Northward Midget

Tag: MAOI

  • Gonna Wash That Grey Right Outta My Head

    No. Not really. It ain’t going anywhere, is it? It’s part of me. To “cure” myself would be to kill my self, and I don’t want that now, do I?

    MAOI is done. See the log up top for the final entry. Next up is “Viibryd.” As noted there, WTF? That’s one hell of a random-number-generated space-name. Sounds like something my character would be smuggling in my Star Wars campaign.

    I haven’t bothered to look it up. What’s the point? Probably the same as the others.

    Over Thanksgiving, I went to West Virginia. Although I’d brought the girls down before, that was the first time without any of my real self-produced family coming along. I felt profoundly sad and out of place. Lay on the couch after the turkey.

    Christmas went surprisingly fantastic with regards to the girls. They didn’t seem to miss a beat, or me. I was afraid there’d be some great trauma when they woke up on Christmas morning and I wasn’t there with mommy to open the presents, but apparently not.

    They came over on Christmas Eve morning and opened my gifts to them. Highlights were Ani’s playable guitar shirt from ThinkGeek, and Celyn’s decorate-able treasure chest. Only three or four hours with them, and then I was off to West Virginia again.

    The day after Christmas, a friend of the family visited.

    A sexy friend of the family.

    I felt old.

    I left soon after they did. Mom cried. She always cries. I had to get away. Had to leave there. It didn’t feel right. I didn’t want the unconditional love of family. I wanted to get back to my man-cave apartment and drink myself into oblivion. So, I drove.

    On the way back, I emailed an old PlentyOfFish.com contact on a whim. We made a date. We’ve been seeing each other exclusively since then. She’s nice, smart, sexy, and 38, so I don’t need to bother with determining whether or not I should feel guilty about dating twenty-somethings.

    The role-playing has been going well. Still every first and third Saturday. Just did a write up on the previous session. My character, Kelyn, has become a full-blown sociopath. The end scene had him ready to blow a couple of his fellow party members and a few other “innocents” out the airlock.

    Speaking of sociopathy…

    I had my first appointment with he who would become my new therapist. A real psychologist, not a licensed clinical social worker. That sounds snarky. Sincerely, I did appreciate what the previous therapist had to offer, but I didn’t need it. I don’t need someone to talk to, and I certainly don’t need someone to affirm my questionable life choices. As I’ve told my friends and others: I’d have to rape someone to get criticism from her. Not just anyone, either. A baby. With Downs.

    So, this new fellow. At first, Donald Sutherland. Then, Ian McKellan. I even cajoled him into saying, “You shall not pass!”

    His initial diagnosis is “depersonalization disorder.” That’s a new one, huh? It’s close to sociopathy, but more a learned or trauma-induced behaviour. He mentioned he’d watched “Mad Men” and recognized the lead character as having it.

    And me.

    I tried to find the book he mentioned at Barnes and Noble. Not in stock. “Finding Unreality” or somesuch. 1996, co-authored by a doctor and her patient.

    I got more out of my hour-ish with him than I did from my full run with the prior therapist.

    I’m looking forward to seeing him again. He has the spark. He knows things, sees things. He speaks on my level. He appreciates my wit. Not quite as a consumer, but perhaps as a peer.

    So, I am in the Washout til Friday. Off the MAOI. As I mentioned in the MAOI log, it’s not nearly as bad as it was with the SSRI/SNRI. However, lately, particularly today, I’ve felt low — low dipping precariously close to the dark Empty.

    The gin and tonic and Sprite and sour mix seem to have held it at bay for the time being.

    Just a few days left.

    I’m doing alright.

    I still wonder why the wife did what she did — why she sacrificed the family for some vain pursuit of “happiness”. I want to know the timeline, the sequence of events, as related by her, that led to the demise of our marriage and our family. I still don’t know.

    I guess that was the problem.

    I never knew.

    Never saw it coming.

    Until it was gone.

  • From Parnate to Nardil

    Last week my doctor switched me from Parnate (tranylcypromine) to Nardil (phenelzine).

     

    At least it’s easier to spell.

    Yesterday at work my friends kept asking if I was high.  I was very tired, maybe slightly euphoric in that tired kind of way.  Not a particularly pleasant high, unless all I had to do was sit in the sun.  Not if I had to correct the code of others in the middle of a deploy.

    After work, I had a date at the pub up the hill.  I don’t know how it went.  It seemed fine to me.  I don’t think I did or said anything particularly offensive, as I am wont to do.   I like her, she’s attractive, was fun to talk and be with.  It was a good time, and then it ended.

    Eh, it was a Monday night.  Whaddya gonna do.

    Nardil isn’t making me any happier.  On the contrary, I feel somewhat worse than when I was on a steady flow of the former MAOI.

    I’ve got to admit a gross violation of the suggested dietary restrictions for MAOI and any other anti-depressant.

