I feel I owe y'all an explanation of my absence over the duration of July. I know I mentioned prior to July that I was experiencing a depressive phase that was more pronounced than usual. Well, it continued through most of July. It got to the point, in fact, where I spent most or all of some days in bed. Literally. I didn't feel like getting up to do more than use the bathroom and eat. Going to bed got difficult as well, and I was sitting up all night sometimes three nights out of the week every week. See, the depression made me afraid to go to bed, because I didn't want to end up spending the day in bed again. It was just a vicious cycle. But that's what depression does. It locks the person who has it into a vicious circle of tactics to avoid or deal with it, and rarely are they healthy methods.
When I had my video appointment with my psych doc a few weeks ago, I explained to him what was going on. He wanted to be cautious. Instead of replacing one of the psych meds I'm already on, he suggested introducing a new one, to which I agreed. The reasoning behind this is that my mood stabilizers were working fine before the big depressive drop, and he doesn't want to meddle too much with established meds. It's actually easier to add a different medication on top of what I'm taking than take me off of one of my current meds and run through a list of others until we find one that works. And, besides, he could assign a medication specifically to deal with the depression, and go from there. I don't know what other plans he may have for my medications, but I'm glad to say this first one worked.
My psych doc put me on Wellbutrin, whose generic name is bupropion, which is actually the name that appears on the bottle. We were hoping for some improvement in my depression, but this medication just totally wiped it out. Before the heat wave hit, I spent a week being productive. It was fantastic, and if not for the heat wave, I'd have spent the past two or three weeks on an all new schedule. Sleeping at night. Awake during the day. I loved it for the week I had it.
Oh, the heat wave is important, because it messed up my sleeping at night. When the daytime temps hit about 95°F and above—and for about a week and a half, most of our days were over 100°F—I have difficulty staying asleep. I get hot at night and wake up. The window unit air conditioner in the bedroom just could not keep up, and we had nothing in the living room to help it. At times, I woke up to wipe sweat off myself with my sheet.
That's part of the reason why I spent last night up. I slept all day yesterday—or may as well have been all day, to catch up on missed sleep leftover from the heat wave. From about midnight the night before until 13:00 yesterday, then I laid down for a 2.5 hour nap at 15:00. Even taking my night meds last night didn't help.
We're getting a new window unit that's supposed to be delivered today or tomorrow, for the living room. With that in place, things should get back on track. I'm looking forward to that!
