Irritations

Hello! I'm back! I know I've been gone for what seems like forever. There have been... issues. Boy HOWDY, have there been issues. Let's start with the biggest one.
Several months ago I started a new medication. One that was supposed to help regulate mood and keep the brain chemistry in the right balance. I suppose it did those things, but at some expense. The list of side effects that came with the meds was daunting. And I ended up with some of the most awful ones. Extreme lethargy (we're talking tired ALL THE TIME). Increased sweating (as if I didn't already sweat too much). And last but certainly not least, diarrhea. Unpredictable, explosive, and extremely unpleasant.
The reasons I switched to it were because I wasn't happy with the medication I had been taking and also the new one was only $4. As opposed to the $96 I had previously been paying.
I stopped taking my meds. I stopped because I was tired of being tired. Because I couldn't go anywhere for several hours after taking it for fear of shitting my pants. I stopped taking them and then things started to get bad.
I got... irritable. Irritable like just-woken-up-haven't-had-caffeine-yet-PMS times like a thousand. It was... not fun for me. I can't imagine that I was much fun to be around. I wasn't sleeping well. I gained twenty pounds (which only irritated me more).
So the other day Mama Bird and I were discussing this and I made an appointment with my doctor. I get to see her in two weeks. In the mean time I'm going to New Mexico. A twenty four hour train ride sounds like just the thing for an irritated mess, right? Two days after I made the appointment it dawned on me that I could call my doctor and ask her if she could phone in a prescription of my OLD meds so that I wouldn't kill anyone on the train. She did and I've been taking them for five or six days now. Already things are better.
The meds I'm taking now are actually different from the old old ones. Before I was taking two pills in the morning and they were sustained release. This meant that I was getting a double dose in the morning and petered out to nothing in the evenings. The NEW old meds are the same drug, but one pill that is also sustained release, but sustained for the whole day.
The new meds cost $117 a month, and that's not great, but at least I'm no more irritated than the next person now.

I think I've explained the whole brain chemistry thing as it pertains to me before here, but I'm gonna do it again.
I have Neurofibromatosis (NF). And a non-verbal learning disorder (NLD). Because of the NF, the nerves in my brain are slightly compromised. Imagine that nerves are like electrical wires, and those wires have that protective sheath insulating them. Okay, the insulation on the wires in my brain? Full of holes. It's not supposed to be like that. Because it's like that, I use more of a specific brain chemical than I make. Because of all that, I have the NLD. Fun isn't it? The meds I take balance all that out. They slow down my re-uptake of the chemical, so there's enough to go around.
At least that's how I understand it. But my brain is wired weird, so I might be wrong,

It's possible that my lack of posting has been because of the imbalance I've been experiencing. We'll see.

--Little Bird is (re)medicated