Week 1: Med Report

It’s been a week now of taking Prazosin to help with the PTSD symptoms. I’m up to 3 mg at bedtime: I can tell that it wears off by midafternoon. I don’t want to raise the dosage any further just yet, but my doctor did mention that sometimes a larger dose is taken at night and smaller doses during the day. I may try adding one mg at lunch and see what happens. I can tell when it wears off because the chest pain and what I can only describe as a ‘wound up sensation’ starts to come back … a sensation I wasn’t even aware of until the medication took it away from me and kept it gone long enough that I could recognize the inner stillness as something new, and strange, and wonderful.

I sleep. Yes, I actually sleep. I go to sleep far, far more easily than before – in what I suspect is the time frame it takes healthy people to fall asleep, usually half an hour or less, though occasionally a little longer. Mostly if I’m reading a good book and don’t want to put it down.

When I am asleep, I am deeply asleep. The Jawbone Up band tells me that I’m not rolling around as much, that I’m lying still for an hour or two at a stretch, then moving a bit for twenty or thirty minutes, then back under – which means I have made it into deeper sleep and am getting better rest. I can tell, too. I wake up feeling actually rested, not just like I’ve been lying down for a long time.

I am dreaming: I am having dreams that are strange, sometimes downright weird, sometimes a little disturbing, but not frightening or waking me in a panic. Mostly I wake up and go “hmm, that was interesting, wonder what that was about?” And often, the dreams fade within an hour or so of waking.

I am dizzy if I wake in the night: I don’t usually (which is new, I have been up at least once every night for the last several years), but if I am woken suddenly (by the dog coughing something up, for example), I can’t just bolt out of bed or I’ll be woozy and probably fall over. If I had a small child to look after in the night, this would be an issue, but since generally speaking I am free to just sleep right through, and all the other people in this house, including the children, are big enough to take care of themselves in the night, it’s not a problem.

I am not hungry. My appetite is most definitely suppressed. I can eat when there’s food in front of me, I do recognize when I am hungry, and I have reminders (including an alarm on the Up band to tell me it’s lunch time) that I need to eat something, but I’m not feeling very hungry. It makes figuring out what to cook a bit of a challenge, since I’m not sufficiently interested in food for it to seem exciting, but as long as it’s fairly easy to prepare, I’ll eat. The blender has been a big help in that regard, a smoothie is quick and easy and good for me.

I am … tired? lethargic? resting? I am not sure how to describe what it’s like for me during the day. I slept for ten hours last night and when I woke this morning the thought that was in my mind was “Wow, I guess I was really tired, I needed that.” I don’t wake up feeling like I have been in bed too long and am not rested … I wake up feeling well rested, but then through the day I still do not feel energetic. So I’m rested, but not replenished.

Getting things done is a lot more work right now. This could be because I’ve gone hard for the last two weeks and I truly just need some time to recover – I have no idea what recovery from a ‘busy couple of weeks’ is supposed to look or feel like. I haven’t done a very good job of that for so long, so I’ve no proper benchmark. I spend a lot of time reading. I have knit a little, but I’m feeling a bit too tired to feel much like knitting – which tells you something interesting right there.

I feel … I feel like you do when you are just getting over a serious illness, when you no longer cough all the time or feel that deadly aching exhaustion, but you still need a lot of time to sit and do nothing, to move at a nice slow pace, to stay in your jammies and not have to do too much.

Recovering from a serious illness. Hmmm. That might just be telling me something interesting, right there.

Hmmm.