(Untitled)

[zydaco]

Well, much has happened in the last few weeks, what with the Dickens Fair and all that jazz. Along with managing the stress of all that, I’ve been trying to dial in the dosage of the medications I’ve been put on, the Topamax and the amitriptyline. The docs had me gradually increasing my dosage in both drugs over the course of about six or seven

Comments

[smartlikeatruck]

Talk to Travis about FM, too. He'll try to talk you into taking Soma, though. :)

I worry about FM being something you can *develop*, simply because of the way that chronic pain seems to rewire our brains. The effectiveness of certain antidepressants on the pain of FM would sort of point to that, wouldn't it? So if we walk around long enough with some niggling pain, then one day blammo! you get to have FM on top of it, too.

[zydaco]

Yeah, that's been part of my research. Some of what I've learned is really interesting, how it's related to stress and developmental brain issues, how the brain wires itself in early stages, and in later stages too. Depression and depression-related ... diseases? conditions? syndromes? whatever the fuck you want to call those things that happen when your brain misfires in ways that western medicine wants to call "depression" (which I generally call, "shit is out of balance, and it makes you feel like crap" or, a different sub-set like with my anxiety disorder which was, "shit is out of balance so we're just going to find some other way to release stress - never mind that it totally screws up your day... you're not handling it well, so we're just going to do it for you" - yeah, brains are cool, scary as hell, but cool) seems to be heavily related to cortisol and serotonin and dopamine and umptine other different chemicals in the brain that specifically manage either a) mood or b) pain or c) your ability to cope with either a) or b)