So here\'s something new: I\'ve never done this before. 

Blogging, that is. Which is a little ironic, seeing as I\'m an English major with too much time on her hands, but perhaps sometimes having too much time is as bad as having too much toilet paper — you know it\'s useful, but you just can\'t figure out how to use it when you don\'t need it.

I\'m writing this for two reasons: 1) I\'m hoping to get some therapeutic value from it, which might just be contained insanity, and 2) I\'m trying a new experiment with my meds. Of course, if you don\'t know anything about my meds, this won\'t make any sense at all, so I\'m going to have to preface this entire entry with a long paragraph about my drug cocktail….but that\'s the price you pay to let a bunch of strangers in on your messed up journey of life.

At the moment my diagnoses are dominant Bipolar I with subsidiary GAD and an unspecified sleep disorder the doctors THINK is narcolepsy, but, thanks to my anxiety, can\'t diagnose fully because I can\'t fall asleep at the testing center. Oh, I can fall asleep everywhere else — on trains, at work, at the movies, in the grocery store standing up in the frozen food aisle — but at the testing center? Haha. Nope. That being said, they\'re treating the symptoms as though I had narcolepsy, which is fine by me since the treatments seem to be working.

It should also be mentioned that thanks to all these problems, I\'ve been unemployed for almost two months, and have no insurance. Keep that in mind when I mention how many drugs I\'m taking…and consider that, though I get my prescriptions at K-Mart, how expensive all of this is. And that I\'m unemployed. And yet I need my meds to be "employable". Lovely catch-22.

Whew. So. Let\'s start from the top. For the Bipolar disorder I am taking Lithium 300mg 5x a day (these pills taste like monkeybutt, let me add), Depakote 500mg 2x a day, Risperdal 3mg once a day, and Wellbutrin SR 150mg once a day. For my anxiety I have a strange prescription — we broke down the dosage into .5mg tabs, which I take three times a day and twice before bed. And, finally, for the narcolepsy I have been taking prescribed methamphetamines (Adderall) 30mg 3x a day. Problem with the Adderall is you build up a tolerance to the stuff, so I keep having to increase my dosage. And, frankly, I like my heart. I would like it to NOT attack me and to continue beating normally. I don\'t want all this speed in my system, so we\'re working on trying to get me on Provigil, a drug that is also "speed", but which targets only the parts of the brain that cause sleepiness, rather than speeding up the whole body and causing aggression and irritability. Problem is, those pills are $500 a month, which I can\'t afford. On the other hand, the maker of the pills has a great program that allows some patients who meet certain income requirements to get them for free. My applicaiton\'s been sent in for that, so I can only hope….

So anyway, I\'ve been having this sleep issue lately (yeah, more sleep problems, JOY!) where at night I am very anxious and insomniac-ified. Problem is, I\'m terrified of being alone and despite my partner sleeping right next to me, I feel like I\'m completely stranded. This is not a nice feeling at 3 or 4 AM, and besides that it\'s making me sleep later in the day (until noon or so) and keeping me from getting things done around the house.

SO I have a theory. What if, when my partner leaves at the buttcrack of dawn (7:10 AM) I actually get up and take my Adderall and Xanax, and see if I can\'t stay awake all day? Maybe if I can do this, by the time the Adderall wears off at 8:00 PM, I\'ll be able to wind down and be sleepy enough to crash and burn for the rest of the night. Hopefully the Xanax will keep me sane enough to take the Adderall regularly, since unfortunately one of the side effects of taking lots of SPEED is being a little keyed up — and by a little I mean crawling out of my skin anxious. 

So this blog, in the beginning, will basically be a mini-look into my experiment and a chance for me to vent a little at people who probably aren\'t listening and who don\'t care….but hey, isn\'t that generally the purpose of blogs? I guess I wouldn\'t know, since I\'ve never had one…

That\'s all I\'ve got for now —

Penguins, over and out. 

😉