Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Day 30 on Lexapro

Day 7 on Lamictal

written ?? days later.

posted 2 weeks later.

Once was a thought inside my head/
Before I reached 30, I’d be dead/
But somehow on and on I go/
I keep on rolling with the flow.

– Charlie Rich, Rolling with the Flow

This morning when I went to meet my mom, she handed me her credit card.

“Fill up your tank. We may have to evacuate soon,” she said.

I was glad to fill up my tank but didn’t think we’d really be leaving. I didn’t say that, though. I just thanked her and went to work.

On this day, my boss was pleased. He said I had been smiling more. When I was sick, I know he was concerned. He cares about me very much.

While at work, I noticed a bruise on my left arm. Perhaps the size of a nickel or quarter. Or somewhere in between. It was a fairly light bruise. I didn’t know how I got it, but because I am always bumping into things, I thought it was possible I may have bruised myself without knowing it. The only thing that concerned me was that I had noticed a very similar bruise on my right arm the week before. Even E. Liz had noticed that one. She had asked me about it. I didn’t know the origin of that one either. And this day, when I noticed the bruise on my left arm, I decided not to pay any attention to it. I didn’t want to be a hypochondriac.

This was another day Em was going to spend the night with Grandma, so I decided to accomplish some things I hadn’t gotten around to for one reason or other. First, I had to pay the rent. The past several months the rent has been impressively late. As a result, I’ve had to pay a late fee. The latest you can pay late rent without getting in real trouble is the 10th of the month. This day was the 10th. This is the last month, though, I will have to pay my rent late. I am finally getting caught up on my bills. Paying late rent has been a major financial setback and very frustrating. This day, though, it was freeing to know that soon I wouldn’t have to worry about not having enough money. Things were finally getting back on track in so many ways. The idea that things were getting done gave me the courage and energy to accomplish other things as well. For example, I asked the management to send someone to change the batteries in our smoke detectors. That was something that desperately needed to be done. For several weeks, in the thick of my sickness, the alarms had been beeping. I had never taken care of the problem. Unsafe, I know. Because I easily ignore exterior noise, I had ceased to notice them. It was usually only when I was on the phone with someone that they reminded me I still hadn’t gotten the batteries changed.

“Just tell the management you need someone to come and change them for you,” various friends would suggest.

“Okay,” I would agree.

But I couldn’t ask them to come. My house wasn’t clean. The rent wasn’t paid. They just couldn’t come.

This day, though, my house was fairly clean. My rent was paid.

So I asked if they would come. She said they certainly would.

And, I told them we needed someone to come out and spray our apartment for ants.

Since I had been sick, the ant problem had gotten out of control. Out of control. It was awful. There had been days when I hadn’t had the energy to clean up food. Sometimes, food was left out all night. Other times, it was left for days.

And because the house wasn’t clean and the rent wasn’t paid, I felt like I couldn’t ask them to come and spray either.

But, this day, I asked them to please come and help.

She said they certainly would.

“When do you think they’ll come?” I asked.

She said they would come the next day — that the exterminators were on property every Thursday. My heart leapt. In time for Em’s party. Because two people had RSVP’ed that day, I thought maybe we’d have the party. It seemed that people didn’t think the hurricane was headed our way after all.

When I got home, I contacted my mom.

“I think the party’s still on,” I told her. “People are still telling me they’ll still come.”

She was wary, but I was convinced.

“I think it’s just going to rain,” I said. “I think people will still come even if it rains. Maybe not as many people, but we’ll probably still have a nice party anyway.”

After hanging up, I changed into some shorts and a t-shirt and got online. I pulled my feet up and crossed them underneath me, as I always do when I am sitting in my office chair. It was then that I noticed the big black spot underneath my right knee. Grease, I thought. So I attempted to wipe it off. But it did not go away.

It was then I realized it was a bruise. An awfully nasty bruise.

I had never had a bruise like this before. It was black and had blood at the top. And the strangest part is I had no idea where it came from. Even bruises that had formed as the result of painful incidents had not looked as formidable as this. All of a sudden, the bruises on my arms seemed more curious.

I asked E. Liz, who was online, what she thought.

Call your doctor, she said.

At that point, I began to search online for possible causes of the bruise. My first thought was that the medication may have had something to do with it.

So I Googled “Black Bruise Lamictal Lexapro side effects.” [Enter]

One of the first sites I found listed black bruises as a side effect of Lexapro. Basically, it said something along the lines that if you have a strange black bruise, you should call your doctor immediately.

My heart sunk. Lexapro had been working so well for me with my depression symptoms. I had come so far since I started it exactly a month before. I did not want to start over with getting adjusted on my meds. I did not want to have to be weaned from it. I didn’t want to have to try to find something else that worked instead. Why, why, why?

Let me say at this point that I love Lexapro. It has worked so well for me. If this is a negative side effect of this medication, it is a personal misfortune. Because every person’s body chemistry is unique, the way these medications react affects each person differently. As a result, different medications are inevitably more helpful for some people than others. Even medications that are used to treat the same thing. It is not an easy quest to find the perfect cocktail to treat each person. And even if a medication works beautifully for a person, the side effects may make the medicine not work for them after all.

