side effect blues

No cigarettes since Sunday and I’m doing okay.  The thing I hate is when I forget and do something I always associate with cigarettes, like drink coffee or finish eating, and for a second I feel like I forgot to do something until I remember.  And then I feel disappointed. 

But I have no excuses this time.  I’m on enough medication to calm a classroom of hyperactive first-graders after a sugar party, and I wear the patch.  I was wearing the patch 24 hours a day but after one very scary round of nightmares, I will be removing the patch before bed from now on. 

I think I mentioned that my medicine gives me terrible nightmares.  Well, the patch does the same thing.  Combine them both and my dream world is the most hard-core, fucked up scary place you can imagine.  The night before last, I had a dream that I was still in the Army and we were doing a training exercise at an amusement park.  By mistake we shot down part of a rollercoaster track with an anti-tank weapon.  It was funny until we realized that no one told the people running the rollercoaster, and we all stood there as coaster after coaster flew down the track and then plunged off the spot we’d shot out, maiming and killing the passengers in the cars.  It seemed like it went on forever, the cars just flying off the track into the air, turning upside down and crashing and skidding into the ground or other rides.  And there was screaming and broken bodies and blood just fucking everywhere. 

I woke up scared to death but when I realized it was only a dream, I calmed down and fell back asleep.  And went back to the same dream, only this time, the Others (thanks, Lost), a society of people who are not human and live in caves underneath the amusement park decided to blow up the rollercoaster by shooting up explosives at every point where the track met the ground.  They were relentless and again with the screaming and blood and dead people and body parts scattered everywhere, and when it became clear that we had to get away to safety, I looked back and saw a little girl dangling from her seatbelt in an overturned rollercoaster car still on a piece of the track.  She was crying and scared and completely unharmed.  I tried to go to her, but my master sergeant told me we had to leave her because moving her would set off another round of explosions.

The thing I hate about dreams is how haunting they are when they’re happening, and that residue of terror they leave behind on your mind, but when you try to explain them, no matter how you try to convey the intensity, they always seem so fucking stupid.

I had an employee physical yesterday for my new job and it turns out I have a pretty scary case of hypertension.  The nurse took my blood pressure five times, on different equipment each time, and she kept looking at me funny like she couldn’t understand.  I’m not fat, I’m not old, I don’t smoke, and I look like a pretty healthy person.  Finally she accepted that the numbers she kept getting were my true numbers and so she made me a printout and sat me down for a talk.  My blood pressure reading was 174/103.  If you’re not familiar with the numbers, normal is 120/80, and the bottom number is the one that’s most dangerous.  My blood pressure is higher now than when I developed hypertension at the end of my pregnancy and had to go to the hospital every day to be monitored. 

I asked the nurse if I was going to stroke out, and she said no.  I asked her if I should go to the emergency room, and she said no.  She told me to refrain from doing anything strenuous this weekend and go see my doctor right away next week. I didn’t tell her that I know the reason for my hypertension because I don’t think my employer needs to know about that part of my medical history, but I’m not surprised at what’s happening.  One of the side effects of my antidepressant medication is hypertension and I guess that’s what I’m experiencing. I have an appointment for my annual checkup on Tuesday so I will talk to my doctor then, but I don’t know how I am going to convince him to put me on hypertension drugs rather than discontinue the medicine that’s causing the hypertension.

Man, I feel like a senior citizen here, with all my medical problems.  You’d never think I was in my early 30s from reading this.  Anyway, I am more worried about what could happen if I go off the medication than about what could happen to my heart if I continue to have this blood pressure.  It’s a testament to how bad things got around here that I would rather be dead than depressed.