Blog like nobody's watching
Sep. 30th, 2004 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI have recently noticed that many of my posts have been, shall we say, colorless. Well, there are some reasons for that, and I'm not going to list them not because they wouldn't add color, but because they're not the topic of this entry.
A person I trust for various reasons, and who has no financial or even personal interest in doing so, asked me if I'd ever been diagonsed as having ADHD. Not exactly. When I was diagnosed, it was 1977 and the "H" wasn't part of the diagnosis yet. Had I ever taken medication for it? No, not really. Did I drink a lot of caffiene?
Yeah, just a bit too much. On the worst day in the past couple of months, I had more than five cups of coffee-- and I have a very big coffee cup on my desk.
She suggested I try something else. Alderall or strattera. Strattera is freaking expensive; a month's supply would be $240 at least, and I don't know if or how much my insurer would cover it. Alderall is cheaper, but it's one of those ritalin-analogues, basically from the amphetamine family of drugs, and I don't know if I'd want to try something like that.
But my inablity to focus has gotten worse in the past couple of years, and Omaha has noticed it, and she thinks it might be something worth investigating. I just wish I believed my own rhetoric, that there are states of mind that can be achieved better through direct intervention, and that I should try them.
A person I trust for various reasons, and who has no financial or even personal interest in doing so, asked me if I'd ever been diagonsed as having ADHD. Not exactly. When I was diagnosed, it was 1977 and the "H" wasn't part of the diagnosis yet. Had I ever taken medication for it? No, not really. Did I drink a lot of caffiene?
Yeah, just a bit too much. On the worst day in the past couple of months, I had more than five cups of coffee-- and I have a very big coffee cup on my desk.
She suggested I try something else. Alderall or strattera. Strattera is freaking expensive; a month's supply would be $240 at least, and I don't know if or how much my insurer would cover it. Alderall is cheaper, but it's one of those ritalin-analogues, basically from the amphetamine family of drugs, and I don't know if I'd want to try something like that.
But my inablity to focus has gotten worse in the past couple of years, and Omaha has noticed it, and she thinks it might be something worth investigating. I just wish I believed my own rhetoric, that there are states of mind that can be achieved better through direct intervention, and that I should try them.
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Hunter-Gatherers
Date: 2004-10-01 08:35 am (UTC)Here's a story that may amuse you... When I left school and started programming full time, I was not doing very well. Fourty hours a week of fixing bugs was draining my will to live, and I was getting very depressed about the rest of my life. My psychologist reminded me of my committment to work with my personality, rather than berate myself. She pointed out that programming, while supporting my family, was not exactly a Hunter career*, and suggested I needed to take concrete steps to incorporate more adrenaline in my life. At our next visit, I told her all about my first date with jenner. Heh. :)
I still get a smile remembering the look on her face...
YVadrenalineMV
* Actually, being a "Project Engineer" (programmer/project manager) turns out to be very Hunter. I have deadlines, lots of pressure, and then a break before the next project I'm responsible for. I like it quite a bit, actually. But at the time I was droning along fixing bugs and assumed that was all I'd ever do.
Anyhow, if you'd like to discuss how I handle my ADHD, I'd be happy to chat via email. I don't condemn medication, but for me the side effects made me too "not me."
- Shasta