This is going to be some brief musing on medication and how it feels. This is both to help you understand the way I’m feeling as I write all of this, and also because it may come in handy for you or someone else one day.
I’d never taken any meds for my mental health before and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m still not.
As of Wednesday At The Maudsley, I was taking:
Mirtazapine 15mg – once a day, at night (this increased to 30mg after a week; I’m currently taking 30mg and am likely to go up to 45mg next week)
Zopiclone 7.5mg – once a day at night
Clonazepam – 0.5mg – as needed. Initially no more than 4 in any given day, reducing to no more than 2 a day from last week.
The first thing to let you know is that each of the EMPs that I’ve talked to about these meds has let me know that all of these pills are impossible to overdose on and will just make me feel very, very sick if I try. I’ve decided not to call their bluff.
Mirtazapine is my anti-depressant. I’m not really sure it’s working. I mean, I’m still here, so who knows how I’d feel without it, but I’m not exactly turning cartwheels at the prospect of another day on earth yet.
Either the Mirtazapine or the Zopiclone definitely works to send me to sleep though. Knocked out, no questions asked, until an alarm wakes me up. My Fitbit sleep tracker is delighted. I’ve always been a good sleeper – apart from an alarming 6 months at university when I developed raging insomnia in my second year, to the extent that I was permanently excused from any pre-10am lectures or tutorials FOR THE REST OF MY DEGREE – but during lockdown had only averaged 5 hours or so a night. Whilst that may seem like blissful slumber to any parents reading this, I’m an 8-hour girl, as a preference.
The best thing about the pills is that I’ve stopped waking up in the middle of the night. Those hours of relentless darkness between 2 and 5am, where all I could think about was everything I couldn’t fix. And The Guy. Over and over, churning stuff through my head. It still happens during the day, but at least that inky window of pre-dawn anguish has ceased for now.
Also, at night, I become aware of the rigid tension that I’m constantly carrying throughout my body. I don’t realise how clenched all of me is until I go to bed, relax a little and realise that all my muscles are aching in a way that would suggest a far less sedentary life than my current one. Having previously done 3+ hours of yoga a day, several times a week, in my pre-Lockdown existence, I’m now lethargic and easily tired. EMPs advise me that this is the depression, rather than the pills.
In spite of my lack of movement, I’m still pretty thin. Again, this is apparently the depression. I’ve deliberately been put on Mirtazapine (whose name I absolutely, positively cannot ever remember – more on this below) as it stimulates appetite. I’m eating, but I can’t really be bothered a lot of the time. I’m from a very ‘groomed’ family – I remember us all wafting in to my granddad’s funeral, the women of the tribe looking like we’d just been freshly hatched from a nearby salon – so I’m still doing my hair and nails and everything. People tell me – sometimes with more of an edge than I’d like – that I look remarkably, frustratingly well for someone in crisis. So I guess there’s that.
Whilst there aren’t any pills (yet) that can make me forget The Guy or the utter futility of attempting to rebuild my life, the Clonazepam definitely gives it the good ol’ college try. 2 of those and I either fall asleep within 10 minutes or everything blurs around the edges for a few hours. Both I and the NHS are keen that I not take too many of these for too long, but they are handy when everything starts to press in a little too hard on me.
Overall, I’m walking around feeling foggy and thick-tongued most of the time. I’m slower than I was, my brain slightly scrambled. When I’m speaking, where I’ve always been so fluent, now I find the words that I want are just slightly out of my grasp. I’m mentally stretching all the time, to make the sentences that I want to make come out of my mouth. I usually speak very quickly, my brain whirring at speed and my tongue keeping up, firing out eloquent, perfectly crafted sentences that dazzle and entertain. I stammer now, and stumble over words, even though they’re slower to come to me.
My short term memory is also shot. My memory is legendary – to the extent that my recollection of events is nearly always the one that is believed, often unquestioningly. That’s always been a little disconcerting. It would have been more disconcerting if I weren’t absolutely convinced of myself 99% of the time, as I always have been, until now. That’s one of the most significant things that I think I’ve lost in all of this – I’ve always been so self-possessed, so self-reliant, so fucking sure of everything. And now, all I’m really sure of is that I don’t want to stick around to find out how much worse life is going to get. As above, I’m not convinced that the anti-depressants are working quite yet.
I’m so reliant on my memory that I’m not in the habit of writing things down. As a result, sometimes my phone rings with an appointment with an EMP that I’ve totally forgotten about, or thought was at an entirely different time. It’s disorientating. I’ve had to accept that I’m not who I was right now and have got up close and personal with the Calendar function in my phone.
Friends remind me of things that have happened, times that I’ve seen them since The Crisis that I have genuinely no memory of, or only fragments. Angharad assures me that she and I ate kebabs together one night in Week One of The Crisis. I dimly remember a kebab wrapper and an issue with her Deliveroo account, but nothing else. My friend Hash reminds me of a phone call we had to resurrect this blog. I don’t remember it, but the evidence that we had it is on the screen right in front of me now. It’s frightening. I feel that I’m slipping away, along with the memories.
Dr Charlie from the Maudsley has advised me that this scattered thinking – which does pre-date The Crisis by severe months – and the memory loss are not recognised side-effects of any of the drugs that I’m taking. Rather, they are the indicator of a severe depression. It’s strange to hear this – and I trust Dr Charlie, so when I hear it, I believe it. I still don’t feel like I’m mentally ill. Just that I’m different to how I was. Hopeless. Less capable. And with no capacity to fix my shit.
Basically, I’m operating at around 70% of my usual faculties and I don’t much like it. My friends joke that now I’m just like everybody else – haha!
I used to do the fucking jokes. And they were funnier.
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