In which I want to vomit forever

On December 9, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I got hammered by the digestive side effects that Mounjaro is famous for so hard this morning that I had to stay home. Suffice it to say that I spent most of the morning in the bathroom and at least once seriously contemplated taking a picture of my bodily effluvia so that I could submit it to Guinness. I have never witnessed anything of the quantity that I was producing this morning. I’ll leave it at that.

Just now, I looked up my scores for the second ILEARN checkpoint, and really, there’s no reason for me to go to work tomorrow, because my kids are clearly learning not a Goddamn thing from me this year.

And tomorrow they’re going to take a test, and then I can start preparing them for the final, which 85% of them are going to fail.

So, yeah, I hate everything, how are you?

This happened

On September 23, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Day … three? of the brain meds, and I am a fucking mess and have been all day. I made it through a day at work but only through a combination of pure stubbornness and fear. Because I have no idea what will happen to me if I run out of sick days during the first semester.

At any rate, I told most of my classes that I felt like shit and that they ought to be nice, and if they pressed I told them it was a medication thing. One class asked specifically what was wrong, and I said that I was dizzy and tired and nauseous and sweaty, all of which was 100% true. (I got up this morning, took a piss, and had to go back to bed and breathe for ten minutes because my blood pressure just decided to flatline for a while.)

One of my kids looks at me and says “Are you on ADHD meds?”

Well, no, as it turns out, but … nice guess, kid.

In which I am more blatant than usual

On September 21, 2019September 21, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Every so often I use either my blog or my Patreon as a bulwark against my own shitty memory, and this is going to be one of those times: I started on the Effexor last night, so today is Day One, and so far I have been dizzy all day and I have been sleepy, although not as bad as my recollection of the Lexapro early times were. The dizziness is manageable and the small supply of Meclizine I happen to have on hand cut it but didn’t kill it; I’m going to avoid driving any time I don’t absolutely have to for the next couple of days, but this isn’t close to bad enough to keep me home from work.

Yet, of course. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.

An utterly random observation: we watched the two-part season finale of Season 10 of Masterchef last night, and I continue to have the most useless mutant power of all time: we watch every one of Gordon Ramsay’s stupid competition programs and I have only been wrong about the winner once in all that time, either on Masterchef, Masterchef Junior or Hell’s Kitchen. Most of the time I’ve been able to pick the winner out several episodes before the end but I’m pretty sure I’m well into statistically impossible by now in terms of how often I’m right on the final episode.

Also, I’m not going to do a full review, but if you happen to be the type of person for whom a combination history of antisepsis and biography of Joseph Lister (the guy whose name was eventually appropriated for Listerine) sounds appealing, you could do an awful lot worse than reading Lindsey Fitzharris’ The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. It’s not for the squeamish, and I nearly didn’t make it through the book’s description of a surgery to remove a bladder stone in the prologue, but it’s good stuff.

Free life advice

On March 14, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Never join a gym on the same day you change your antidepressants. Because the bullshit from the med change will make you not want to/not able to go to the gym, and that will make everything worse.

Especially when the Monday after the med change/gym joinination is the goddamn Daylight Saving switch, and everyone in the universe wants to crawl back into bed regardless of what chemicals they’ve been putting in their bodies lately.

Hitting the reset button on everything once I get back from C2E2. Until then, I’m not worrying about it.

On anxiety: an observation

On November 20, 2015November 20, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories9 Comments

This post probably could have just been a handful of Tweets, but I’d kinda like it a bit less ephemeral than that. First things first; I’ve talked, a couple of times, about some of the things about Penny Arcade that make it somewhat problematic for me to be a fan of theirs. That said, when Mike gets something right, he really gets it right, and you probably ought to read the piece he put up yesterday on his, and his son’s, issues with controlling anxiety.

Second: I am, as most of you full well know, currently on medical leave due to (primarily) anxiety issues. I’m taking Clonazepam after having a genuinely shit reaction to the Lexapro I initially started on.

Every so often, I catch myself feeling like I’ve managed to pull a con on somebody. Not often, but it happens. This got you on medical leave? Really? Because most of the time, I’m fine. It’s the 10% of the time when I’m not fine, and the unpredictability of the arrival of that 10%, when it becomes clear that, yes, I really do have a problem right now, and it is best for everyone if that problem does not strike during a time when I am responsible for educating the children of other people.

I just got out of the shower maybe twenty minutes ago– shut up, I’m at home by myself, I’ll shower when I want— and all the sudden the whole world crashed down around me. I’m not going to get into the details, but it was bad.

And then it hit me that I had forgotten to take my pill this morning. My routine was a little disrupted from usual and I forgot.

And it took, oh, six hours without any Clonazepam in my system for me, out of nowhere and with no particular anxiety-inducing trigger, to be reduced to a miserable, shuddering wreck.

(And I should also be clear that I’m still having occasional flare-ups while on the medication. But they apparently trigger immediately if I forget to take it. Is that just what my life was like before I started taking this shit? Jesus.)