I Got Accepted Into A Clinical Trial!

Today was my appointment to apply for a clinical trial for a new depression medication. The day kind of started off poorly, because on the way there, I got stuck in a huge traffic jam, for about half an hour, so I was really late. But the people were really nice about it... not like going to a regular doctor's office where you would just miss your appointment! 


Here's how the process seemed to work. 


1. Doctor A explained how the whole clinical trial would work, about the placebo effect, possible side effects of medications, etc, etc, etc. I also had to read about twenty sheets of paper about it and sign each one.


2. Doctor A and Doctor B interviewed me about my depression symptoms and other medical and mental health history. They asked how long I'd gone through depression, whether I experienced suicidal thoughts, whether I had a loss of appetite, trouble sleeping, lost interest in activities... you know, all the basics. 


3. I had to do a computerized assessment that basically asked all the same questions. 


4. Doctor A gave me a brief physical exam that included getting my temperature, blood pressure, weight, height, listening to my heart, looking in my eyes, ears and throat, etc 


5. Some technicians came to give me an EKG test. I at first thought it was the kind where I'd have to run on a treadmill, but that is called a stress test. This one was easy... I just had to lay on the exam table, and they put little stickers around my heart and on my arms and legs, and then turned on the machine for about a minute.

6. I had to pee in a cup. 


7. The only part that sucked... I had to get a blood test! But even that wasn't bad. Despite the fact that I have small and difficult veins, the technician managed to draw my blood painlessly, and I didn't even get lightheaded! 


8. The best part was when Doctor B came and handed me a check for $40! I did not know ahead of time that I would be getting paid for this. Technically, they said it was travel reimbursement, but it doesn't cost me $40 to get there! I will be getting paid $40 for every appointment I go to. That is a really nice fringe benefit, because I'm a starving student and I don't have a steady job right now, having quit my most recent job because my depression was really getting in the way of my being able to work. (My job involved working with children, and when I was feeling so bad, I just couldn't get my heart into it! Usually I am great at planning activities, etc, but this time I found myself not even caring about the kids at all, so I figured I needed a break until I could get treatment.) 


9. I have another appointment for next week, at which time they will give me the medication. I have a 50% chance of getting the type of medicine being tested, a 25% chance of getting an existing brand of medication, and a 25% chance of getting the placebo. Nobody will know what I have, not even the doctors. I really hope I get one of the medications! 


In the mean time, they are going to run the lab tests on my urine and blood. They have to make sure I don't have any major medical issues that might mess up the results of the medication. I hope I don't have any unknown medical problems! Since I don't have health insurance, I haven't had a physical exam in the last few years, so anything is possible.


After I left the office, I felt so happy, just knowing that medication was on the way! I was driving home in my car with the windows open, blasting the oldies station and singing along, just like a regular person. It was kind of a nice relief... but if Doctors A and B had seen me, they probably wouldn't have believed that 24 hours earlier, I had been crying as I walked through my favorite Six Flags amusement park, because even the rollercoasters couldn't lift my depression that day! 


I will find out more about the results of the lab tests in a few days. I'll keep you posted!

A Helpful, Free Online Tool

Hi everyone! I recently found a cool online tool that I've been using. This could be very helpful for anyone who is dealing with a disorder that affects their mood, especially if they are trying out new medications.
The site is called Mood Tracker, and its free. The concept is pretty simple... each day, you can log on and track what your mood was for the day.  You can also mark whether you took your medication, how many hours of sleep you got, whether you followed your exercise routine. The system will then track the information. You can choose to view graphs of your moods... and you can even print out the graphs and journal entries to share with your doctor or counselor.
Some other perks of the system? You can sign up for support alerts. These are alerts that will email or text you, or another person who you indicate. For instance, you can get a text message or email sent to you each day when it is time to take your medication, or you can ask for a "help" alert to be sent to a certain person whenever your mood hits a certain level.
You can also have your caregiver (which I guess would usually be a doctor or therapist, although I doubt any doctor I went to would be willing to take that time) sign up for Moodtracker and have access to your mood tracking. They can then keep track of what is going on with you. (If they didn't want to do all that, you could still just print out your mood charts and bring them to the caregiver!)
There is even a forum where you can talk to other users.
This service is free. You can also choose, for about $25 a year, to have a subscription. This would get you a few extra features, including pie charts of your moods, the option to track your exercise records, space to record significant events in your mood tracker, and no ads on the site.
I think it is pretty cool, and I've been using it for a while! I also think it will be handy when I start taking meds for the study I'm going to be in, to be able to keep track of my mood from day to day and have tangible evidence of whether the meds are working.
Check it out! www.moodtracker.com.
If you have any other helpful sites to share, please let me know!

