Adventures in Zyprexa – Day 8

It’s been a week on Zyprexa. The agitation has calmed down but part of that is the klonopin. Klonopin has really interfered with my ability to correctly assess how well this drug is doing. But, I can see it bleeding through a little bit. In terms of energy, I’m at a higher state than I was a while ago. I’m interested in exercising again, I want to work on my thesis (though I don’t dare touch it in my current state), I just want to do things again. I want to go out and party with friends, or sit down at a nice dinner. Even through the haze of klonopin, I’m feeling up compared to how I was a few days ago.

Anxiety is still there though. I still feel like a mountain is sitting on my shoulders of things that need to get done and I just don’t have the capabilities to do it. Hopefully that will get better as this drug starts to take hold. But in terms of seeing through the haze, I’m feeling centered again. It’s like I have a sense of control over my mood. Hopefully, this will continue and get better as the zyprexa takes hold even more. I have about another week or two before I get to therapeutic levels. So for now all I get are the edges of the drug.

Suspicious thoughts are also at a minimum. Klonopin takes care of that, but when I’ve gone off of klonopin, I don’t experience these thoughts either. What I’m battling right now is just the end stages of a dysphoric mania. One which will still drive me to suicidal thoughts. But, so long as I have my trusty cigarettes and klonopin I should be good. Maybe another week and I’ll be back to normal.

Side effects are far better than abilify. It’s a very predictable drug that doesn’t cause extreme agitation or anything of the sort. It also has shortened my need for sleep. Which is a side effect that I neglected to mention about abilify. It makes you sleep 9+ hours. Instead, zyprexa seems to make me need to sleep less. I hit maybe 7 to 8 hours instead. It also doesn’t make me groggy. This might be surprising since I’m on klonopin which is sedating, but antipsychotics tend to really knock one out if they’re going to be sedating. Instead, it seems to be activating. Which is precisely what I want from a drug. I want it to counteract the lethargy that depression brings on. I’m hoping that a higher dose of it will end or shorten my depression going into the winter months. I’ll wait to see what develops, but so far this drug is doing what abilify did for me, only it’s controlling my psychosis even better.

Adventures in Zyprexa – Day 3

So it’s the third day on zyprexa. Already I’ve noticed that I’m agitated, just like I was when going on abilify. This time it’s not nearly as extreme because I have klonopin on hand, but I’m very bouncy and fidgety. I’ve also noticed that I do not need to take klonopin as much as before. Before zyprexa, I literally craved to have it in my system to give me some temporary control back, now that feeling is gone. Hurray antipsychotics! As for brain fog, maybe I’m unique in this regard, but I don’t feel like I have it. I don’t feel slow or off balance mentally. In fact, I feel sharper and things seem easier than before. But that might just be residual mania creeping in. Perhaps it’s switched my paranoid mania into a regular mania. Let’s hope so, because I like those.

Hunger. That’s something that I did not experience on abilify. Quite the opposite, I couldn’t stand food and I would dry heave in the morning from nausea. Now, everything seems delicious and I want more of it. I have to fight off the snack attacks by reminding myself that it’s the drug talking and not my stomach. I’m resolved not only to stay at the same weight that I’m at now, but to start exercising more and losing weight while going on this medication. If I do that, I’m going to give myself a good pat on the back for dodging that bullet.

Paranoia. Not quite gone yet. The klonopin/zyprexa combo has really reduced my suspicious thinking. Even on a lower dose of klonopin, I can feel my brain wanting to think that way, but it’s not delusional. It doesn’t transform itself into a belief. So I don’t have to fight it, it just flits in and then out of my head. I can live with that. It makes me more delightfully eccentric than before. So far the effect from the drug is mild, but it’s only the third day. I can feel it acting in my system, but hurrah for it having a mild impact. I’ll keep tabs on it for the next few days and see how it performs in the long run. I’ll have to make sure that I get back to mood journalling soon to keep track of all of these changes.

Adventures in Zyprexa Time!

Time for a new antipsychotic. It’s double teaming my symptoms this time. Abilify and Zyprexa. So I’ll do what I did with abilify and chronicle how it goes for me. Remember, this is just how it went for me, results may vary. Stay tuned for more personal ramblings on how this drug is impacting my life and the fun that ensues in taking any new antipsychotic.

Adventures in Abilify – 2.5 Months later

It’s been two and a half months since I began abilify. Seems like ages ago considering that it still makes my days feel looonnnggg. But I’ve had to do a medication shift and realized the power this drug has in controlling paranoia and anxiety.

First is the paranoia front. It figures, the day that I write about paranoia, I get a mild sensation of people watching me. It made me shake just going outside. I wanted to rush back in after taking out the trash. My head was spinning, I was white as a sheet. It made me feel like a wreck. And I forgot to take my abilify that day. It wasn’t until later that night that I realized that a) I can’t keep taking it in the afternoon, it’s too easy to put it off, and b) it rocks in controlling paranoia. About an hour after taking it, the paranoia began to subside. It was blissful to feel it melt away. I wasn’t afraid to go outside where I felt exposed after just 2 hours after taking it. It worked wonders.

