DISCLAIMER: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
OK, this is one of those posts where I share the mistakes I've made with my medications and hope that no one who reads this will ever do what I did. All lessons do not have to be learned the hard way. :-)
Now, on to my story. I've decided somewhere down the line someone in my family crawled through some green ooze that caused some gene mutations. Unfortunately, we didn't get really cool ninja skills like the turtles, we got a gene that causes us to think we know more about what medications we should be taking than our doctors!
I can remember my parents and my aunt & uncle having many conversations with my grandpa on this topic. In my infinite teenage/young adult wisdom and foresight I "KNEW" that I would always take my medication exactly the way it was prescribed....WRONG!!!
Apparently I forgot about the time when I was 16 and got a royal butt-chewing from my doctor for not using my inhaler for months at a time (it was prescribed for daily use).
And apparently my crystal ball I had back then didn't show me that in 2009 I would assume I knew everything I needed to know about the water pill I was taking and then end up taking it in the morning before playing a softball tournament in Panama City in 100+ degree weather (apparently I forgot that part of biology where we learned that peeing wasn't the only way your body rids itself of excess fluid) Yea, that didn't end well....
But, instead of realizing that maybe, just maybe, I didn't know EVERYTHING about my medicine and I should talk to my doctor, I would freak out and take myself off of it until my doctor noticed that my blood pressure had gone up and let me know that I had two options, take my water pill or start blood pressure medicine (that got me over being afraid of the water pill really quickly)!
And obviously 2011 was too far outside the scope of my crystal ball or else I would have known that after I started my anxiety medicine (that diagnosis came a few months after the depression diagnosis) I would feel so good that I would decide it had been anxiety all along and I wasn't really depressed so I just wouldn't refill my depression medicine because I just didn't need it. Yea, I only did that once before I realized that my Bachelor's in Management and Master's in Logistics was not equal to all those years of med school my doctors had.
See, I learned that even though my anti-depressant only took 3 days to be completely out of my system, it took about 2 weeks for it to fully get back in it! And, on top of that, I was dragging so bad from not having the anti-depressant that I would run late every morning and ended up missing 3 days of my anxiety medicine before I realized what was going on.
AND THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS: Your doctor(s) went to school 7+ years to get training in what they do. Take your medicine as they direct. They know things about the medicine that you don't. Even if you do have that M.D. out beside your name like they do, how objective do you really think you can be in diagnosing yourself?
MORAL #2 (I'll throw this one in for free ;-)): Ask your doctor questions!!! So many people ask so many questions about the mundane parts of life or the latest gossip. Heck, we even ask questions we don't necessarily expect an answer for (i.e. How are you?) So why is it when it comes to our mental and physical health so many of us go mute?
No comments:
Post a Comment