I'm not dead

Sorry to all of you my faithful readers. Some of you that know me in the real world have told me you miss my blog. I apologize. Life just kinda got turned on it's head there for a while.

To answer the question about what happened with the meds. That's an interesting story, one that brought me full circle back to where I started from.

I started taking Adderall. The first three days were interesting. I felt a little more aggitated than I normaly do, but definitely more focused, and even though I was only sleeping about 6 hours a night I woke up feeling completely rested. My friends said I seemed calmer, and more relaxed. If it stayed like that it would have been cool, but unfortunately it went rapidly downhill from there. Within a week I was so exhausted by 4 pm that I had to take a nap daily. Not so cool when I have three kids that need to get homework done around that same time. It also cut into my blogging time. Then the foot cramps I get about once a week started happening about once or twice a day. Sometimes in the middle of the night and waking me up, and sometimes lasting as long as 30 minutes, even while walking around. I had my next appointment with the doctor at three weeks and after I told him what kind of stuff was going on he decided to try me on Strattera.

Strattera has a tendency to make you sleepy, so it's usually recommended to take it at night before bed. I took the first pill that night and woke up sooooooo depressed. It was not cool. I was crying for no reason other than I was crying. I couldn't get out of bed and just wanted to sleep all day. Either that or cry some more. My husband was out of town and I called him for support. The conversation went like this:

him: why are you crying?
me: I don't know
him: well you have to be upset about something
me: no, I'm really not
him: then why are you crying
me: I don't know
him: that's the craziest thing I've ever heard

Needless to say, I didn't take any more of that stuff.

I was also seeing a therapist during that month. I left most every appointment feeling like all he said was "you already know what to do, you just need to do it". He told me I needed to keep a detailed calendar, I do that. He told me I needed to have systems and routines in place so that I don't forget things, I already do have a lot of them. The rest of the things he told me I should be doing are things I have been doing with Kimberly for years. He told me to transfer that knowledge and make it work for me. There were a few nuggets of wisdom I didn't have already, but the majority of it was "you have managed to be quite successful thus far, and have developed some rather ingenious coping mechanisms, you just need to expand on those".

So after all that I have this realization. Yes, I have ADD, but just like I have been telling myself for the last few years, I manage it pretty well without meds. Sure I drink a 6 pack of soda a day, and sometimes forget where I parked my car, but in general, I'm not too much of a screw up.

So thank my friend Bethany for starting her own blog and sending me a link to it for getting me signed back onto blogger. Once I was here, it wasn't hard to write something. I'm going out of town for the weekend, but hopefully I'll remember to sign in on Monday and tell you about it.