Daily Reads

Monday, October 08, 2012

Anxiety and depression -- election worries or just new medication side effects?

The title says it all.

The last week I've been progressively more short tempered, panicky, weepy, and just unpleasant to be around for everyone including myself.

I'd like to put it down to being too wrapped up in following politics, but I suspect the reason is the more mundane one of getting new meds for my asthma.

I've been having these sinus problems for about two months now, and after two rounds of antibiotics with a course of prednisone in the middle, which put 10 pounds on me which looks like about 20, I ended up at the allergist's.  I've had allergies all my life, but this is the first time it's been bad enough to go see a specialist.  Apparently they are worse than I thought, because they did some breathing tests and I was slightly obstructed, which I hadn't even noticed (common with asthmatics, you just get used to not breathing that well, and the abnormal becomes your new normal), and I guess that combined with working in a place that is carpeted which flooded three months ago, shortly before all the symptoms, along with some shellfish allergies meant that I left the office with three more appointments for testing and a script for an epi-pen.

That alone is requiring some adjusting of my world view and may account for some of the emotional instability.  But I also found out that my rescue inhaler is being discontinued, and I love the breath activated device, since it requires no co-ordination, and it worked better during my pneumonia in 2001 than the nebulizer did.  And my preventative of choice, Advair, is also being discontinued, at least in the purple disc form.  So I've got a new inhaler type preventative, QVar which doesn't seem to be helping much at all.  Though that could be because I've had to stay off the antihistamines until after the skin testing.  I have the first round tomorrow afternoon, and I'm hoping that mold comes up big time so I can use the test results to get work to do something about the regular flooding of my library.  I'm also hoping that cats don't come up too big, since we're not getting rid of them, and the youngest is only about four, so we'll have him for a long time.

But I've yelled at my mother, my daughters, vented at work, and find myself in tears watching Castle as they leave Alexis off to her dorm room at college.

So I either need some new asthma meds, need my workplace to be remediated, need the election to happen and the right guy to win, or some antidepressants.  Or a combination of all four.

Work has also decided to do change to a new office supply vendor and give us an extremely limited set of approved options, none of which are the things I normally use.  I can't even get refills for my Day Runner, because I "have Outlook on the computer".  The fact that I don't have access to my outlook account unless I am in my office on my desktop computer doesn't matter, I'm just supposed to haul printouts around, which doesn't sound terribly professional to me.  Not that they'll let me get a 7-hole punch so my unprofessional printouts can at least travel in a nice case....

I need to win the lottery, damn it!  Or at least find a new job, not that there are very many here in Connecticut within an hour of where we live.

2 comments:

RG said...

I'm quite familiar with a number of those problems. Hang in there and you'll get at least a couple of them resolved. Take care, here's hoping you get to feeling better soon.

fillyjonk said...

I take a specific asthma med (pill) that has scary (but rare, I presume) mental/emotional side effects.

I live alone, so I've warned my colleagues that if I seem deep-endy, they need to point it out to me. I have noticed I'm a wee bit more irritable lately, but then again, I have lots of irritants in my life....


Can you request through HR or Worker's Comp or somewhere that they deal with the moldy carpet? I agree that you need your workplace remediated. You shouldn't be made sick by the place you work.