood is still flowing, it's not as big a problem as some things, but it's at the least a warning to pay more attention.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

3 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

We see occasional PVCs on pets under anesthesia sometimes, but they're not supposed to happen more than once in a blue moon, so to speak.  If we get a bunch of them, we know there's a problem.  Since some blood is still flowing, it's not as big a problem as some things, but it's at the least a warning to pay more attention.

Yeah, that's what my cardiologist told me. They ran a 24-hour Holter monitor test on me in 2012, after a particularly nasty bout put me in the emergency room. The monitor showed that I threw thousands of PVCs during the test.

What's weird is that the EKGs they run when I go in for a checkup never show any PVCs. They only run it for a minute or less, though. I'm tempted to get him to run the Holter monitor again, just to see if the PVCs are really gone.

Until then, I'm taking 15mg of clorazepate twice a day to try and calm things down.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

I've been on a lot of Tramadol today, and it's starting to take over tonight. I did something that aggravated the 7-year-old compression fracture in my lower spine, and this was just while trying to tape a box shut for UPS delivery. Add the allergies from today (along with other things best left for another thread, if anywhere), and you've got a very non-functional me.

[mlooney 3,417]

I don't know if the the drugs or what, but I have noticed over the last few weeks that my short term memory is a lot better than it's been in years.  On the other hand my terrible spelling (some of, but not all of, caused by dyslexia) has gotten worse.  Given that near 100% of my "writing" is on a computer with spell check as you type¹, this is less of a problem than it could be.

Secondary note, as an example, had 3 red lines in the above paragraph...

All in all, I'm still counting that as win.

On the gripping hand, I find my self editing a lot after saving a file/message.²

¹Even vim, which requires a bit of tricky .vimrc editing.

²One thing I don't like about the Grrl Power forum, no editing function.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

5 hours ago, mlooney said:

¹Even vim, which requires a bit of tricky .vimrc editing.

You have my respect for your perseverance. I could never wrap my head around vim. Wound up using nano for almost everything.

Now that I'm back on Windows, I'm back using VEDIT Pro 64 as my text editor. Mrs. Prof let me get it way back in 1992 when it was just VEDIT for DOS. I've kept up my subscription (geez, I'm just now realizing that it's my 25th anniversary with the program!) and even learned the macro language for a while when I was doing programming and writing The Hack Report. My macro-fu is no longer as strong due to lack of recent use, but that's beside the point. The message is, if you need a powerful text editor, you'd be hard-pressed to beat it in the Windows world.

[mlooney 3,417]

11 minutes ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

The message is, if you need a powerful text editor, you'd be hard-pressed to beat it in the Windows world.

Assuming you don't load cygwin, then you get vim and emacs plus a bash shell instead of cmd.exe.  This of course has been for freaking years.  Microsoft just now (Windows 10) has decided let you have a bash shell.   Of course they some how manged to screw it up.

On the rare times I have a Windows machine that I can't load Linux, the second thing I download and install is cygwin.  The first, of course, is Firefox.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

1 hour ago, mlooney said:

Assuming you don't load cygwin, then you get vim and emacs plus a bash shell instead of cmd.exe.  This of course has been for freaking years.  Microsoft just now (Windows 10) has decided let you have a bash shell.   Of course they some how manged to screw it up.

On the rare times I have a Windows machine that I can't load Linux, the second thing I download and install is cygwin.  The first, of course, is Firefox.

I use Rex Conn's Take Command as my "shell" for Windows. Been using it (and its predecessor, 4DOS) for almost as long as VEDIT.

In other news, I think the extra antihistamines are finally kicking in. So is the brain fog that they cause.

[HarJIT 97]

2 hours ago, mlooney said:

Of course they some how manged to screw it up.

The issue being how they try and consolidate the difference in how Windows and Linux do file permissions etc.  They basically mount the home directory using a different NTFS wrapper than the drives, which includes extra metadata on the files (and borks when that isn't present).  More info here (coincidentally, that's the same Sven Groot responsible for the Ookii.org EGS resources).

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

It's back.

I just lost part of my dinner, immediately after finishing it. The process brought tears to my eyes.

