So far, I have weaned myself down by half — from 40 mg to 20 mg.
I am definitely feeling it since the drop to 20 mg 5 days go. But nothing really horrible, honest.
My normally very very long patience fuse is basically gone. I am very easily annoyed, wired up, quickly reaching peak irritability at little things. Not really my normal self. But the part that is still normal is that I remain very easily amused.
The irritability manifests mostly while I’m working — remember, won’t you, that I LOVE my job. Really. It is a great job. I am helping my company implement Health Care Reform. Politics aside, actually non-existent on my planet, this is very good work for someone like me … Federal and State laws, intense deadlines, really complex business and systems problems to solve, really smart and hard working people to collaborate with, a few morons to keep things interesting (and ANNOYING), working at home most of the time because I have too much to do to spend commute time to drive into the office.
Aside: My workdays have been so intense that I have dispensed with proactive feeding of horses at home, which requires about 15 minutes — go find the hay cart, drag it to the hay barn, fill the cart with hay, deal with the annoying hay twine, drag the hay cart down to the pasture where the horses are, toss hay over the fence, fill the water troughs, chat with Pootie the Cat. To save this 15 minutes that I typically don’t have when meetings start at 8 am and go to noon, I have invented Horse Fast Food, which takes about 3 minutes: Go to the barn gates, open them up and call the horses. Wait for the first one in line to come through the gate. This is usually Rainy, the Pork Butt sorrel mare center front in the photo below. Point the lead horse to the hay barn. The others will follow. Voila. Horse Fast Food. Hours later go check on the horses. For no reason. Because there is Food, there is no need to go anywhere.
So let’s talk a bit about the Morons, since this is how my patience fuse got blown a few times this week. These are people that have jobs in my company. Mostly they are merely voices, since we do most of our work via telecom and Webex. Some of these Morons are actually very intelligent people. They just don’t do anything except speak a lot of words to demonstrate their intelligence. I go into meetings with a mission, agenda, things that need to be accomplished so I can get Something Done and then get onto the next conference call. Morons go into meetings to talk. Some of them are academics — they know a lot of stuff, and they need to tell everyone what they know, all of the time.
Some are really Sales or PR folks deep down, they talk as a performance. They “raise issues” and poke holes at things and speak the Execu-speak that they think makes them sound like they are VP material and if they keep speaking that way, eventually someone will promote them.
Some are merely auditory communicators — they have words stacked up in their esophagi like big long freeway traffic jams and they MUST speak each and every word in the order in which they have stacked it, without variation of any kind. If you interrupt them, or in my language “So-and-so, there were too many words in what you just said. Could you restate more concisely?” , they raise their voices and backtrack, rewind and start over where they were five minutes ago. I could really go truly psycho. If this happens on a conference call, I Mute and Multi-Task — do something else while playing the phone meeting voices on low volume, sort of like the Relaxing Sounds of the Ocean that my clock radio has to help me fall asleep to. That I still don’t fall asleep to since [1] I don’t sleep in the room that has that clock radio in it, since that is my bedroom and since Insomnia Galore, I can’t fall asleep in my bed and [2] also because of Insomnia Galore, relaxing sounds of the ocean are really annoying sounds of the ocean.
To finish up with the Morons: I try to punish them for talking so much by giving them ACTION ITEMS. These are tasks that the Morons need to complete. This only works to the extent that I get the malicious glee from causing them to panic. Since they usually don’t have to do anything other than produce words, like the balloon words that come out of the characters in comic strips, they get a bit weird about getting Action Items.
Aside: Sandie will remember that we had a long philosophical, first year of college-age discussion, possibly under the influence, about what would happen if all of the words we spoke could be seen coming out of our mouths and floating into the air, like in comic strips.
Many other symptoms … head (brain/jaw) zaps (feelings of electrical shock); high energy/wired feeling; loss of appetite. The loss of appetite is really strange. I really don’t have desire to eat — I do, of course, but only when my stomach is screaming for something. Pacing. Racing thoughts but not like those that come with anxiety episodes.
I am still taking the Relaquil for the natural anxiety relief aspect. I am convinced it is making a major difference. I am dealing with all of these symptoms pretty well, and even the anxiety hits have been short and pretty easily managed. And not to forget my major source of therapy — Mo the Horse — continues to be a huge help. We are back to jumping again (bad ankle steadily improving) and so, the utter terror of jumping helps keep me calm and sane.
Ok, now that did sound a little nuts.
Life in the Fast Lane on a Dirt Road 