The Medication Problem

How do you know what is the best medication for you? From my experience, it's trial and error. And let me tell you, when it comes to medication, trial and error is not fun. It's been a few weeks since my doc took me off of Strattera (R) (which was working pretty well, now that I think of it) and put me on a stimulant. And, well, the stimulant helps, but not enough.

So what I want to know is, how do you know how much is enough? How do you determine how much you should depend on medication, and how much you should take into your own hands? I've noticed that ever since I switched to the stimulant, it hasn't done much for my sleeping schedule problems. And on top of my body wanting to sleep from 3 in the morning to 11 in the morning, when I do try to go to sleep, even if I'm dead tired, I still have trouble falling asleep. What's with that?

Oh, yeah, and I've noticed I've been clenching my teeth a lot ever since I started this particular stimulant. Is that bad? I don't know. I've been chewing a lot of gum lately to try and stop it, though. Sigh. I guess time will tell whether this is the right med for me or not. Or it won't. Hopefully not the latter.

You don't fully appreciate something until you've lost it

I never realized how much I depend on my medication until my doctor took me off of it. I had noticed that my medication was losing its effectiveness, so my doctor decided to gradually take me off it before we tried a new one. The result? The past three weeks have been a Mess. With a capital M. Who knew that I would turn nocturnal, take three hours to get a simple task done, sprout wings and grow fangs (okay, so not the last two)?

But seriously. I was a mess. And the frustrating thing about it was that the harder I tried to control things, the faster they spun out of control. I recall one night when I was trying to get myself ready for bed. I kept getting so distracted, it took me THREE HOURS. Not kidding. The ironic thing about it is the thing that distracted me was my reference book on ADHD (It's called Understanding Women with ADHD, edited by Kathleen Nadeau. Great book. You should check it out). What's with that? My ADHD distracts me from the task at hand because I'm trying to understand my ADHD. Ah, the ironies of life.