You know you are going to have a bad day when you arrive for your 7:45 am session with your shrink and someone is sitting in your chair in the waiting room. If that weren't bad enough, they also have the latest issue of the New Yorker. You are immediately thrown into a quandary. Where do you sit now? Granted every chair in the room is in full view of the door the doctor is going to come out, but what if she doesn't see you? And what to read? You really couldn't care less about Jennifer and Ben, and if you see one more article in a ladies magazine on "How to Walk off the Weight" you will scream. I mean, don't they know that those of us with bipolar disorder who take no less than two mood stabilizers have tried everything short of carving off the weight, to no avail?
That gets you started thinking about your pills. Jesus, you have to add ten minutes on to your morning routine to count and sort all the things you take to keep you as close to normal as possible. There is the Effexor for your mood, and the Avapro to counteract the high blood pressure the Effexor gives you. You take Lithium so the Effexor won't make you feel TOO good, so you take Synthroid to counteract the damage the Lithium has done to your thyroid. Because the Effexor dose must be precise, you must take four of the little suckers to come up with right milligrams, and toss in the other pills and that's a lot to swallow. Why couldn't some pharmaceutical company come up with customized meds so that ALL your medicine comes in one convenient easy to take tablet? Now granted it would be the size of an Alka-Seltzer, but we could manage. We swallow seven pills in one gulp, with the dregs of our coffee, now.
