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.

One thing has really worried me, though. I have no way to prove this, but I'm seriously wondering if my ADHD is affecting my driving. I mean, there's nothing in my books that says "Women with ADHD have difficulties driving." But the thing is, I've made several stupid mistakes in the past two weeks, the time I've been going off my medication, that I don't usually make. One incident that really spooked me was when I was turning out of a parking lot onto a road and almost ran into an oncoming car. Now here's the weird part. I saw the car. I knew it was there. I remember seeing it before I pulled out. But it was like the fact that the car was coming just slipped my attention. I've made several other similar mistakes, and they all come back to the fact that I wasn't paying the attention I needed to drive. And here's the other thing. I wasn't texting. I wasn't eating. I wasn't rummaging through my CDs or changing the station. I was actually trying to pay attention to the road. That's what makes me so nervous. Were those just stupid mistakes, or was my ADHD the culprit? I don't know; I have no way of knowing.

The comfort is that I've started my new medication, so hopefully things will straighten out. It's too soon to tell, but at least I've got something. And hopefully the medication will straighten me out enough that I don't kill anybody. Or transform into some creature of the night (just kidding. Sort of).