First post... and the inspiration for the blog title.

First off.. welcome to my blog. Yay blog. I have no earthly idea how often I'll actually be able to update this thing, or if I'll do it ever again.. but I will try. I have a very active toddler, and a fairly demanding life so I rarely have time to pee.. let alone blog.

Hokay. First ever blog post. Here goes.



When we talk about self medicating, we think about someone downing a bottle of vodka, popping some pills they stole from grandma's medicine cabinet, or even going to the neighborhood smoke shop and buying some pot. However, in the day of Viagra commercials during the evening news, and Paxil commercials during Lifetime movies, perhaps the whole idea of self medication needs to be revisited. Allow me to present to you a brief journal entry, written by yours truly, just a few months ago after having my right ovary and Fallopian tube removed surgically. I'm kind of a baby about surgery, so it was painful and I was given fairly decent pain medications afterwards. I warned my doctor that I am a recovering addict.. and he ignored my fears. The following post is what happened because he ignored my fears, and because I chose to self medicate instead of being smart and seeking help.

It’s like being hugged by someone you respect who you never thought knew you existed, and, through that hug, you can feel that they love you.  Truly love you.  It’s the best feeling in the world, topped only by the actual experience of such a hug by such a person.  I don’t get that experience too often.  But I get pills every day and, for the time that I’m high, I do get that experience--or second best at least.  Better than going through life alone and unloved.  My drugs love me, sometimes, most of the time; they stand alone in that regard.  It’s a love-hate relationship, true; they love me so much that they hate to let me go, that they will go to any lengths, they will hurt me even, to keep me tightly contained in their embrace.  And the love-hate is mutual.  I love their caress, the feeling of belonging that they bring to me, but I hate the cruelty the drugs inflict on me when I try to leave, I hate their selfish need to push everyone away to keep me all to themselves and ensure that no one else will love me the way that they do--or any other way because, really, who can love a drug addict, someone whose love above all others is a pill (well, a lot of pills), whether they want it to be or not?  No one wants to come second best to pills.  It’s an insult that most will not bear.

Which leaves me alone with my drugs.  My drugs who love me so much that they are willing to ruin my life just to make me “happy” for a little while, and then a while longer and a while longer while I take more and more because what else do I have left? Why not take the love and affection they offer when no one else is offering? What else do I have to lose? Drugs have driven them all away already.  Well, drugs and me.  I certainly can’t blame the drugs entirely when I’ve done such a fan-fucking-tastic job of driving everyone away all on my own.  But where everyone else has abandoned me, I know I will always have my pills to turn to and they will never turn me away.  Even if I have ended my relationship with them for months, years, they are always there for me to come running back to and they welcome me with open arms that quickly envelop me and do their best to never let me escape their affections again.  And each time I fall back they hold me tighter.  A death grip.  But what a way to go out; held deeply by the one that loves you, literally, to death.

End over dramatic, drug induced ramblings. One can clearly see where I was using medications to fill some void in myself where my relationships with my husband, child, and friends just were not working out.

Cut to today. Two weeks ago, actually. I went to my primary care doctor. I said to him, "Doctor, I'm kind of depressed. I'm not sleeping well and I'm a little all over the place. I've been on antidepressants and mood stabilizers before, and they've helped. What do you think we can do here?" Now, instead of saying, "Well, let's try some cognitive behavioral therapy, or some relationship therapy, or even to see if there's some root biological (read: non psychological) reasoning behind this" I jumped right to medication. My doc, being a doctor and not a shrink, was in agreement, with the stipulation that he was going to run some bloods to make sure nothing was horribly amiss there. Now tell me, how is being put on psychotropic meds.. meds that have been known to cause an up rise in teen and young adult suicides any better than self medication with alcohol and illicit drugs? Because it's legal? Because I'm being closely followed by doctors and my husband to make sure I don't go over that line? I know I'm not making one ounce worth of sense right now, but give me a freaking break.. I'm titrating on 4 different meds right now (Abilify, Cymbalta, Ativan, and Topamax) and off a cortical steroid and a freaking opiate pain killer so my brain is more than a little muzzy.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is that in some fashion, we all self medicate. Am I any better than I was back then, popping vicodin to make myself feel better? I don't think so.