“I’m on drugs!” ~almost famous
13 December 2005In the interest of irony, I should tell you that it took me a full two days to finish this entry about taking ADD medication because I kept getting distracted. Armed with that information, off you go:
I am obviously a big fan of the Better Living Through Chemistry school of thought– if you have a problem, and they make a drug for it, you should take it. Don’t listen to Tom Cruise, take all the pills you want. If you blush too much, you should talk to your dermatologist about drugs that will keep you from becoming maroon at inopportune times. If your head hurts, you should take advil. If you have allergies, you should take an antihistamine. And if you’re clinically narcoleptic, you should feel no shame in hitting the Ritalin. Repeatedly. Which is how I got through college and, after nearly 3 years au naturale where I was trying to convince myself that I could have a rich and fulfilling life while still sleeping 14 hours a day, where I find myself today. On legal speed. Try to contain your jealousy.
I’ve been frustrating myself and others with my sleeping problems since high school, where I would make evening plans with my friends, go home and promptly fall asleep, leaving Carolyn to call my house and have my dad go “Uh, yeah, looks like she’s out for the night.” This was also in the phase of my life where I was still trying to become Master of the Universe and was involved in every afterschool club that would have me (and am still bitter that Ms Chin kicked me out of Asian Club) and working part time and needing to sleep 12 hours a night, which does not add up to a 4.0 GPA. In fact, it adds up to little else other than me panicking before the yearly lecture we all had to attend to open the debate season (remember that one, Marie? Where we went over thrilling topics like Whats Wrong With Russia and they guy in charge invited people to throw a shoe at him if he didnt see their hand raised, and one douche every year always took him up on it?) and, ultimately, quitting debate and leaving the Captain’s Chair to Ultimatum Girl, who you might remember from previous posts about Ways In Which To Secure An Engagement Ring That I Would Die Before Trying That Sadly Seem to Work On Some Less Worthy Men.
So went spent the next couple of years bopping around to various doctors discussing a variety of interesting treatment ideas that would bring me down from 12 to the normal 8 hours, including but not limited to: having the metal fillings in my teeth replaced to make sure that they weren’t leaking mercury into my bloodstream (I declined that one); regular B12 shots, which is what the celebrities were doing to cure their sleepiness circa 1999 (didn’t work, though it did cure me of my needle phobia); thrice-weekly IV treatments of Vitamin C intended to “jump start” my immune system (mostly just bruised my inner arm and made me look like a heroin addict); and a complex cocktail of sleep aids and antianxiety drugs (made me drop 20 pounds and allegedly caused my friends to consider lifetime movie-style interventions when Ultimatum Girl decided I had an eating disorder, obviously fueled by her jealousy of my unintentional thinness).
Before my sophomore year od college, we finally went to a sleep clinic (why this wasn’t the first stop on this crazy train I will never know) and I got to do the fun thing where you sleep in the hospital with the wires on your head and they make a graph of what your brain does while you’re sleeping. Then they show you the graph and tell you that, according to the frequency with which you REM sleep, you’re narcoleptic and you, with your Deuce Bigalow understanding of narcolepsy (ie, that it makes you fall asleep in your food) say “I don’t think I have narcolepsy,” to which your mom pats your arm and tells the doctor “She’s a psychology major, so she knows a lot about this.” Yes. That man went to school for 20 consecutive years to become a doctor, and I sat in Millington 150 and watched videos of the Stanford Prison Experiment while playing 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon and trying to decide who I should make out with that weekend, but I am more qualified to make this diagnosis.
(I should also note that, in that same intro psych class, when we spent half an hour covering sleep disorders, about 20 minutes of that was our professor playing a video of a narcoleptic dog running through a field and then randomly falling down asleep that had people rolling in the aisles that I laughed particularly hard at, and I am convinced– CONVINCED– that I now have to deal with this sleeping bullshite as retribution for that. So be careful who you laugh at).
