Day 3: Med report

The deal with this drug is that it is slowly ramped up: take 1 mg for 3 days, then increase to 2 mg, hold there for three days or so, and then see where you are at, increasing up to a certain amount (7 mg for me at this point) until you are sleeping well and not having trouble during the daytime.

I actually increased my dosage last night, one day early, as I wasn’t having any troubles and I have somewhere to go on Saturday, so if I was going to feel anything untoward from the doubled dose, I wanted that to happen today, when I’m at home.

No problems so far: I am a bit light headed, and I have to be careful not to wave my head around too vigorously when I’m talking (I talk with my whole body, so this actually is something I have to pay attention to) but really, I feel okay. The overall sense of mellowness from the first day is somewhat lessened, as my body is adjusting to the medication I suspect, but it’s still there. I’m tired, but that’s not surprising either, I’ve also been going hard for the last week, doing more than I usually do, and between that and modifications to my biochemistry, I would expect to be a little less energetic.

Now for some objective measurements: pictures of my sleep profile from the Jawbone Up bracelet.

Here is a fairly typical “before” picture – this is what sleep looks like for me, even with all the herbal supplements and two Tylenol 1s:

I’d have been in bed reading for a couple of hours before I finally hit the “I’m going to sleep” indicator at 1:06 am, then I slept … restlessly, until a little before 8, though I stayed in bed until 9:44. The tall dark blue bars are when I was still – what the Jawbone interprets as “deep sleep”. When you are dreaming, you don’t move, and rolling around and moving lots is not good, restful sleep. My deep sleep was just under 50% of the time I was in bed.

Here’s last night’s picture, with 2 mg of Prazosin on board:

Deep sleep was close to 3/4 of the night: that’s a huge improvement. And I was actually asleep longer: that is nine hours of actual sleep, not just nine hours in bed.

Now, I was having bad dreams for some of that time … stressful enough that they probably count as ‘trauma dreams’,  so there’s still improvement to be seen. But for three days into treatment, this is such a massive step forward, I’m very pleased.

I didn’t realize that there were options for treating PTSD besides antidepressants. There are, and I’m grateful to have found a doctor who will help me find my way back to biochemical balance.