September Blahs

I don't talk about it much--partly because I don't talk about myself a lot to begin with and partly because I use LJ, to some extent, as a form of escapism--but one of my ongoing health problems is mild to moderate depression. (The other one was never diagnosed--I'm pretty sure that wacky brain chemistry can't make you run a fever for a year. Or maybe it can. Who knows?) I guess everyone has their cross to bear and this particular one is mine. There isn't a whole heckuva lot that anyone can do about it. When things got unusually bad a number of years ago, I was prescribed many different medications (not all at once!), and my doctor and I discovered that I am the Side Effects Queen of the Universe. It got to the point where I made a game out of it: whenever I started a new one, I'd take it for a week or two before reading the package insert, keep track of all the new and exciting side effects I was experiencing, then compare them to the lists from clinical trials, and check off just about all of them. (I think the only one I didn't get was priapism. If you don't know what that is, you can just look it up for yourself.) It's nice to be good at something, I suppose.

Anyway, it turns out that I can't take SSRI's at all (side effects of DOOM). My flavour of depression includes insomnia, which therefore excludes most of the non-SSRI's. Effexor worked for a while, but the withdrawal symptoms I went through coming off of it were so incredibly unpleasant that I will have to be hospitalized before going near it again. Which leaves me with Remeron, which helps a little, but has a tendency to stoke up my appetite like whoa while simultaneously shutting down my metabolism. I gained over one-third of my body weight within about six months when I went on it the first time, and then lost most of that--without even trying--in less than three weeks after stopping taking it.

Clearly, the science of brain chemistry--or, at least, my brain chemistry--has a long way to go.

This is all a very long-winded prelude to an explanation of why I haven't been around here much lately (I was a grad student for about a hundred years--I've been trained to be long-winded): I go into an annual anxiety-riddled slump at ::checks watch:: yep, just about this time every year. Starts about mid-August, lasts until around October. Good times. My doctor thinks it's due to the rapidly changing sunlight levels--many of her other patients have the same problem. I don't have Seasonal Affective Disorder--in fact, I rather like the huddle-in-my-cave feeling of winter. But getting from summer to the cave-huddling part is, well, problematic.

I still log into LJ most days, and it gives me great comfort to do so. So I'm still here and still reading, just being kinda quiet. Once this latest period of subdued navel gazing passes, I'll be back. I might even have bought a house by then, which will give me a nicer cave to huddle in this winter. :-)

And that's all I have to say about that. /gump

I did have a good time at SFX last Sunday; post and pics of Gaius-related glee to follow.

Holy heck, we're having such a thunderstorm right now. I'm expecting to see an ark float by any minute.