introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K

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brain candy

sleep in monday - 1august 2o22

"mother, i can feel the soil falling over my head."~the smiths

on wednesday, one of my best girlfriends came to visit from philly for a few days. in the days before her arrival, cleaning and chores that seemed impossible to even start were begging to be done. for the first time in over two weeks i had the energy and motivation to pick up the house.

just a couple days before the Big Clean i discovered i'd been making a terrible mistake with my medications. i try to keep the kitchen organized in in old baking pans full of spices on my countertop. i do the same thing with the pills. a loaf pan filled with orange and white bottles with my name on them. there is the antidepressant. the anti-psychotic. the sleeping pills. the anxiety attack pills. the birth control pills that i just started for the first time since my 20s, this time to help with the ovarian cysts that anxiety has brought back into my life. there are a lot of pills. not counting vitamins, i'm swallowing about 5 a day. the pharmacy is constantly texting me to pick up another bottle and it seems like an endless stream of capsules that need to be picked up.

i don't like pills. i particularly do not like sleeping pills. i don't trust them. i feel like i could sleep through an emergency if something like a fire happened in our building again. neither do i trust what will happen to me once i've swallowed them. i recall an Ambien-fueled sleep almost 20 years ago where i woke up across town with my dog in the middle of the night in the dead of the hardest winter in my life--the young hound looking at me confused and cold in the january snow. i was thankful he was with me or i might not have been okay. that was jarring and i swore off the sleeping aids then. but now, my sleep is so disrupted by my anxiety that my psychiatrist has convinced me to try them on an as-needed basis. 'take 1-2 capsules by mouth (whew?) as needed for sleep and anxiety' says the bottle. if i take them at all, i take one.

but the pills got mixed up when i brought them home and the sleeping pill, a green and blue capsule, looks strikingly like my anti-depressant, a green and yellow capsule. they come in the same jewel orange bottle with the white top. they both have impossibly long generic names. i have to get my reading glasses out to see the brand name by which they're more commonly known. the pharmacy texted to let me know that my other pill, whose dosage had doubled that day, was ready for pickup and would i like to please pick up my other scripts? so i picked up a lot of pills sent to replace the pills i already had. for some reason, the pharmacy also filled the sleeping pills despite me having two full bottles of them already. i have enough sleeping pills to put down a small horse i just know it. not realizing, i quickly put the pills away...the morning pills in the loaf pan in the kitchen. the night pills in the cabinet in the bathroom. only thats not what i did and some pills got switched.

i thought it strange that i was in quicksand for weeks, assuming it was because the dosage change on my other medication which had taken me some time to get used to in the first place. i was useless, listless, fighting to stay awake. chores went undone. when i think of the things i managed to get done at all on a double dose of Vistaril i cannot believe it. i walked miles and wondered why i was dragging so hard and why finishing two miles felt like ten miles. i managed to cook all our meals and keep the kitchen at a perfunctory level of clean. laundry was done but not put away. it took three chunks to get through Everything Everywhere All At Once, the first time falling asleep on a date to watch the movie in the first place. it scares me to think of how often i drove back and forth from the city to my parents. i eventually gave in after hours and took afternoon naps and often felt much better after a few hours. my only productive time for two weeks was at night when i fought to stay up to get anything done. in hindsight, it all came together and added up and i was able to get things straightened out right away.

i can't be the only person to have made this mistake. there is just not enough to differentiate the pills from the others. lesson learned and i'll be more careful. i'm feeling so much better. the house is cleaner now and i'm slowly catching up that which fell behind.

get out those reading glasses and double check, old lady.

xo,
jones


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.what came before. - .what happened next.

a new leaf - 23 august 2o22
the devil, reversed - 18 august 2o22
tell me something good. - 17 august 2o22
brain candy - 1august 2o22
games - 26 july 2o22

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