Posted by scatterbrained on March 2, 2006, at 20:30:48
I have seen the same people on this board(myself included) for years searching and searching for that one perfect drug and nothing works for many of them. At what point do we just accept that we have an illness that is refractory? I don't want to spend my whole life going from one medication to another, having that false hope that it will work and then getting let down again and again and again.I don't want to spend my whole life on this board. And I'm tired of dealing with the absolutely horrific side effects that I tend to get for whatever reason, all for the sake of "maybe this one will work". I'm absolutely pro medication but I'm not pro denial. And I'm not pro torturing myself with these side effects. I guess it's one thing if the medications didn't cause terrible side effects with me and just didn't do anything. If that were the case I would perhaps be more interested in trying all the drugs and combinations I haven't tried yet(which are limited). But for me I am super sensitive to the medications and just because i don't have a lasting positive response *anymore* from them doesn't mean that I'm not feeling the drug. I'm feeling it, it's just not doing what it's supposed to do and instead I'm getting terrible side effects.
What I have decided to do for the time being is to accept that I'm treatment reisitent,give my body a break and not try anymore drugs(I have been off medication for about three months, excluding omega 3). I want to find ways to compensate instead of getting rid of this debilitating disease, since getting rid of it seems to be an impossibility for me. I'm going to start neurocognitive rehabilitation pretty soon( which will hopefully help with the cognitive problems) . If it can help rehabilitate people suffering from strokes I don't see why it wouldn't help with other forms of cognitive impairment(depression is certainly a form of cognitive impairment, especially the anhedonia variant). Anyway, I don't expect it to do anything profound but I guess that's the point. I am begining to accept that I have to live with this disease, I can't get rid of it, I have to find ways to deal with it.This is not a hopeless discovery, it would only be hopeless if I wasn't looking into ways to compensate for it.
This message isn't for people who have had a good response to medications(don't stop taking your medications) or who are just starting out going through all the drugs. But for us who have done this for a while I think acceptance is a good idea.
poster:scatterbrained
thread:615139
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060227/msgs/615139.html