New Morning & Another Reason for Keeping Notes

It is very clear to me now both why doctors prescribe antidepressants and why patients endure the early symptoms until their brain chemistry stabilizes and the drug begins to work. I feel…better. It is a curious state to attempt to describe. As my friend BS says, “You generally don’t notice feeling okay or good, but you do notice when you feel bad.” There is also the fact that as you experience a particular state for an extended period of time, be it either feeling good or feeling blah, you come to take it as your normal state and forget that you used to feel differently.

In my case, I realize now that the treatment regimen had gradually been grinding down my mental energy and state of mind. I had not noticed it as it happened though the folks running the study, and AVB in particular, claimed that they could see it happening to me. They actually had the advantage of seeing me intermittently as opposed to every day. This allowed them to notice the changes more clearly because they showed up as significant differences. It’s like the first time you spend some serious time away from home. When you return you notice real changes in your parents and siblings that would not have been nearly so obvious had you been with them on a daily basis. Likewise with me, my wife and I were immersed every day in the grind of treatment and thus the incremental changes became what were normal as opposed to something we should be paying attention to. If nothing else, the declining number of posts per month to this blog should have been a tip-off that the depression and why-bother attitude induced by the interferon were taking a very real toll.

Now that I have been taking antidressants for about 3 weeks and Celexa in particular for about 10 days, I feel a bit better; a touch more mentally alert; less likely to have the why-bother attitude. I still get tired and lose the ability to concentrate by early afternoon, but now when I get home, I don’t just drop onto the sofa and watch a couple hours of awful television in a kind of passive stupor. I still turn on the TV, but I now get bored after a while and find something else to do. The ability to be bored by stupid, mindless crap is a great gift of mental achievement that has been returned to me by modern bio-medical research and I am grateful.

This is yet another reason to keep notes about yourself while you are in treatment. If I had done nothing more than record the number of hours I was watching television, it might have tipped me off that my mental outlook was going downhill. So take notes, date them and look them over from time to time as treatment goes on. You have to review them regularly because the interferon is going to fog your brain and ruin your memory during treatment. If you do these things, you can stay ahead of the side effects and do your doctors a great service by having good information to give them. Both of these things will help you come through you treatment more successfully.

PS: A purely personal note about Celexa because it means a lot, SEX IS BACK!