Mitigating the Madness

Bit of a Back Slide

This was the first full week that I didn’t have two treatments of Spravato, and it was a bit of a doozy, but not for the reasons of therapy or medication. I just had a rough time this past week nursing my ESA back to a point where she wanted to live. After losing one of the two female rats that are my ESAs, my remaining rattie refused to eat, or do much of anything other than lay in the hide she had shared with her sister. I spent three very terrified days hand feeding her with a syringe to get nutrition into her. Every morning I woke up fearing that I would find her passed away in her cage as well. While I still have a lot of anxiety about losing her, the only thing I can do is take it one day at a time and enjoy the time that we have together.

So that stress was pretty much the reason I had a bit of a backslide when it comes to my depression, but it wasn’t an all-consuming depressive episode like I’ve had in the past. In July, I get to revisit my current medications, and possibly lower or come off of my anti-depressants altogether. It would be the first time in ten years that I won’t be prescribed anti-depressants if I do step down off them. As a person that both struggled to remember to take their medication, and who dislikes having to take pharmaceuticals, to me this would be another step in a positive direction. That isn’t to say that I don’t think that medications don’t have a place in healthcare, I just don’t like taking so many pills.

This upcoming week, I’ll be going a little longer than a week between treatments because of the influx of patients starting Spravato in the clinic I go to, and that really makes me happy. I hope that the people who are just starting the treatment are able to have outcomes similar to my own. How different the world is when you aren’t living under the shroud of depression.