Despite my mom’s unending faith in my abilities to confidentially reject the opinions of experts, the more he talked the more I believed him. Turns out that most narcoleptic people don’t fall over sleeping in the street, they just can’t consolidate their deep sleep so they wake up frequently at night (yep) but have trouble getting out of bed in the morning (yep yep) and function best when they can do a 4 hours awake/ 3 hours asleep pattern throughout the day (yep yep Finals yep). This was not the diagnosis that I wanted, but at least it was an answer other than “You’re just lazy,” which I had been fearing for a while after seeing the “I can’t believe I created a child that not only didn’t even try to apply to Princeton but can’t haul her ass out of bed for her 11 o’clock class” look in the eyes of Dad, who is also a Champion Napper but is able to fully function on 5 hours/night for weeks at a time if he has to. The doctor also confirmed that some of the other fun symptoms I was reporting– namely, extremely vivid nightmares and brief hallucinations upon waking up–were normal for My Kind and not someone pulling some major M. Night Shyamalan mindfuck on me. Super.
Okay, but that part of the story is boring. The good part comes next, when they put me on Ritalin, and it turned me into a superhero.
For reasons that no doctor has yet been able to explain to me, when you are not, in fact, hyperactive but you take medication intended to focus ADHD kids, it has the opposite effect on you. Basically, it calms hyperactive people and makes calm people hyperactive. (Not that anyone has ever described me as “calm,” but you get the idea). For me, it managed to do something that literally nothing else has been able to do in my life– not shoe shopping, not Made marathons, not the prospect of an alcohol-infused Taboo tournament– it kept me from wanting to lay down and go to sleep. Magic!
It was not without some interesting side effects, to the amusement of my close friends. Namely, the talking. Near constant talking. I would talk to anyone who even remotely looked in my direction and I Would. Not. Shut. Up. It also–somehow– would make me intensely focused and motivated on whatever task I decided needed my attention. (This, I think, proves that I’m at least a little ADHD, since that’s what it’s supposed to accomplish in those kids). My roommates became experts in my medication schedule, as they were forced to sit on our couch and watch while I arranged the boxes of pasta on our shelves first by size, then color, then alphabetically while I filibustered on such exciting topics as Why The Absence of Saved By The Bell In The Afterschool Time Slot Will Be Detrimental To Forthcoming Generations. It was particularly fun to take at horse shows, where the #1 activity is Standing Around. You wake up at 5 am to ride in a van for 3 hours, where you commence with 6 hours of standing around, 8 minutes of actually being on a horse, 2 more hours of standing around and then another 3 hour van ride. Having to be awake that long without something to distract me from the fact that I wasn’t in bed was torture before I started taking Ritalin. I’m pretty sure that it was torture for everyone around me when I was on it, though, as I vibrated from one team member to another trying to engage people in meaningful conversation about important thinks like Drinking and Boys. It was in one of these hazes that we came up with the idea for the first Riding Team Progressive, though, which was the catalyst for many people vomiting, falling down stairs, getting kicked out of bars, and cheating on their boyfriends, so I can’t say that it wasn’t for the greater good.
I should have more stories about how it helped me choose Studying over Sleep, but I don’t. When you suddenly have the circadian rhythms of a normal person, annotated bibliographies and flash cards are not high on your list of what you want to accomplish with your new lease on life. It helped when I needed it to, though– I remember leaving my sorority house one night at 9 pm knowing I had two 20 page papers both due the next day, neither of which I had begun writing. I distinctly remember Amanda calling down from her bedroom window “Good luck!” as I waved and strode confidentially towards the 24 hour computer lab. 40mg and 6 hours later, they were both done. As regular Cristin, it was hard to motivate me to do such basic tasks as, say, showering, but as my RitalinGirl alter ego, I was a machine.
I stopped taking it after college because having a job where I was far, far away from a bed for many, many hours was usually enough to stabilize my sleeping schedule. Yes, I routinely collapsed upon returning home, particularly when stressed, but generally speaking, it wasn’t so bad. And it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to keep a steady Ritalin supply– I’m convinced that it would be easier to do it illegally. Because of that Prozac Nation chick, and all those people on that MTV special about how you can get high from snorting adderal, drugs like this are “controlled substances” and you can’t get automatic refills. Which means you go back to the doctor every month or, if you happen to be in college in Virginia, your mom goes for you and then sends the drugs to you in the mail (across state lines which must- MUST- be illegal) because your school health center doesn’t even stock it due to all the college kids abusing it. Which I didn’t think could possibly be as big a problem as everyone was making it out to be, until my high school drug dealing boyfriend looked at the pill splitter in my medicine cabinet and pronounced that I was sitting on a gold mine. Yeah, he was arrested for possession the following summer. Hands off, ladies, that one’s mine!
