I wrote 750 words this weekend, and counted it as a triumph.
Those words account for the first real writing I’ve done in… man. Since March? Mid-April? Three months, at least. Closer to six, if I’m being honest. I was writing fairly regularly for a while. Then I kind of hit a wall. Strange.
Well, not really. My doctor put me on a beta blocker.
My wife noticed first. She commented that I had less energy. I was definitely struggling to get out of bed in the morning. By the end of the work day, I almost always didn’t have the energy to go for a walk. When I did go for a walk, I could only manage a mile or two, and I was out of breath any time my heart rate got over 100. Most of the time, I came home and fell asleep on the couch for an hour or more. Then I’d eat dinner and plow through whatever I could get done in the evening, and usually beat my wife to bed by a good hour.
I mean, I had noticed it too. Kind of hard not to. I thought it was just a matter of getting used to the medication. They’d warned me about that, and I figured all I needed was some time to get used to it.
Two weeks ago, we were talking about it over dinner again. Shari was encouraging me to call my cardiologist about it. My daughter, the nurse, asked me what dosage they had me on - 12mg or 25mg? I honestly didn’t know. Trudged upstairs to check my prescription, and…
Fifty.
Somehow I’d ended up on four times the “starting” dose. I called the office, said I wanted to talk about it, and within a day they called me back—not to schedule an appointment; to tell me to go to a half-dose, and if I still had problems, to drop that again to a quarter-dose.
Well.
A week later, my energy’s back. I’m rolling out of bed earlier ready to hit the day. No more dragging myself home at the end of the day, I can do 3-4 mile walks again, and I don’t start feeling out of breath until I get my heart rate to 115.
And I have the energy to write. Not just the energy - the interest. Being creative is a bear and a half when your brain won’t function and all you want to do is lie down and sleep. What energy I had was being spent on essentials like work, family, and such. I just didn’t have anything left over for my brain to do Fun Stuff.
We’re past that, I think. At least, it feels like I’ve got some sparky-sparky stuff happening in that soggy bit of fat cradled between my ears. We’ll see. But that leads me to the Cautionary part of this tale…
It’s hard to see the forest for the trees. Or yourself from the outside.
I know that it’s important to monitor your medications, to know what you’re taking and why you’re taking it. I’ve been through that with multiple family members before. Until my daughter spoke up, though, I never thought, “Hey, I’ve had what seems like a pretty radical reaction to this stuff they put me on. Maybe I should not just check out the side effects of the medication, but make sure that the dosage makes sense for me?”
You’d think you shouldn’t have to do that. In a perfect world, you’d be right. We live in an imperfect world, though. The doc told me what he was going to put me on, his staff made sure I got the script, and my pharmacist (who is excellent, BTW) talked with me about it… but nobody, especially not me, stopped to ask, “Is this the right dosage?”
If something feels off, if something doesn’t feel right, if someone from the outside is looking in and telling you there’s a problem? You need to stop and figure out what’s going on. Don’t tell yourself “Eh, I’m sure it will pass.” Sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t. And sometimes, it’s the only warning you’ll get before things really go off the rails, which is an entirely different situation.
tl;dr: Take care of yourself. You’re the only You you’ve got.
And now, with that: on to the memes!
Glad you figured it out and are making a comeback. And just so you know, we never speak the third name of the bologna.
Eh, checking for typos is done after a gap of time, and there are various things you can do to increase your distance.