Guess How Many Pills I Take Everyday. It is 7.

So. The next chapter in the saga of chemical substances that are being pumped in to my body.

I was feeling like the nortriptyline (a tricyclic used for treating chronic pain for those of you playing at home) was making me feel crazy and distressed. It has a suicidal ideation warning on the bottle, but the way I was feeling wasn't exactly depression. One of the symptoms of rheumatic conditions is depression, and it runs rampant through my family. Me and clinical depression are not what I would call old friends, but we are certainly old acquaintances. It was more like the sort of manic emotional state that you (okay, I) experience right before a period starts. You know, fine for a while and then tetchy and angry, and then despairing and fatalistic. Unable to concentrate on large quantities of anything. Extremely tired and unable to cope with people or things. Looking at the dishes like a mountain too high to climb. If you had never experienced clinical depression you might think that was what was going on.

Anyhow, so I emailed my doctor and said "get me off this crap, and make it snappy" and he emailed me back saying "no, we will just put you on another thing on top of it and that will solve the problem". I was FURIOUS. I actually spent a week or so sitting on it because I couldn't quite figure out what to say that didn't use curse words and would fit in the 1000 character limit that Kaiser imposes on it's emails. I also couldn't do research, because I would type something in to google and then look at the 11,735 related hits... and my mind would just shut right down and I would need to go take a nap and a shot. In the end I had to have my (poor sweet wonderful) husband research it for me and then cut and paste relevant bits of information, with highlighted sections so I would know what I needed to look at first, and send it to me as an email.
 Then I took about five hours trying to whittle down an email to a few talking points. And then I had my husband look it over to make sure it was intelligible. And finally, at 1am one morning, I hit send and off it went.
The bad news is I am now on ANOTHER !@#$ing drug on top of my original drugs. The good news is that I have been taking it for three days and feel a lot better (mentally, anyway) already. Cons: couldn't sleep last night which wasn't awesome. Supposed to make me gain even more weight. Can't wait to see how wide my ass can actually get before I snap in half. Pros: this is supposed to help with the pain as well as with the crazy. It's basically low-dose zoloft which is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and interacts with the tricylic (theoretically) to decrease pain and smack down some of the side effects.
We shall see.