Better Living Through Drugs
I had a good appointment with the doctor yesterday, apart from my forgetting to get a new prescription for atenolol, which I will be out of after Thursday. Oops.
It is worth noting, following up my other post, that side effects do vary from person to person, though it is pretty usual to have certain ones from certain drugs. For certain blood pressure pills, lethargy is normal. If you don’t know that’s a possibility, you should, even if there’s nothing you can do to change it. At least then you know it’s not you, but rather the chemicals that might give you an extra few years of life if you never stop taking them, at the possible expense of all those years that gain you the extra few being kind of a hazy half-life, and the possible gain that you might be saved by the drugs from being the person on the short-straw end of the curve.
But enough cynicism for today.
The doctor read to me from his narrative about my first visit, which implied I ought have been aware it was a beta blocker, and gave no indication I ever mentioned my history with beta blockers. Which I remember telling him, as part of the discussion of my prior regimen having included 8 mg Cardura and some amount of Verapamil; explicitly no beta blockers.
My history includes them having made me lethargic and an energy sink, made me unable to remember things normally - including what I was about to do next or in the middle of saying, and in retrospect made me gain abnormal amounts of weight. While beta blockers can cause depression, and some of the other things they can cause can be related to depression, in me it’s impossible to say they “cause” it, trigger it when it might have passed me by, make it worse, or are completely neutral.
In any event, long-time readers may recall my experiment with Lexapro, mentioned to some degree, in chronological order, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. In short, it was a bitch getting acclimated to it and past the nasty initial side effects, but the stuff worked wonders. It’s probably no accident that much of the best of my blogging, getting CotC established, “met” Deb, got married, and started Sadie cooking while on the stuff. Until I was off of it long enough to decide I was okay without it, at least for the nonce, and that it was not worth a particular side effect. While it might be something that would evoke jokes about wishing you had that problem, it’s ultimately not fun.
Beta blockers or not, I am, and have slow-to-admittedly been for some time, in a state to need to try one of those things again. Thus I left the doctor’s office with twelve weeks of samples of Effexor and an appointment to go back in three months. We’ll see what happens.
I gained back eight pounds, which is odd because we don’t know where it went. The pants fit the same. Perhaps the Effexor will have the same matabolic side effect as Lexapro, making me lose a bunch of weight without changing a thing.
My blood pressure was reasonable. Thus the three month window that has more to do with seeing how the Effexor is doing than with a need to monitor blood pressure. It will be interesting to see if Effexor makes my blood pressure drop the way Lexapro did. It has a possible side effect that’s exactly the opposite; it can make pressure go up. That would suck. But I bet it de-stresses me and makes it lower, whatever the cautions say.
The doctor looked at something in e-mail while I was in his office and remarked about “learning to use e-mail for everything.” I took the opportunity to gush about how much I’d love being able to e-mail questions, and that some doctors provide that service for a small fee each. He grunted in a tone somewhere between neutral and negative to that. Heh.
Anyway, it should be interesting. I’ve poked around a bit while writing this and found that Effexor is a combined reuptake inhibitor, working on serotonin as Lexapro does, as well as norepinephrine, I can expect it to cost me about $100 a month, and that it is probably the hardest such drug to discontinue. Doh. The money I can deal with. If it makes me somwhat over an hour more effective per month, it balances. If the stuff works well, discontinuing isn’t likely to be an issue.
There’s some interesting literature out there suggesting that the effects of CMRI (combined monoamine reuptake inhibitors) don’t occur via NE or 5-HT, but rather through the downstream effects of their modulation of neurosteroids. Saw it at a meeting. Seems as if the pharmacology of the interaction is too little to have a direct effect…
Probably TMI, but I think it’s interesting based on what I’ve been doing for the last 6 years. And anyway, if it works, it works. Good luck.
Posted by caltechgirl on 08/06 at 06:05 PM
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