Still off the Lamictal, Seroquel, and Neurontin. Comparing now to a couple of months ago, how do I feel?
I don’t feel as moody, as paranoid, or as anxious. I haven’t had any panic attacks. I’ve lost about 10 pounds and I do feel lighter and less bloated because of that. I’ve stopped eating sugar all day every day so my energy level (such as it is) is at least more even than it was. I’m still getting muscle cramps but they don’t feel as debilitating. I’m not sleeping as well, but I’m getting more sleep than I did before (I think). More important to me, however, is the fact that I’m not taking those 3 medications that I’ve had a sneaking suspicion I had no business taking to begin with. Most important of all is that I don’t feel “addicted” to Seroquel. (I should add that I really hate trying to fall and stay asleep without Seroquel. I’ve tossed and turned so much in the past two weeks that I’m sore from it, and I’m getting up multiple times in the middle of the night).
However… this was not a panacea. It simply helped to narrow down the range of possibilities as far as what’s making me feel bad. My biggest “I don’t feel good” complaints right now are:
- Rapid heart beat upon any kind of exertion
- Shaky
- Dizzy
- Wheeziness
- Itchiness
- Watery eyes
I’ve been able to see a clear correlation between using my inhalers and the rapid heart beat/shaky symptoms. This makes perfect sense, but it’s also depressing. I tried going without my Symbicort for more than a week, and it was damned difficult to get to sleep at night because I never could clear my lungs out well enough to get a good breath. Without either inhaler I’d probably be shaky, etc., just from lack of oxygen.
Of course, I smoke, and yet what’s becoming clear to me – what I always suspected but am only just now becoming certain about – is that allergies… severe, chronic allergies… are behind the worst of my symptoms. They change every day. Some days, smoking makes things much worse. Some days I can smoke like a chimney and it doesn’t seem to make any difference at all.
So, as you know, I’ve been focusing on our house where the allergies are concerned, and feeling pretty overwhelmed because of it. I finally talked to David about it a little bit, yesterday, and told him I believe we’re going to have to bite the bullet and find some way to gut the master bedroom/master bathroom and get rid of the mold I have always suspected is everywhere in the walls and ceilings in there. He didn’t disagree, which is a start. In fact, we decided to go ahead and pull the wallpaper out of the master bath and take a look behind some of the tiles, last night – and there was mold everywhere. On the studs behind the rotted drywall, for instance, a slick, black coating of slippery mold. On the surfaces underneath the tile we pulled off, colonies of black and green mold. The area around the window seems especially bad, but we haven’t made our way to the door frame yet, which is rotted at the bottom and has a moldy hole we can already see inside of. The ceiling in the bedroom is puffy and droopy from an old leak the previous owners didn’t fix correctly, so my imagination is running wild thinking about what it looks like on the other side of it. And then there’s the carpet, of course – our air conditioning unit froze up last summer, causing a leak that flooded the carpet in our bedroom and hallway. God only knowns what the pad and floor look like underneath the carpet.
So our mission for today is to get our stuff out of the bedroom and move in to David’s office (our next largest bedroom) for the time being. From there we’re going to tape off the air intake vent and the doorways and start knocking stuff out. With plenty of protective gear/face masks, etc., of course. Depending on how it goes we may or may not have to call in some professionals for assistance.
A little afraid of what we’re going to find in the attic when we get the ceiling down. There’s no access to that part of the attic, right now. Our home owner’s insurance doesn’t cover mold – I remember that quite clearly – so whatever we find and whatever we need to do is going to be up to us to cover the cost of.
Once we get the moldy stuff off of/out of there we can call in the professionals to clean the rest of the moldy, dusty, 40-year-old-blown-in-insulation out of the attic, and to clean the duct work and reseal the ducts.
Maybe my allergies will improve as things progress, giving me more energy to deal with the mess itself.
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