So I’ve been Drug Free since 2003. And it’s been fine. This problem has never affected my work– I’ve never face planted in my keyboard, or snored through a launch meeting– so I figured that meant I had conquered it. But there is the small problem that my work is not My Life, as yours shouldn’t be, either, and some times I want to do stuff outside of the office that does not involve putting pajamas on at 7 pm. I live in a gigantic playground and I would like to play in it, even if it’s (gasp) dark outside. I give my management company a boat load of cash every month just to have this zip code and, goddamnit, I am getting my effing money’s worth, even if it takes a prescription to do it.
So I went back to good ole’ Dr P a few weeks ago, convinced he would have no idea who I was. Turns out he remembered everything, as he only has about 8 narcolepsy patients in his whole practice. Everyone else is an insomniac or has sleep apnea. That can’t be fun. I might see imaginary spiders in my sleep, but at least I don’t ever stop breathing. Thank gawd for small favors.
There were a few highlights of my Dr P confab… at the front of my mind is when he looked at my weight from three years ago and asked how much I had lost since then, and when I said like 6 pounds he didn’t believe me and stared at me for a while before going “Oh, it’s because you’re so tall,” leading me to believe that I look fat on paper. Thanks. Or how he didn’t believe me when I said I never drove (“Never?” “never.” “Not, like, once a week?” “no, never.” “Never?” “I live in manhattan.” “oh.”), which, I’d imagine is the #1 concern for all doctors of people who fall asleep at random and undesired times. Also great was him telling me that, even with the medication, I should be in bed by midnight every day. Righto. As was the news that they’ve developed a new drug for My People that’s actually a sleep aid, intended to consolidate your sleep at night into deeper sleep so you don’t feel the need to pass out during the day… and it’s the same thing as the date rape drug. Because I would love to roofie myself every night.
In the end, though, he handed me the Stuff and told me to take it when I needed it. Score. Totally worth the $10 copay.
In summation, I’m off the wagon. Consider this your warning. I feel the need to advise the people closest to me of the new and improved (?) version that might be up and running occasionally so they have an excuse for the mild lunacy. Amy is going to bear the brunt of most of it, since she’s generally with me for the 6-10pm time slot where I need this the most, and even before I was back on the sauce I would do stuff like screaming so loudly at the 24 promos (coming in January! AAHHHH!) that she would jump off the futon. Another prime target is Whitney, is within striking distance during my 2 pm re-up, and yesterday had to deal with me running around to her office (our offices share a wall, but are on opposite sides of a large O, if you can picture that), telling her I was going to send her an email, running back to my office, sending it, then running back to her’s going “Didja read it? Didja read it yet? Is it here? Should I resend?” Nora’s had the best reaction so far with “Brilliant. I love the effect of prescription drugs on my friends. Sometimes I try to get my roommate to chase her pain meds with beer for fun.”
I’m also doing a series of fun experiments on myself where I start my stopwatch as soon as I take it, and see how long before I start to feel jumpy and chatty. There’s more of a variance here than I would like: anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and 15. Because of this, I’m also compiling a list of situations you should not enter into having just taken Ritalin, including but not limited to: Before going to the post office during the holiday season, as you will get stuck on a 25 minute line and when the girl in front of you keeps dropping things, you will respond without thinking “Having some trouble with gravity there, arencha?” Before going to church, as the impatient drumming of fingernails against the pews tends to echo; and before hanging out with anyone who’s only met you once before, as they have no framework of normalcy to return to once they’ve heard you talk about pirates for twenty straight minutes without taking a breath.
Something to look forward to. So if I leave you a 45 minute long voicemail about Lindsay Lohan v. Hilary Duff, or my solution to the oil crisis, that’s not really me… it’s just the drugs talking.
2 Responses to ““I’m on drugs!” ~almost famous”
December 15th, 2005 at 11:46 pm
Yeah, you think you’re pretty cool. Where were you fifteen years or so ago? That’s what I thought. I am still number one, and don’t you forget it.
December 16th, 2005 at 9:58 am
Everything I do, I do after my little brother. You dress up as a pirate, I dress up as a pirate. You start a blog, I start a blog. You spend a decade on ritalin, I start hitting the drugs. you are SO #1, peej.
Now go study for finals.