First off I suck at keeping up with this blog. Quals were crap, work is depressing, money is short and so was my vacation. I could have used just one more week of vacation. Kids are back in school and homework hell has returned. Another day of drama and tears; hers and mine. I feel “ranty” today… must be hormones.

Bah humbug. I’m changing projects…AGAIN. Something in cyber infrastructure. Haven’t really thought about the topic much as it appears this time it’s mostly left up to me to come up with a topic. Weird for a science field. Anybody out there work in Cyber Infrastructure related to the sciences? It’ll be a co-advisorship with a prof in Comp. Eng.

In other news I had to stop taking Concerta. My hair was falling out…so I was put on Focalin, which is just the active isomer of Concerta. Since my hair went back to falling out, I’m just going back to Adderall. I hate taking meds…and I hate even more playing switcharoo with brain stimulants.

I have a project due tomorrow that I’m just hating doing right now. Oh well…back to work.

4th day of Concerta 54mg and all of a sudden I have chills and a sudden high fever (102.7) and a huge headache…still in bed miserable with a headache and fever.

I’m going back to 36mg…this was way too scary and 36mg I felt no such side effects at all…this isn’t worth the extra concentration time I would have provided me…I ended up loosing a day because of this.

My meds got upped today to 54mg. Finally I’m above the “kid” range of mg into the “adult” range. A research study found the median adult dosage was more like 67mg on average…in other words between 54mg and 72mg. Kids take between 18 and 54mg. My first day on 54mg will be tomorrow…maybe I can get out of this research slump I went back on.

What’s worse is that as soon as the 36mg stopped working, my insomnia came back…ugh. Today it took me 2 hours to calculate something that should have taken me no more than 30 minutes tops. All because I was so distracted that I kept forgetting the numbers as I was transferring them to the calculator… how basic a skill is that? For ADDers it’s a heck of a struggle just to stay on task!

It’s 2am and I’m still up. 3 days, 9 hours of sleep total and I’m still wide awake beginning day 4… I hate to admit but my ADD is back. Not that it ever left me…but I am trying Concerta and compared to Adderall, symptom wise, it’s wonderful. Aside from a little dry mouth I am symptomless, unlike Adderall which at only 20mg gave me the worse tinnitus and come down headaches.

I hate meds. Anyone that knows me knows that I hate taking pills. I fight it all the way. When I was pregnant with my first I had build up of spinal fluid in my brain…something called Benign Intercranial Hypertension ( or the scarier version: Pseudotumor Ceribri). Anyhow, here I was 2 months with child, and had to take a diuretic called Diamox. I tried and tried to get the Neuro to lower the dose, all the while terrified of the effects on my child…but it was either that or loose my vision or perhaps, eeek stroke.

But where was I? Ah yes, ADD. How appropiate…at least I was halfway on topic. Yup, so Concerta has no side effects that I feel, and my appetite was good and it’s really gentle. But the 18mg did nothing…and 4 weeks into 36mg and it’s also lost it’s luster. So I’m back to tangents, or hyperfocus or minucia that doesn’t matter at the moment…or ever. Today I spent 2 hours searching for a MathCad opensource substitute for Mac, when I already have Maple AND Mathematica installed and can use both perfectly well. All of this because I visited the bookstore to get my $9 MS Office and happened to walk past and my eyes caught the non-site licensed version of MathCad priced at $99. Somehow that extra order of magnitude in price prompted some obsessed search of an alternative to a program I don’ t need…. do you see where this is going?

What I need to do is a) ask the doc to up the meds and b) get me back into the college ADD coping skills group…which means more waste of time to hear someone blabber about to do lists, and choosing whats important…yack yack yack that I need to hear anyhow. Even though to an ADDer, it doens’t really matter what’s important when you’re hyperfocused…because you don’t see the time fly by.

Don’t get me wrong…I enjoy my hyperfocused state sometimes. For example…the twilight hours I stayed up these last 2 nights I got at least 1+ weeks worth of data and movement on my thesis…and nothing like hyperfocus to help you learn a subject just days before an exam. The problem is that I can’t turn it on/off or refocus it. ADD is a really bad name for what this really is and it should instead be called: Hyperfocus Refocusing Disorder or HRD, get it? HyRD…HeaRD ! nevermind…

But I digress, again. I’m really on a kids dose and for my size, physically I should probably up it now that the metabolism got used to it…but I hate taking meds…specially since it’s really because I feel that it’s not ADD that is a problem, but my line of work that makes it so pronounced…it’s the statistical part of the research that I can’t stand…graphing, regraphing, legend, normalizing, abcissa tick size, colors, spreadsheets, numrical analysis…in other words minucia. If I were a banker I would starve.

Maybe I should have continued my music career and the conservatory…no I take that back because sitting through a 20 minute symphony with a 36 measure rest is a sure way to make me miss my entrance and get a baton thrown at me…yup true story.

What I should have been was an emergency room doctor…all that action and adrenaline get’s me pumped and thinking on my feet…something ADDers do really well is thinking on in a time of need…like when I give presentations I’m pretty awesome at it.

If only my research could mix graphs, numbers and analysis with someone else’s imminent death… but wait! that would make me a health insurance exec!

I know I know…bad joke…what do you expect on 9h/3days of sleep? As my friend would say: Booooo!

Technorati Tags: add, concerta, adderall, meds, insomnia, sleep

I was born forgetful and accident prone. My whole childhood I can remember answering my parents miriad of why-questions: “I forgot” to which my mother invariably answered “you never forget when your show is on TV.”

Now as an adult and several tests later I’m ready to out myself to the world: I have ADD. There, it’s out. I take meds for it too: Adderall. And I found out what I was missing all these years..being able to shut my mind up. This has it’s typical sad parts: All those years unable to concentrate enough in school to pay attention. If there is one thing I remember my primary teachers telling me to do is “for the last time…sit down!”

But it comes with it’s very comical side effects… here are some examples:

Cleaning the house – I start in one room, pick something up, go to the next room, find something that belongs in the living room, go there, then I see the dishes need cleaning and three cups later the floor is wet, so I mop it only to remember that the bathrooms also needed a moping and ofcourse when I’m there I notice the tub needs cleaning and the rugs could use a round in the washer, which reminds me, I have to put a load in the washer…

TV – I go through spurts. Last month I spent the whole month watching the Tennis channel, because I started playing tennis again, but ofcourse the programming began to repeat and so I am now a Food Network channel watcher until my next spurt.

Music – same thing…like artists have phases, so too does my taste in music. In HS all of 9th grade I spent listening to french standards, and in 10th grade I obssessed about learning all about Jazz standards. My latest music phase is Cuban salsa and before this I was discovering the music of western Africa.

Marriage – You know you’re ADD when in the middle of “IT” you start thinking about completely unrelated things like “I wonder I should restring my tennis racket this weekend.”

But in all seriousness, the medication is a life saver. When I take it, even to play tennis, I am a much better player. I can react more on instinct and not have my brain analyze the angle of impact, the velocity, the rotation, my arm extension, the racket angle and …darn, the ball flew. I’m so hung up on thinking about it all that my reaction is slowed down.

I even found out yesterday that I can drum when medicated, but can’t hold a beat without it because I’m thinking too hard about wehre to strike the drum and how hard to hit it and the pattern that I can’t just “feel the beat.”

My closest friends know when I’m ON the pill and when I’m not and we laugh about it constantly. At some point someone will say “did you take your meds yet?”

My poor overfunctioning brain.