{"id":6757,"date":"2015-12-29T17:22:09","date_gmt":"2015-12-29T22:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=6757"},"modified":"2019-05-15T13:50:07","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:50:07","slug":"more-pills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=6757","title":{"rendered":"More pills??"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=6310\" target=\"_blank\">surgeons are done<\/a> with me. Today I turned myself in\u00a0at the office of the primary care doctor.<\/p>\n<p>My usual doc was out of the country, so I went to\u00a0his partner. I wasn&#8217;t too sure about going to a stranger. But I&#8217;m anxious to get some closer-to-home follow-up on the daily trials I&#8217;ve been dealing with:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>stitches haven&#8217;t dissolved and are scabby; my\u00a0scalp\u00a0remains\u00a0very sensitive<\/li>\n<li>lower back pain still flares up and my shoulder problem from before the surgery seems to be much worse<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=6315\" target=\"_blank\">anxiety<\/a> attacks and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=6365\" target=\"_blank\">crying<\/a> jags<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>He reassured me that the stitches look fine, and said I could put anti-itch salve on them. &#8220;The incision killed off those nerve endings, so you will always be numb there. But the feeling will come back all around it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He was not willing to give me any more Percocet or Valium for the pain and anxiety, because they are so highly addictive. The Valium, he said, &#8220;should only be given to you in the hospital when someone is right there to monitor your response and control how often it&#8217;s taken.&#8221; I didn&#8217;t tell him that at discharge they&#8217;d given me a bottle of both drugs\u00a0to take home &#8211; and that I still had some.<\/p>\n<p>For the anxiety and crying, he said, &#8220;Do you know what will cure that?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Yes,&#8221; I said. &#8220;Time.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s right,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Your brain&#8217;s just been through a trauma and it takes some time to settle down again.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I told him that I&#8217;d been briefed on this by a friend who was a psychiatrist.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; he said, &#8220;we can give you anti-depressants, along with an anti-anxiety drug similar to Valium.&#8221; He explained that my brain would need the anti-depressants to maintain a baseline, and then the anti-anxiety drugs could be used to cope with occasional attacks.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d need to be on the anti-depressants for three months at the very least, but probably six to nine months &#8211; &#8220;That&#8217;s what the research shows is most effective in these cases.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Since this is just what my psychiatrist friend\u00a0had told me, I was prepared for it.<\/p>\n<p>But I still felt disappointed in the idea of taking anti-depressants. It seemed like a defeat, after all these years of managing depression on my own, without drugs.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Can I wait awhile before I start this?&#8221; I said. &#8220;If the anxiety is better, maybe I can just wait this out?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He looked at me, then said, &#8220;I think you&#8217;re delaying the inevitable &#8211; but, sure. You can wait a week and see.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We scheduled an\u00a0appointment for a month from today. I went and got the prescription filled.<\/p>\n<p>I brought them home and looked at them.<\/p>\n<p>My will climbed out of its hole and sat upright. A little wobbly. But there. Saying, &#8220;No.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I talked to Tom, and he agreed that I was right to give myself a week.<\/p>\n<p>I made it all these years without anti-depressants. I can do it.<\/p>\n<p>The cure is time.<\/p>\n<p>Today&#8217;s penny is a 1993, the year that I mark as having mastered depression.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The surgeons are done with me. Today I turned myself in\u00a0at the office of the primary care doctor. My usual doc was out of the country, so I went to\u00a0his partner. I wasn&#8217;t too sure about going to a stranger. But I&#8217;m anxious to get some closer-to-home follow-up on the daily trials I&#8217;ve been dealing &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=6757\" class=\"more-link\">read more <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">More pills??<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6827,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[46,491,442,656,654,83,657,62,20],"class_list":["post-6757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-46","tag-anxiety","tag-depression","tag-doctor","tag-medicine","tag-pain","tag-scalp","tag-time","tag-tom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6757"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6831,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6757\/revisions\/6831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}