Paying For Treatment

One of the major problems I have right now is that I am currently not on any medication for my depression or ADHD. I can live without ADHD meds... I've developed lots of skills for coping and compensating... but its rough without depression meds. I actually had to quit my new job because my depression was making it too hard to go to work! If I'd had medication I wouldn't have had that problem. But because the job was only part time, I wouldn't have had health insurance from it anyway, so there wasn't even any hope for securing meds in the near future!
In the county I used to live in before I moved back here, I qualified for free counseling and med management, and the doctors at the county mental health office worked with me to help me get my prescriptions for pretty cheap. They would try to prescribe generics that I could get at Target for only $10 or less, and they were trying to enroll me in programs through the prescription companies that would let me get meds for free.
Where I live now is a much larger county that includes a major city. Instead of all low income people in the county going through one mental health center, it goes by the town you live in. For instance, most people in the big city could probably use the city's mental health services. In the suburbs, there are private mental health centers that provide sliding scale services to people in certain groups of towns. If you live in one town, you have to get services from whatever agency is serving your town.
I found out that my town is served by "Creekside Behavioral Health Hospital." At first I was hopeful, because their website boasted a mental health clinic near my house, as well as an outpatient hospitalization program where you can get all the benefits of inpatient hospitalization, but sleep at home. (I was very interested in this option, because my depression was getting so bad, I thought that an every other week counseling session was just not going to cut it this time!)
So I contacted them... and found out their "sliding scale" fees. It would be $160 for an initial evaluation, $100 for a therapy assessment, $80 for each follow-up therapy session, and $55 for medication management. So, assuming I just went to therapy twice a month and got med management once a month (you usually are required to have it once a month in order to get prescriptions for "controlled substances") I would have to have $395 that first month. That is money I just don't have laying around!
I did give them a call anyway... but you have to leave a message with their intake department, and they call you back whenever they get a chance. (Its been a week so far with no call back from them.)
In the mean time, I found a depression study I may be able to enroll in. I have an appointment on the first of August. The study means I will either be on a placebo medication (hopefully not), an already established depression medication, or a brand new medication. I will be on meds (I sure hope its not the placebo) for free for twelve weeks, and if all goes well, I'd be able to continue taking it for free for a year.
Here's the scary news... in order to participate, I'll have to go through a physical exam, including a blood test and an EKG.  I hate blood tests (I usually faint.) And an EKG? Is that the thing where you have to run on a treadmill? I don't think I will do well on that! I really get nervous about physical exams because I don't like strangers touching me.
But... ugh... I guess it is what I'll have to do in order to get on meds!
I also found an ADHD study that I can participate in. I won't get meds, but I'll get paid $10 per hour to do it (four hours of testing) and that is a full tank of gas! I will be doing that tomorrow and Thursday.
If you have depression or another mental illness and you're wondering how I found these studies, I just went on Craigslist and typed "depression" into the Community, Jobs, and Gigs sections. You could also look on the websites of hospitals and universities in your area, since some have links to clinical trials that they are doing.
Anyway... I will be sure to let you know how all of these studies go!

Homesickness

One big sign of depression for me is when I get really homesick in ridiculous situations, such as when I'm going to be working a full day or when I'm going to spend one night somewhere else. The stupid thing is, I've lived on my own, off and on, since I was a teenager. When I was a kid, I was fiercely independent and wanted to be away from home as much as possible. I moved across the country on my own for a year (it was for a year-long volunteer program), traveled alone across the country to visit my brother for multiple weeks, and even during times when I was staying with my parents, I spent more time away than home.

But now, I can't bear to be away from home! I feel like my parents' house is this big, safe, happy fortress, and I just want to hide inside. For instance, right now I am supposed to be puppysitting for a friend whose dog had puppies... they are on vacation for a few days, and my duty is to stay with the dogs during the day and also sleep over. Well, its been TORTURE for me! Even though I absolutely adore dogs, and being around tiny puppies should be the happiest time in my life, all I can feel is sadness whenever I am there. I try to come home every few hours... like swimming under water, and coming up for breaths. I go spend time with the puppies, come home, back to the puppies, back home, all day long, even though it is a half hour trip each way.

And when night comes... when I have to go sleep at my friends' house with the puppies... I feel like i am leaving home forever! I bawl myself to sleep because I just want to be at home, in my own bed, with my own dogs, like a normal night. I cry as if my whole family has just died, when really I am only going to be away from them for a night!

