Meds Mishap1/11/2020 During open enrollment, I switched from Kaiser to Aetna because, as I've said before, Kaiser is lousy at treating mental health. I got pretty sick and tired of having to go to San Francisco just to get ketamine. Unfortunately, though, there was a little misunderstanding with my old psychiatrist. I thought I had one more refill of Strattera (because that's what it said on the bottle!) when, in fact, I didn’t.
Days before December 21st, which is when I would leave for Thousand Oaks for the holidays, I went to Kaiser’s pharmacy to get one last refill for Strattera, only to be informed I didn’t have any left (even though my bottle of said otherwise!). It turned out that I’d waited so long to get my next refill that my psychiatrist therefore thought I didn’t need any more. (The reason I took so long, BTW, is because my bottle of Strattera had lots of pills in it, so I didn’t see the need to do it sooner.) I was informed I could some more through some emergency procedure, but, by the time I could get more that way, I’d already be in TO, and picking it up after coming back wouldn’t be an option because I’d no longer be under Kaiser. So I decided to start rationing what I had. I decided I’d take none while on vacation. At first, I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep. On the third night, I slept soundly because of how exhausted I’d become. Then it alternated a bit before I could finally sleep soundly consistently. I tried to see if I could get by without when I came back here. Strangely, right after I came back here on the train, I started feeling constantly hungry, and I started eating a lot more. Then I found mind racing a lot. I felt like a pinball bouncing from one topic in my mind to another except that I felt like I was moving through an associative web of topics rather than a pinball machine. Thinking about topics at such a hyper pace made me feel like the fast-talking man from the Micro Machines commercials. I simply couldn’t focus on one thing at length because of my mind racing. Also time just whizzed right by. My first weekend back was over before I knew it. Yet I also felt more creative, but I didn't have the presence of mind to use voice recording to record the thoughts I was churning out. Although I could control my focus on the 3rd (the day I got back), by the 7th, it’d become completely uncontrollable. I tried things like relaxing and exercise. None of it worked. So on the night of the 7th, I took a single pill of Strattera, and I noticed a huge improvement the following day. I was in a bit of a tizzy at first, but things mostly stabilized on the 9th. On the 7th, I tried to get a new psychiatrist through Aetna, only to informed that I'd need someone to refer me to him. The following day, I informed a fellow autistic co-worker what had happened and what I'd be doing to get the new psychiatrist. He suggested, among other things, I should get my former psychiatrist to write a prescription for me. It worked, and my former psychiatrist also wrote a report about for my chosen psychiatrist to read. I picked up my meds yesterday. (They were covered under my new plan.) The disaster is over. I have thought about experimenting by taking less Strattera on the weekends, but I'll run that idea past my new psychiatrist first! Comments are closed.
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