Song: “Stay With me” by Faces
Mood: 7.5
Nightmares: 1
Ghosts: Few
One nightmare woke me up last night but it didn’t get me out of bed, I didn’t have to change my shirt, and it wasn’t too long before I was asleep again. Nightmares have been trending downward from when they were really bothering me a few weeks ago. Two Thursdays ago I had a pretty rough night but otherwise things have been calming down. I think I’ve even been able to catch up on some sleep, which has been great.
I’m still doing my ERP homework and I’m happy to say that the front door is much easier to deal with at night again. I’m going to keep working on it, though – hopefully this will be the last time I have to hammer away at the front door. It may not work for everything, but ERP is a really good tool to have in an OCD toolbox. It’s difficult and painful (and kind of horrible) to use at first but it’s been my experience that once there’s progress, there’s also some “momentum” that helps keep things moving forward.
I’ve also had a lot of success with not taking a picture of the stove on my pre-bed loop around the house. I hope I don’t regret saying this later, but it’s actually not bothering me at all. Not too shabby!
J went to visit her parents last weekend, so I was doing the bachelor thing for a couple of days. I kept myself busy with my usual hobby puttering, but also spent some time outside watching the wildlife and caught up on some of the shows I wanted to watch. I was up a little later than I’d usually be, but I slept pretty well and everything was fine. It was very nice to have J back home, though!
FA came over on Monday and we worked on some project-y stuff, shot the breeze, and went for a wander through the hardware store. As usual, it was a good time full of thinking, hanging out, and joking around. I think some of the best work we do is when we’re trying to figure something difficult out – we have very different ways of approaching problems and usually the best solution is somewhere in the middle.
Had a Dr W appointment yesterday. It wasn’t too bad but I think Dr W was in a bit of a hurry. He wasn’t rushing things, he just… sounded like he was in a hurry or harried or something. We talked quite a bit about my medications and for the first time in months (January? February? It’s been a while) we decided to reduce some of my medications. So now I’m back to 8mg of the prazosin at night (went up to 9mg when my nightmares got bad again) and quetiapine is down 25mg to 125mg. I’m particularly pleased about the quetiapine, as there is correlation between it and weight gain, and I’d like to shed some of the weight I’ve put on since I got sick.
I made the changes last night and I don’t think I noticed anything. At one point I was on 700mg of quetiapine a day, so getting rid of 25mg now will hopefully go unnoticed by the little chemical receptor things on by brain cells.
Oh, and I came across this somewhere in my travels and thought it was a funny and accurate portrayal of some of the things my OCD makes me grind my teeth over:
I always try to get the gas to a full dollar value. If I miss it, I’ll go to the next dollar up. If I go too far and obviously can’t fit another dollar worth of gas in, I’ll go to the nearest $0.25… but I won’t feel right about it for the rest of the day. I don’t know what I’d do in the situation in the picture, though!
Nothing planned for this weekend, but next week after Tuesday is going to be busy. I have a lot of appointments – an appointment with the nurse at the clinic for a vaccination, one with Dr H, one with the surgeon who fixed my arm, and one with the dietician.
Stay safe.