I wish I wasn't like this. I want to enjoy the puppies. I want to be happy to see their little tails wagging at me. Part of me is... but the other part of me is just crying, "Home, home, home home," the whole time I am there.

I can't stand it.

Butterfly's Description Of Depression

Okay, lets try this again.

I'm creating this blog so that I can have a place to write about my real life, the things I go through, and the reasons why. I've had other blogs before, but I've decided to keep this blog anonymous. That way, I'll be able to be honest about everything I go through, without worrying that someone, like a prospective employer who finds this blog, a relative, etc, might take something the wrong way. A few of you do know who I am... but unlike my other blogs, you won't see any pictures of me or any other identifying information. In this blog, I am just Butterfly, a young woman struggling with a plethora of issues including depression, anxiety, ADHD, learning disabilities,some autistic-like tendencies, post traumatic stress disorder, and who knows what else.

The type of depression I have is chronic. It is different from someone who goes through a rough period in their life, sinks into depression, and needs to be on medication for a few months to a year. Mine is lifelong, lurking there, forever.

I am not constantly depressed, though. It seems to happen in a pattern. My depression can be triggered by various things. Everything can be going well for me, until I get the flu, or my dog dies, or I get in a car accident, or I get in a fight with a friend, or I find that I do not like my job. Then, even though these things might be minor setbacks for most people, I seem to get slammed with depression. Suddenly, I'm crying all the time, feeling sick to my stomach, feeling exhausted and dizzy, unable to eat, unable to sleep. Sleep is an especially weird thing when I'm going through depression. Even though I'm exhausted, at night I can't fall asleep. I'll be awake at all hours, tossing and turning, unable to stop flailing my arms and legs. Even Tylenol PM or tranquilizers don't work. I have to trick myself into falling asleep by going downstairs and watching TV until I drift off, in the wee hours of the morning.

When this happens, eventually I manage to get on medication... easier said than done when you have no health insurance. The medication always takes weeks to begin working. When it does work, I start living more and more of a normal life. Then, after a year or so of being on meds, because I have trouble getting it (meds can be impossible to get every month without insurance, and when you skip a few doses because you're having trouble getting them, you start getting physically ill, which, when I'm not going through depression, makes it seem to me that I'm just taking the meds to avoid withdrawal symptoms instead of because I need them for my mental health) or decide I'm ready to be off it, I'll quit taking it. And then, maybe a few months or a year after that, SLAM! I'm back in depression.

That is what happened this last time. I was getting services from the mental health department in the county I lived in. However, that wasn't working out, because I was living with my so-called friends while caring for their children full-time as what started out as a paid nanny and ended up as some sort of indentured servant. Since I rarely got paid for watching the children, my income was basically 0. The county wanted to know how I could survive on 0, and when I explained that I was living with these "friends," the county wanted the friends' tax information. The friends weren't willing to supply it... and so, the county could no longer help me. I ran out of meds, suffered through the painful flu-like symptoms involved with sudden withdrawal for a few weeks, and that was that. (I did try to wean myself off a little by cutting  my last few pills in half and taking half every other day, to ease the pain. It may have worked a tiny bit.)

I ended up moving out of my "friends'" house in December, moving to another county to live with my parents. I was going to try to finish school. I have about a year left. The problem was, when I left my "friends" behind, I also left behind their children, whom I had helped raise full time for the past three years and whom I had known well since their births... and their other friends and family members, who I had known for years and cared for very much. Basically, I left my whole life behind. And that triggered a bout of depression. At first it wasn't so bad... but over the summer, it got super bad, to the point where I cried every day. I, who have been living on my own off and on since I was 17, now found that I cried heartbrokenly when my parents went on a 5-day-long vacation, or when I had to stay overnight somewhere for work, or when I read a sad book... just about anything can knock me down.

And the anxiety that comes along with it... I finally secured a job that could work around my school schedule, only to find that I was sad and nervous to the point of vomiting every day before work. I would be bawling every morning as I left the house, and when I was at work, all I could think was, "I want to go home, need to go home, don't wanna be here, need to go home." This was much more intense than the usual "my job sucks" kind of feeling. I've had other jobs that suck, and when I am healthy, I am able to find a bright side of anything. When I'm healthy, I really am an upbeat person, who puts her heart and soul into any job she has, and looks for ways to make things more bearable. When I am in depression, I cannot do anything but survive each minute.

But I have no meds.

So I finally emailed my new boss and said I need a few weeks off to deal with a medical crisis.

And now, I have to find a way to get better!

Okay, so...

So I've worked for multiple hours to set up this blog, and now I am feeling too sad to write in it. Hmm. Better luck tomorrow... tune in!