There’s nothing quite like having great insurance only to find out your insurance coverage — for reasons still unknown — is no longer as great as it used to be a few years ago. Is that result the rubbing off of Obamacare on established health insurance plans that have now been debrided down to an even more lowest common denominator, or is something else stinking afoot?
Continue reading → On Being Ill with Wellness: The New Uninsured Insured
As I’ve written before, having a blog of a sustained length over time that can dive back a decade with in situ thoughts and facts-of-mind on the record makes for a wonderful repository that allows a certain grabbing back into what we thought we knew then in order to compare it against the modern treachery of The Now.
Continue reading → The Medication Generation: Searching for Perfection and Enlightenment
If you are on maintenance medication for depression or your heart or some other long-term illness, one thing you should always be aware of when taking a new medication is its effect on your dreams. Your doctor may not care about your fruitful dream state, but you care because you must. Your dreams are the pathway to a prescient future.
Sometimes, the medicine-induced dream-influencing doesn’t happen for a few months, or the fitful sleep arrives in dribs and occasional drabs that leads to a dribbling memeing. I discovered, through trial and error, and the momentary comparative experience, that Benicar, my blood pressure medication, was indicating horrific nightmares for many months.
Continue reading → Side Assaults and Medication Induced Nightmares
My article on Seven Depressions yesterday brought an old friend back in touch who shared with me that he has been suffering from depression most of his adult life. He appreciated the bluntness of the post that depressed people are sort of stuck in their lives traveling from one medication to another looking for the right mix of meds to help them build a bridge to start feeling average again. Some never feel better. Nobody finds a cure.
We know most of my friends are still medicated and, the other day, I was concerned when I read an article claiming that most depressive people on daily maintenance medication will have seven major episodes over the arc of their lives. The demarcation between depressive events was notched as major changes in medication. Some of my young friends have had only a couple of events. Some of my older friends are deeper into their modes of seven.
I spent most of last Sunday night slowly and steadily working through the heap of responsibilities that I had steadfastly ignored in favor of the weekend. I did this despite knowing the pitfalls of procrastination, and unsurprisingly, I was tired when I woke up in the morning. I walked to meet a friend for breakfast, silently bemoaning my terrible decision the whole way there, and when I arrived, she was not in much better shape. We exchanged mumbles, I admitted I’d brought this fate entirely on myself, and her reaction was misguided, although sympathetic: “You want an Adderall?”
We are starting to see the aftereffects of Obamacare starting to trickle down to patients, and there are some things that are both odd and curious. Obamacare goes full-blown in 2014, and in 2012 some doctors started the transition process by writing electronic prescriptions, but 2013 is already turning out to be the Big Obamacare Year of Change.
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