I also cannot imagine going to a higher dose of abilify than 10mg. I’m super sensitive to medication and cannot stomach high doses of any drug. I almost always get the full set of side effects, so seeing that a minimal dose can really help is great.

I have also noticed a great deal of help from abilify in controlling anxiety. Taking it 2 hours before having to meet my professor has made it so that I do not need xanax at all. So it’s done wonders there. On top of that, it’s delayed my mood cycle to about 2 weeks and reduced most of my anxiety so that I have fewer anxious days where I just sit around and quiver.

So it comes down to asking “is it worth the $100 copay”, for me, it definitely has been. I’ve felt my life come back and minimal cognitive side effects. It’s preserved my hypomanias, but really kept my manic august-september season in check. The only thing now to check is to see how the november-december depression is effected by it. Hopefully, the double attack of lamictal and abilify will at least make it bearable. But more to come on that front in the months to come. It’s still the waiting game.

Adventures in Abilify – Depressed, Finally

Whoo hoo! I was depressed for two days. Which means that my cycle is at a steady 15-16 days. Cause for celebration since I spend about 2.5 days in depression every 15-16 days. Which comes out to just under 1/6 of my life spent in depression. I think that’s a good average compared to before where I’d spend about 4-5 months out of the year depressed to some degree. So I’ve more than halved the time spent in depression and more than doubled the length of my main rapid cycle. Plus the peaks and valleys are shallower than before. This is cause for mild celebration.

Still, I get depressions, and the lamictal and abilify together seem to really cut out the deep bad thoughts. Last night was a particularly horrible experience. I had to work and I was right at the bottom of my cycle. Should have thought that one through a little more when I signed up to run sound. Being a sound engineer is stressful, worse than performing on stage. It means that my mind has to be on and analyzing for hours at a time. Think of it this way, I have to study the acoustic dynamics of every last song for 4 hours straight with only 10 minute breaks to reset the sound for the next band. I also only get one try to get everything right. If you ever go to see a band and it sounds even remotely good, thank the sound engineer for all the work that went into it.

Working the show while depressed was difficult. I have no instinct when I’m depressed, but the abilify seemed to give me this slight extra power to shut down my depression to compensate. It gave me just that slight edge over it so that while I even had brief suicidal ideation, it shut it out without me even trying and kept me going. I’ve noticed that these drugs together do that in general. I experience no emotional fatigue. I can just keep going and going and going. Never needing a break. Even while depressed and bored out of my mind, I some how just kept plugging away at reading. They do the work of cutting out my disturbed thoughts, so that means extra energy for other things.

It’s exhausting in its own respect, to never need a break of sorts. I don’t think that it’s entirely healthy, but it gives me a leg up from before. Essentially, it’s kept my bipolarity there, but it’s turned up the knob on the high functionality meter. I still have all the dark thoughts telling me different things, but I can some how keep going with whatever needs to be done. So now, nearly two months later, I seem to have really stepped things up in terms of output. It seems from the outside as if I’m almost normal, and I think I want to leave it there. It’s a nice feeling to have after all these ups and downs every week that I experienced since last winter, now I just get them every 2 weeks and change. Glory be to the mighty antipsychotics and mood stabilizers!

Adventures in Abilify – Day 45 Lengthened Cycles

I’ve finally been able to track my cycle. It takes a while to pin it down since I need to oscillate between mania and depression at least twice before I can really pin down the peaks and dips. I’ve yet to hit two full length cycles, but the pattern has emerged from previous data and I’ve been able to extrapolate how long the cycle is. It’s at least 10 days, and appears to be at around 17 days. This is nearly 3 times as long as the previous cycle.

Additionally, the dips are only lasting around 2-3 days and tend to be more mixed than depressed. I’m not thrilled to have more mixed states, but it’s a step up from feeling suicidal every 6 days. The time I’m depressed has only increased by about a factor of 1.5, a little less actually. I had about 1 day of mixed states in my previous cycle, so mixed+depression = 2 days and the new cycle is a max of 3 with an average of 2.5.

That’s a huge step up in comparison to my previous state, but I’m also a lot more energetic. I spend most of my time at 6 or above in energy levels on my mood chart, and I’m averaging about 7. There’s coffee involved in all of this, but I also see coffee as just another medication to include in this (and it’s really cheap too).

Anxiety is also lower. I still have problems with my nerves, but that’s ok in my mind. I’ve accepted that I’ll always have anxiety problems, I just don’t want to deal with it every day and have trouble leaving the house because of it. That only happens when there’s a major event happening.

Agitation is much lower too. I don’t fight with people in my head nearly as much as before. I generally rank  myself fairly low even when manic, excepting a few moments where all I want to do is lash out and destroy something.

With all this in mind, it’s safe to say that abilify has rounded some edges off while elevating my mood in general. That’s more than I wanted, so this has been a boon like no other. Combined with a smidgen of coffee every morning and I have become a fairly productive member of society. Don’t get me wrong, I still manage my moods every day and there’s a great deal of work to be done to maintain my moods. But it’s better.