Sheer Will

[nyren]

Doctor: "From what you've said and what I've read in your chart, I honestly can't see how you've been able to function at *all.* I can only surmise that you've been functioning by sheer force of will for, well, your whole life

Comments

[lilitusama]

Here and reading and not responding and not expecting any.

[petercooperjr]

Medications (of all kinds) seem to me to often work by making a part of our bodies defective in some way, which often is to compensate for some other way in which our bodies were already defective. (Such as by treating pain by shutting down the part of the brain that deals with pain, or whatever.) While modern medical science has made astounding progress in coming up with medications to treat all sorts of terrible things, sometimes it's really hard to tell whether the treatment is worse than the disease, or just replaces one problem with another. There's really much more that we don't know about the body than we do know. And when the medical problem or side effects from treating it have to do with something related to our brains (which isn't that unusual since our brains do a lot of stuff), then it becomes really hard to reason about, since it's our brains that do the reasoning, and it's hard to know what to attribute to the original problem or medication or whatever

[nyren]

The problem in my case is that the disorder is worse than any meds since without meds, I can't live. I can't hold down a job (-any- job in the US), drive, or learn from a lecture. But, being stubborn me, I would continue to try to do those things and I would have hurt others. I've fallen asleep while driving about ~15-20 times in my life (and only three of those resulted in car accidents) and I've fallen asleep while operating heavy machinery in a factory. Maybe I wouldn't still try to pretend everything was normal with my diagnosis when I knew I wasn't on meds, but who knows?

Even the meds that gave me stark suicidal thoughts would have been better than the disorder if they had actually worked to treat it. I would be less of a danger to myself and to others if I was suicidal but not narcoleptic and stubborn.

My problem is that I can't confirm that the meds are having any negative side effects. I don't know that they're having an effect on my behavior. My behavior seems significantly different to others, but not to me.