    I consume alcohol daily.  Sometimes not a lot, just a beer or two.  Sometimes an awful lot (a bottle of wine or a bottle of whiskey apportioned in overpriced servings), sometimes nothing at all.  But I do it, and I know I’m not supposed to, but fuck that.

    It’s the only thing that makes me feel “good” at the moment.

    So, I’m not giving that up.  It isn’t going to happen.  Same with smoking, although that doesn’t affect the anti-depressants.

    Maybe Nardil is less tolerant of alcohol than Parnate.  I’ve read bad things about most of its “hydrazine” class being recalled due to hepatoxicity.

    In any case.

    Sometimes.

    I realize, where I’ve landed.

    And, although I say I am happier than I ever was when married, and in a sense, I really am, when compared to the loveless marriage of the past few years, and others think so, too.

    Sometimes.

    I wonder.

    Where is my beautiful wife?  Where are my beautiful girls?  Why am I all alone?

    Why am I fucking crying?

     

     

  • MAOI Update and the Syndrome With the Funny Name

    No new MAOI dosage, no more late-night milk-spilling slapstick, and no better feelings.  To be fair to the meds, the past month has been a stressful one.  The wife thinks I have Asperger Syndrome.  (Henceforth “AS” for brevity and to avoid the “ass-burger” images.) It fits my career, lifestyle, and personality, and I’ve suspected it myself.

    Unfortunately, if it’s AS and not “just” depression and anxiety, the behavior that causes us so much domestic strife is not so much a symptom of those mental diseases as it is a part of who I am and will always be — more like Tourette Syndrome.  I cannot relate to other “normal” (neurotypical or “NT” in the AS lingo) people.  There’s no pill to make me do so.  (Although I know a certain liquid that helps tremendously.)

    Thus, my condition is no longer something I can overcome through therapy and medication, but something that is just part of who I am.  Hell, AS people seem to embrace it almost as much as the radical fringe of the deaf community embrace their lack of hearing.

    That’s not to say therapy can’t help me deal with others, but now it’s entirely a matter of therapy (and my willingness to make that effort) and not medication and therapy in conjunction dealing with the underlying problem and the symptoms going away.  I’ll still need the medication for the comorbid bedfellows of severe depression and anxiety, but it’s not going to make me into the man she wants me to be.

    Is that the man I want to be?  I want to be happy, I want to sympathetic if not empathetic towards my loved ones.  I want to be a “good” husband and father.  However, before all this, before my attachments, I never wanted any attachments.  Yet, I was lonely — but was it lonely for relationships, or lonely for physical intimacy, for sex?

    When I was a kid, a lonely dateless high-school kid, I dreamt of just skipping ahead in time with some girl to the family and the white-picket fence.  Towards the end of high school and into college, as I became more depressed, well, I don’t know what I wanted then.  I was still lonely, God wasn’t returning my messages, and I became an atheist.  Once I found the Internet and started actually interacting with girls(!), at least virtually, I became vehemently against marriage and kids and the rest.

    But, it happened.  Maybe, knowing who I was, I should have objected, but who I was (and still am) is also someone who avoids conflict (and change, to a degree) at all costs.

    Anyway, what was this about?  The title says an MAOI update.  I see my psychiatrist tomorrow and I’ll ask him about AS.  I’ll also give my 1-10 “how do you feel” scale and downgrade it from last time’s six to a four or less.  I don’t know how he’ll react to that.  MAOI is kind of the end of the line for me on the medication train.  I don’t want to switch to something new, primarily because it means being off everything for two weeks, then allowing the new stuff another month or so to start working.  Nevertheless, 40MG a day is still a pretty low dose, he says, so maybe he’ll try something higher before giving up.

    As for AS, I mentioned it to my therapist and she said that people with AS usually can’t function as well as I do.  That threw me, because AS is on the “high-functioning” spectrum of autism and plenty of people live successful and fulfilling(?) lives with it.  She didn’t think my psychiatrist would agree with the wife’s “diagnosis.”  In any case, she said she’d mention it to him and look into any local therapists or psychologists who have experience with it.  We’ll see.

    Back to the MAOI for a moment before closing.  I’ve done remarkably well with it, physically.  The dietary restrictions aren’t really so bad, and I haven’t made any big slips or had any hypertensive crises.  Plus, last night, I took the kids across the street to their friend’s house for a bonfire his parents were having.  I wrote about one of those nights before, and this one was similarly satisfying — and booze-infused.  The upside of that side is that I had two beers and at least three cocktails and the only effect was my feeling relaxed and socially comfortable.

    Plus, the kids had a great time.  We didn’t go home until 10:30PM.  They played hide-and-seek with flashlights, and the girls put on a couple of their unique plays, with an encore of “The Mummy.”  The eldest is one demanding director, nay — auteur.  Her younger sister gets the parts of the vampire, the mummy, the ghost, the ghoul, the … hunchback.  And, of course, all the male roles.

    So, that’s life right now as we enter the summer season.  Things will probably be a lot different when the girls start school in the fall.  The anxiety is about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, and the unknown encounters on the path from here to there.