Merry Meds

Today I had a phone call from my psychiatrist. I mean, wow! She's never phoned me before. You'd have to threatening to open a vein just to get an appointment usually. Okay, slight exaggeration, poetic licence.

She rang about my lithium levels. I'm on some kind of roller coaster when it comes to my lithium recently. My dosage was 1000mg, then increased to 1200mg, then decreased back down to 1000mg. Today she wants me to decrease further, to 900mg. These changes are all over the last couple of months. I understand the changes to a certain degree, lithium has a very narrow therapeutic range and can be harmful if taken outside of this range. Since I've been back on 1000mg my blood level has been at 1.0 which is bang on the topmost range.

The upshot of all this, and my cause for concern, is that I'll be dropping to 900mg which is a lower dose than I've been on for several years. Scary. It's no good only looking at the negative side of this, there are positives too. The shakiness in my hands (and sometimes whole body) should reduce, maybe even stop alltogether, who knows. My thyroid has gone a bit weird too over the last few months, so I'm thinking if that's connected to the increased lithium, then maybe that will fall back into line too. Lithium affected my thyroid a couple of years ago for quite a while.

I've not been wanting to go out of the house again. We had two funerals to go to, on the same day recently. I didn't go to either of them and I really regret this, as I knew I would. One was a friend I hadn't seen for a while but was in regular contact with on facebook and the other was the daughter of a friend.

Why don't I want to go out? I think the main reason is that I don't want to talk to anyone. I can handle getting ready, apart from the whole 'nothing fits me' thing; and I can handle driving, parking, shopping, paying at the checkout. It's the social side of things that I just can't handle. It's always been this way. When it was my job to talk to people, no problem. Put me in a social situation and I just can't do it. My stress levels go through the roof. For me it's not 'stranger danger' but more a case of 'family phobia'!