| View Blog
|
|
|
|
For most people the months between May and September consist of taking vacations and enjoying the outdoors while juggeling a job and supporting a family. In recent years, summertime for myself was a time to experience the outdoors in a way that gave me focus and inspiration.
This May I turned 28 years old, and looked forward to a summer of kayaking and personal growth in the process. It had been a hard winter and spring, with more pain and surgery than most people experience in five years. I was ready to apply for graduate school, and get on with my life.
Then, on June the 8th, I went to the bathroom to perform routine buisness and discovered that, to my absolute horror, I was literally shitting chunks of blood. My memories after that are fuzzy. I woke up in a hospital bed a day later with fragmented images of being admitted to the ER. I spent the next two days in horrible, horrible pain, but thank God for the morphine, because I basically slept through my entire stay at the hospital. When doctors found an ulcer in my stomache, they cauterized it and sent me home.
That was June the 10th. Today is August the 12, and I while 90% of Americans enjoyed sunny days and trips to the beach, I sat in my room, and slowly went insane. Around the end of June I realized two obvious things about my health. The first was that my stomache was not healing. The second was that I was very much addicted to my ADHD medication, and that despite being medicated I could not find the will to flush the toilet, let alone clean up after myself.
In July I stopped taking (well, really ran out of and never bothered to get refilled) my ADHD meds. The first week of being non medicated I slept almost all day. When I actually was awake and moving about, I found myself and my senses almost totally detached from anything in the physical world, to the point where I would reach for a glass of water and just let it slip out of my hands and crash beneath me on the floor. I would then walk away, not because I didn't want to pick up the glass and clean up the water, but because those things did not seem to exist in the same place that I did. I would walk on top of the glass, the shards sinking deep into my soles from the wieght of my body, and this not only failed to concern me, but it also felt like it was not real.
I had been in this situation many times before in my life, and I contributed it to being non medicated. What I didnt realize all that time was that the behaviors and symptoms I was exhibiting and experiencing were not the result of having an unmedicated ADHD mind. What was really happening, was that I was going through an extended period of withdrawl from the drugs I took on a daily basis. My brain was esentialy working without the "training wheels" of medication. And when this period of withdrawl subsided 2 weeks later, I found out what the real "me" was like. It was not as bad as I had given it credit to be. Contrary from having a lack of overall energy, I found I had an overabundance of it. My thoughts flowed more easily, and I found I could actually say what I really wanted to communicated to people for the first time in 15 years.
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| Views: 15
Email This to a Friend 