I wonder if it's related to how much post-nasal drip I've had today. That's been a huge problem. Then again, the antibiotics and Nexium might need another bout to treat a H. pylori infection. Hell, I don't know. I'm just tired of the situation.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

Managed to keep down breakfast and a cup of coffee without the help of Phenergan. This much is good. Still planning on going back to the doctor for this on Monday or Tuesday (depending on what appointments are available).

My sleep schedule is screwed beyond belief, due in part to the large number of medications I take and to the high mountain cedar pollen count. I woke up at 2:30 a.m. with serious post-nasal drip. Took another dose of hydroxyzine, hoping that it would knock me out for four more hours. It gave me about 90 minutes. This much is not good.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

Oh, joy. I get to wear a heart monitor for a week.

Prior to my Friday gastric incident, I had a couple of heart incidents. On Thursday, my heart went into palpitations for a few seconds. Not a pleasant experience—it felt like atrial fibrillations, but that's just a guess. What's not a guess is that I felt horrible for a couple of hours afterward, with numbness, dizziness, and mild nausea. In the end, it wasn't bad enough to call an ambulance, but I didn't dismiss the idea until the symptoms disappeared (as quickly as they had appeared).

On either Friday or Saturday (can't remember which), my heart threw two PVCs back-to-back. HARD. It made me pause for a few minutes and wonder WTF was going on. (BTW, I just threw another PVC as I typed this.)

I saw my regular doctor Tuesday and discussed things with him. He referred me over to my cardiologist for one of the week-long monitors. No appointment date set yet, but I'm expecting they'll call Wednesday.

I also got told that I was not to attend the annual Super Bowl party at a friend's house, since both of their children are coming off of a case of both strains of the flu. His exact words when I asked if it would be safe to attend were, "Hell no." So much for me being the traditional cheese supplier for the group.

I am not having fun.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

17 minutes ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Oh, joy. I get to wear a heart monitor for a week.

Prior to my Friday gastric incident, I had a couple of heart incidents. On Thursday, my heart went into palpitations for a few seconds. Not a pleasant experience—it felt like atrial fibrillations, but that's just a guess. What's not a guess is that I felt horrible for a couple of hours afterward, with numbness, dizziness, and mild nausea. In the end, it wasn't bad enough to call an ambulance, but I didn't dismiss the idea until the symptoms disappeared (as quickly as they had appeared).

On either Friday or Saturday (can't remember which), my heart threw two PVCs back-to-back. HARD. It made me pause for a few minutes and wonder WTF was going on. (BTW, I just threw another PVC as I typed this.)

I saw my regular doctor Tuesday and discussed things with him. He referred me over to my cardiologist for one of the week-long monitors. No appointment date set yet, but I'm expecting they'll call Wednesday.

I also got told that I was not to attend the annual Super Bowl party at a friend's house, since both of their children are coming off of a case of both strains of the flu. His exact words when I asked if it would be safe to attend were, "Hell no." So much for me being the traditional cheese supplier for the group.

I am not having fun.

Good Lord. Prof, do take good care of yourself. Yes, I know, you will have Mrs. Prof watching you like a hawk, but I worry.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Good Lord. Prof, do take good care of yourself. Yes, I know, you will have Mrs. Prof watching you like a hawk, but I worry.

Thank you. Support like yours is the only thing that keeps me going nowadays.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

2 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Thank you. Support like yours is the only thing that keeps me going nowadays.

Then it is a good thing we have a whole forum full of decent people here. And we don't want to lose one of our best, for that matter.

[PSadlon 88]

I have septoplasty schedule for some time on February 21.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

3 hours ago, PSadlon said:

I have septoplasty schedule for some time on February 21.

Good luck with it. I hope you've got a doctor who knows what he's doing. My septum re-deviated several years after it was "fixed" back in the early 90s. Had to have ablation done last year. I really wish you a speedy recovery—just make sure to do exactly what the doctor tells you to do post-op, lest you risk improper healing.

[ProfessorTomoe 1,308]

Still haven't heard from my cardiologist about the week-long monitor. Expecting that next week.

Good news: I won't have to worry about catching the flu from the host's kids at the Super Bowl party this weekend, since the party has been postponed until February 19th, by which time all traces of influenza should be gone from the family. Now, if I can just find the cheese that matches the Chimay ale I bought for the party ...

[mlooney 3,417]

Next Tuesday is Shrink Day.  I have a fairly good idea that my meds are going to change.