In the beginning.
So this is the first post.
Currently, I’m sitting at my computer at home off sick because I’ve started a new antidepressant medication. This is in the hopes that this new happy pill will stop me from shitting myself.
That’s right, I bet on a fart and lost and not only did I put a toot on black and it landed on red, this happened while I was at work.
After the wave of panic washed over me I did an initial cheek assessment and I surmised that it wasn’t a complete disaster only a modest squirt. I concluded I could make the journey from the smoking area out back, to the toilets on the first floor. I got there without incident, I didn’t even have to make passing small talk with anyone en route. Result.
Now for the matter of shamefully cleaning myself up.
I had to awkwardly remove my trousers and pants while in a 1mx1m cubicle. The uniform we have to wear has the loudest belt buckle known to man and I know for sure someone was in the cubicle next to me.
I did my very best to not make it obvious what was going on but after the third time falling into the cubicle door making it slam against the jam and the buckle jingling like it was Christmas, I think it was safe to assume anyone who was also in the room with me would come to the conclusion that I was undressing.
Finally, pants off cleaned down and now commando. Soiled pants in a spare specimen ziplock that I found in my work bag along with various other spare healthcare nicknacks that get gathered when out doing jobs.
I had only a couple of hours to go on the shift but something had to be done. The medication I was on was working perfectly, it was just a bloody shame it was making me need to go to the toilet immediately every hour or so. I’d been putting it off thinking I could deal with the side effects, but this was a sudden and very violent wake-up call it just wasn’t working for me.
So why are you off sick then?
Well, I went from Sertraline then to Citalopram (it ended up doing the same thing, the shitting) so my next avenue was Mirtazapine. I asked to go on Venlafaxine as I’ve heard good things, but it messes with your heart my GP tells me so the better option is Mirtazapine… For now anyway, so I dutifully do what doc says.
The catch is you need to ween off an SSRI (which is what Sertraline and Citalopram are) to go onto an SNRI (which is what Mirtazapine and Venlafaxine are) and god, it is awful. Going from a high dose to a low dose kicks my ass. The doctor wanted to do it when I changed from Sertraline to Citalopram just to see if the side effects weren’t side effects but symptoms of something else. I took quite a large ween going from full dose to half dose and damn; I felt like a junkie going cold turkey. It was awful.
When weening off to go onto this new med I asked Doc, please don’t do this to me again - so we took a gentler ween. They set me up to have a 10mg-a-week lower dose each week over 4 weeks. The first three weeks were kind of okay, very manageable actually; but the last week I had to go off work. Then I went onto the Mirtazapaine. I had to titrate up from the lowest dose to my target once a week.
A silly little goofy fact about Mirtazapine is that it is used to also absolutely knock out insomniacs. The silly goofy part of this information is that it only knocks you out if you’re taking the low dose of 15mg. If you take more than 15mg of the drug, for some reason, unbeknownst to me and two doctors I talked to about it who remarked “Yeah, it’s odd isn’t it”, you don’t get the sedative effects. Have you ever slept for 18 hours to wake up still feeling tired? I have, for three days straight.
I’m on 30mg now. I’ll expect myself back to work tomorrow where I can begin the recording of my jobs proper. It’s a 12-hour shift 11:00 - 23:00 so I’m sure I’ll have lots to write about in between downtime. Fingers crossed we’re low levels and there is downtime. If not I’ll try and mark down anything of particular interest and retroactively write about it at a later date. Or on the other hand forget about this project entirely and discontinue the venture.
