Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Rocky Start

Taking anti-depressants while not depressed is a strange sensation. In my experience taking anti-depressants in the past, I never noticed any kind of effects until I tried to get off the medication. Well, there were a couple different ones. On the Effexor, I never noticed much until the head zap withdrawal symptoms. On Wellbutrin, I noticed that I no longer wanted to smoke cigarettes and I actually quit while on it. And then the withdrawal from that was just needing to take a nap for about a day every time I decreased the dose. Not bad.

But with this Prozac that I'm taking to try and treat the IBS (an off label use my doctor has prescribed), I noticed effects really soon after I took the first dose. My doc said that I might feel "activated" and I didn't know what that meant until I felt it. I wasn't feeling hyper, but I just felt a little more... active. In my thoughts and also somewhat in my body. A lightheadedness. And my stomach went from feeling bloated to feeling super bloated.

Now, I'm taking this to try and fix my IBS, and one of the side effects is, essentially, upset stomach and constipation, the exact things I'm trying to avoid. My doc told me to look at any GI symptoms in a positive light, in that if the drug was affecting that area, that meant it might help it later on once I reached an effective dose. Which is not very comforting when I feel like I'm going to burst. I even dreamed that I was pregnant, which I completely blame on the feeling of largeness in my tummy (I'm not pregnant).

I won't really know if the medication is helping until I've been on it for 4 to 6 weeks. I really hope I start getting used to these side effects soon.

Or at least that the tummy issues subside, because right now I feel like I'm making the problem worse instead of fixing it.

On the brighter side, I'm getting well on with the books I want to publish before the year is out. Amazon switched its paper copies from CreateSpace to the Kindle Direct interface, and I wasn't sure how those would look, so I ordered a proof copy for the May ICT section book to be sure the new service translated my files correctly. It looks good, and I'm just waiting on Ambrose to do a proofread before I go in, fix things and publish.

I'm working on captions for Return to the Wild Coast, and I hope to have the proof for that ready to go by the end of this long weekend. Then I just need to finish up writing the September ICT trip and my CrossFit book. I just might get them all published in 2018!

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