I was so frustrated.

So, I called the doctor. I scheduled an appointment for the next day at 2:30pm. Right after work.

At that point, I began calling all of my sopranos, hoping they’d offer a prayer for me at choir rehearsal that evening. I finally got to talk to two of them and they agreed that prayers would be requested. Then I called my boss. I told him about the bruise and my doctor’s appointment. He told me if I needed to take an earlier appointment, I should. I told him I thought I would be okay.

Some friends suggested I stop taking the Lexapro immediately. The only problem was, I didn’t want to go off it suddenly. When I did the same with Paxil, I had suffered horrible withdrawals. Painful withdrawals. It wouldn’t hurt to take it one more night. I would see what the doctor said the next day and follow his directions then.

Then I called and told my mother. It was at that point she mentioned that she and my dad may be evacuating soon and that I needed to consider doing the same.

“I don’t have time for that,” I told her. “And I don’t have the money. I can’t handle that kind of stress. If a hurricane comes here, I am going to go buy a lawn chair and sit outside and wait for it.”

It wasn’t long, though, before I received an email from the music secretary at our church saying that minimal services would be held on Sunday. No hymnals. No choir.

Then I started hearing that schools were suspending normally scheduled classes and that some people were being asked not to come into work. The doctor’s office then called and said he really wanted to see me, but requested I come in at 10:30am instead.

At around 5pm, I was too tired to stay awake. So, I took a Tylenol PM in hopes of taking a nap and getting up with enough energy to finish cleaning the house. I slept soundly until around 8pm.

Then, my mother called again. She said they were almost certainly evacuating. After a bit of waffling and investigation, it hit me. I would have to evacuate, too. The only question was when I would decide to go.

You see, I am kind of famous for my early evacuating. I pride myself on it.

This night, I was chatting with three different friends online.

Initially, I told them I thought I would evacuate immediately after my doctor’s appointment the next afternoon. Then, when they moved my appointment up, I told them I would leave immediately following my appointment the next morning.

But I still got the feeling that wouldn’t be early enough. I couldn’t stand the thought of being stuck in the evacuation traffic. So, I typed to all three friends that I was thinking I would forego my doctor’s appointment and leave that night. None of them thought that was a good idea. They were all concerned about my bruise. I was concerned about the bruise, too, but more concerned about the possible traffic. No contraflow for me.

It was then I hesitantly sent out a message to all of Em’s party guests saying the party would be rescheduled for a later date due to the fact I was not a “big fan of hurricanes” and that I thought it’d be such a shame if the guests got their cowboy boots all sopping wet.

I guess it was around 9:30pm that my parents and I decided we would all head to my cousin’s house north of Dallas. I was going to go on my own. They would follow a couple of hours behind. Em would ride with them.

I started to do minimal preparations, including packing and unplugging the computer (the CPU, my Wacom tablet, and the extra hard drive) and moving it to a higher shelf in my closet. Had the computer not been in  front of my window, I might not have moved it at all. Even though we were leaving, I still wasn’t very concerned.

While preparing to leave, my cousin called. She was laughing about how I had been the earliest to arrive at her house during Hurricane Rita. She thought I was so smart to evacuate when I did, and was impressed that I was doing the same thing again.

“Yes, of course,” I told her. “I can’t stand the thought of being stuck in that traffic.”

I had remembered evacuating during Hurricane Rita and how my husband and I had driven Baby Em to my cousin’s house in the middle of the night. I remembered the thrill I felt as we drove freely down the highway, not worrying about traffic. We had lived right on the coast at that time and I had packed up everything we had, wrapped it in plastic and shoved it in both of our larger closets. I had pushed the beds up against the doors and moved the couch into our kitchen. That time, nothing had happened. Rita had missed us completely. I thought the same thing might happen this time, but I’m not big on sticking around to find out. And I had promised Em I wouldn’t make her stay.

So, I took a shower, grabbed Feta the rat, and loaded everything.

When I got in the car, it was 11pm exactly. I drove until I got to the highway and then it hit me. I shouldn’t be driving that distance alone. Especially after not having felt well for so long.

And I had told Em I would get her away from the hurricane. I should be the one, I thought, to stick to that promise.

So I called my parents and told them I was headed to their house. We were going to caravan.

It was midnight when we pulled out of their driveway, with Em strapped safely into her carseat behind me and my parents and their two dogs leading the way.

The ride was long and I was exhausted. At least I had already had a brief nap that evening. And I guessed I could take my Lexapro for a while longer. On the way I left a message with my doctor’s office letting them know we were evacuating and that I would not be at my appointment the next morning.

At around 2:50am, Amy texted me. She was concerned about me driving for so long in the middle of the night. At that point, I was fairly concerned, too. We were navigating dark roads winding through Mexia and Hillsboro and I could barely stay awake. As we drove, I noticed the motels in these small towns were already full. To keep me alert, Amy regaled me with stories of her Hatchie Bottoms, a meddlesome brother, and ice cream shops that did not serve ice cream. I laughed until I finally reached a dead zone that dropped our call for good. Talking to her gave me the strength to keep going, though. We did not reach my cousin’s house until 7am that morning.

When we did, I took the medication I was supposed to have taken the night before.