When I last posted here I talked about problems with racing thoughts and shakiness from the addition of Trazedone and Claritin-D to my daily drug regimen. As a quick update: I switched to Diphenhydramine (aka Benedryl) and Melatonin for nighttime sleep and allergies, and Zyrtec for daytime allergies as needed.
I’m struggling to make it through the night on Diphenhydramine and Melatonin alone and have ended up taking one pain pill (Hydrocodone) each night in an attempt to deal with the anxiety, muscle pain, and general withdrawal symptoms from the other meds for the past 3 nights. This is unsatisfactory to me but I still feel that I am moving forward towards prescription-free sleeping. As I mentioned previously, I believe the road to drug-free nights is going to be a relatively long one. The racing thoughts, however, did stop.
My cold flashes are thinning out and giving way to hot flashes. I seem to be in a more or less constant state of either-or where hot and cold are concerned, and I suspect it has a lot to do with hormones. I should start my period any time now, but all the changes in my medications coupled with the physical stressors from my dental work over the past month will have had a big impact on the hormones that are traveling around inside me right now.
My goal for today to is simply stay busy and try not to fixate on medications. To get past the anxiety and withdrawal symptoms I’m going to have to give it time. Healing time. Just like when I had my wisdom teeth out and knew there was nothing I could do to make the healing process happen overnight. So – my project for today is to work on getting our kitchen cabinets ready for paint.
One reason we bought this house – the first either of us has ever owned – is because it was a fixer upper. We looked at another house in the same neighborhood with the same floor plan and by the same builder, but the owner had gone through and attempted to modernize it. This one was stuck quite firmly in the 70′s and 80′s and needed a lot of work.
We started in our sizable back yard. More than twenty years ago, a previous owner had a big swimming pool installed, then proceeded to cover most of the rest of the yard with a big, wood deck. The deck was surrounded by a four foot fence with two feel of lattice on top of that. The owner we purchased the house from had taken things a step further by putting yet another 4 foot wood fence on top of the 4 foot wood fence the previous owner had installed. The fence was leaning every direction, and all of the wood in the fence and deck was rotted. A large gazebo in the corner of the yard was also rotted, as was a lean-to between the house and the kitchen the folks we bought the house from had nailed together. A tin shed in the far corner of the yard, behind the fence, was rusted out.
We spent the first year and a half tearing all of it out (except for the pool, of course). We filled two, 2-ton construction dumpsters with the debris and had it all hauled off. Underneath the rotted wood was several inches of useless river rock, and underneath that was a few inches of builders sand. Somewhere underneath all of that was shredded plastic and underneath that, dead dirt. Poking up through everything were the toughest weeds and vines you can imagine. Last year, we worked through most of that, and we now have grass growing in a couple of areas. I even had flowers around the pool, in some places, before the drought killed them last summer.
Inside the house, we tackled the popcorn ceiling in the kitchen, first. This was quite a mess, but it was nothing compared to what came next. The people we bought the house from had created a home-made, dragged texture on all of the walls in the kitchen (as well as on the base of some of the cabinets!) and had then attempted to drag a watery blue paint over the top of that. I think it was supposed to look like fabric, but have never been sure. Rather than simply replacing the sheetrock, I decided to try to sand the texture off. When that was unsuccessful, I retextured the walls myself. The light fixtures in the kitchen, such a they were, mostly did not work. We have yet to address the wiring issues, which will be challenging because the wiring runs through a dropped ceiling and there’s no way to access it from the attic.
We have dreams of gutting the kitchen and expanding it. There’s certainly room to do that, but the value of the homes in this neighborhood doesn’t support that kind of remodel. So, our next step is to get the cabinets looking as good as we can. We removed all the doors. We bought all new hardware. Now we just need to sand, paint, and put everything back together.
We’re in the middle of several other things in the house, too. We need to install flooring in the sunken den, which is currently bare concrete. We refinished the ceiling and walls in the den a couple of years ago but they need major touch-ups (and I’m having second thoughts about what we did there, regardless). The ceiling in the master bedroom has to be replaced. The tiny master bathroom has to be gutted and redone. The roof has to be replaced.
In fact, there is so much to do besides fixating on medications and my mental state that I’m beginning to understand why I feel so stressed out all the time to begin with. My husband and I have a practical to-do list that is so long it has become overwhelming.
My resolution this year is to get control of that list.
Starting with the cabinets.
Probably.
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For now, that advice is: