After last night's cold-shower rush of awareness, I was given a pleasant gift as a reward, so to speak: a sunny, warm day, lovely and pleasant. Deserved, don't you think?.... well if you don't think so feel free not to chime in.
Met with Melinda, the psychologist at the clinic, about plans/prospects for taking interferon. We were pretty clear about risks and advantages; as I already knew, one of the things that raised my anxiety level about doing interferon (yet again) was not the memory of sitting outside California Pizza on a sunny sidewalk near UCLA in 2001, when I first had to do this medicine, feeling lonely and frightened and actually bursting into tears as I looked at the bag of hypodermic needles, nor was it the depressing time of wasting my first sabbatical in Newcastle on a second bout with this medication. It was the memory of B. taking interferon over the past two years – he was honestly a mess, a collection of disintegrating functions and added medications to handle his blood problems, digestive problems, breathing problems... we were all pretty appalled for him.
But of course he toughed it out, and is now doing quite well; he even came to the HIV patient group's meetings with medical students and talked about how he was doing (mostly as a way of getting out of the house).
As Melinda pointed out, entirely rationally, the fact that I've taken these medications without that many side effects suggests that it would be really strange if I had those symptoms, of course (but a bit of panic is natural). She agrees that she won't put me on antidepressants until we see how I'm doing – nice to have the flexibility, I hated the packed-in-cotton-wool feeling of taking them (besides, it would make my Jungian analysis a bit pointless for the duration).
One unexpected thing I did recognize in the discussion: I think my anxiety is also organized around something that has always bothered me, a source of some of the worries and depressions I exhibit in this blog: that I am actually emotionally quite volatile, changeable. Not socially: I don't fly off the handle – but emotionally, when good and bad things happen, I respond to them fairly heavily, and can change quite a bit in the course of a couple of days. Which is why I always complain about living alone, and try to fix solutions on external sources – friends, possible partners, even getting a cat – because although everyone who knows me sees me frequently seeming quite level-headed and cheerful, many of them don't realize that when I'm away from them my mood can plummet like a stone.
Good to recognize, anyway. Perhaps I can figure out some way of moving through that in the coming months... lucky I have Melinda, analysis, my acupuncturist – I must sound like a desperate child clinging to anyone who can help (hey, I was the youngest of a largish family); but I don't mind taking advantage of all those support systems.
Today, in the bookstore near the university, the counter near the sections of medical books had a charming new toy: a red ballpoint pen that looks exactly like a nastily realistic hypodermic, full of blood.
I bought one, of course....
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