SO MANY PILLS
The days of shoving a singular vitamin in my mouth in the morning went out the window a long time ago. These days I dread setting up my pills because it takes FOREVER, but the only thing I hate more is having to do it every week, so I now do it for the whole month. First I have to sit down and have a glance at what I did with my last set. Did that herb last month make things better or worse? Should I up the dose of this thing? Will taking these two things at the same time make my liver explode? I plot out a plan and write it down in Evernote. Then it's time to gather and assemble all the bottles. There's a lot, and most of them are for bladder repair in one way or another. The current group: vitamin D, L-arginine, glucosamine & chondroitin, aloe vera, calcium glucarate, iron, CBD, palmitoylethanolamide, and the occasional B vitamin when I'm feeling brave (bladder actually hates this, but I'm getting low). A couple others I'm probably forgetting. I think Celexa or Lexapro is going to happen again but I'm still figuring out the best timing, and Elmiron is now taken on the other end with catheters, so those are set aside. Once the bottles are assembled, I start putting them in the right places, and once I start, I can't get interrupted--because ALL THE DAMN PILLS ARE WHITE. If I lose concentration there's almost no way to tell which pills I already did. I can't afford to under or overdose myself, so if I fuck things up at this stage I have to throw it all out and start over, and that sucks really bad so I usually put on headphones and try to ignore everything around me while I'm doing this. Sleep meds don't go in, because I usually have to take something a little different every night and you don't want to hear about that. Sleep will not occur without meds, and after decades of dealing with this, I am done fighting this basic fact. (It's most likely tied in with the whole syndrome I'm dealing with and not going away). I have a whole *other set* of medications for fighting flares, and those don't get put in any boxes because I have to take a different thing and amount for each kind of flare when they happen, and I have to consider a lot of things, like where I am in my cycle and what I've already ingested for the day. One of the best things I ever did a couple of years ago was finally getting clear on the three distinct culprits that cause them for me. Each requires completely DIFFERENT medication, and figuring this out was...huge. I no longer felt helpless when things went sideways. Now that I usually know exactly why it's happening and how to deal with it, I feel a little less frustrated. It still sucks but I feel better knowing it's not completely random. Elmiron is the special pill--it's a prescription that I credit with putting me into remission about a decade ago. I just started taking it again recently (with the catheters) and it appears it's already doing twice as much good as all the "natural" stuff above. The supplements sometimes work just as well or better than Elmiron for some IC people--lucky them!--but it looks like I'm not one of them, which to be honest is kind of what I suspected given my mother's long, long relationship with it. However, the CBD definitely did dial down a lot of nerve noise, so that stays, and I'll probably keep taking at least some of the supplements for insurance. I don't really know what my point was with all this. It was a great way to procrastinate doing the pills again 😆
