Hi everyone! Wow, a quarter of the year has gone by already. March was... eventful, to say the least. I turned 19, I withdrew from both of the allergy medications that I've been taking, we removed our kitchen counters and had new ones put in, I believe I discovered the truth behind my current "allergy" headaches, and I started doing exposure therapy again.
My 19th birthday was nice and quiet. I meant to have a bit more of a celebration as usual to make up for the fact that I did close to nothing on my 18th birthday, but that didn't happen. I wanted to wait for some nice weather to do anything, but we've been busy on all of the few nice days we've had since then. But my dad made me cupcakes and snickerdoodles and I got some cool presents, so it really was nice. I especially liked the cupcakes. I haven't had cake (or cupcakes) since I went low-fodmap 2 1/2 years ago, and these turned out really good.
Withdrawing from the allergy medications was actually harder than I was expecting. I've been taking Claritin (and occasionally allegra or Zyrtec; for a while I was switching back and forth) since May of last year, and for some reason I ended up with some truly awful withdrawal headaches. Luckily, they went away after about a week but its still wasn't fun. Withdrawing from the Flonase was easier.
The weekend after my birthday my uncle came over and helped us rip out all of our kitchen counters. We had new ones put in the following Wednesday. Well, we had most of them put in on Wednesday. Some of the pieces weren't cut properly and they had to come back and finish on Friday. This all caused quite a bit of disruption in my usual routine, which wasn't fun with my anxiety. But I got through it, and that's all that matters.
I've had a suspicion for a while now that the "allergy" headaches that I've been getting (or at least the ones I've been getting since I stopped using the cefaly on a regular basis) are actually from dryness in my nose. I have no clue about the mechanisms involved or why they present in the way they do. What I do know is that they go away when I put bacitracin ointment in my nose. Unfortunately, I'm sensitive to bacitracin (or more likely the petroleum base), so I had to find a different method of keeping my nose...less dry. Fortunately, using a humidifier on low all the time seems to do the trick. I still don't understand a lot about the headaches (like why they responded to allergy medication) and I'm a little upset that I suffered for over a year before figuring it out, but at least for right now they're under control.
I started doing exposure therapy again at the end of this month after discovering that I'm going to have to go to the gynecologist's sometime soon to get a refill on my birth control. I also emailed my last psychologist to see if she could give me some tips on using exposure therapy that's tailored to fit acceptance and commitment therapy. And after a week of emailing back and forth to see if I could set up an appointment, she informed me that she doesn't specialize in acceptance and commitment therapy and I should find someone who does. Which was really disappointing, because it means that I will have to find a different therapist after all, should I decide that I want professional help. Anyways, back to the exposure therapy. I've mostly been doing imaginal exposures and, like, sentence exposures, but I'll probably move into doing real life exposures sometime this month.
Which brings me to things going on this month. I don't have much really scheduled to happen this month, though I do technically have a gynecologist appointment scheduled for the 30th. I may end up rescheduling it for sometime later, depending on how much progress I've made in exposure therapy by that time.
I obviously do have some other tasks that I need/want to do, though. As of this morning, I have begun tapering the buspar again. I'm hoping to get all of my doses at least down to 10mg (my afternoon and evening ones are currently at 15mg and as of today, my morning dose is at 10mg). I started working on a crochet project last month that I still haven't finished. Its the biggest thing I've ever made and I have no clue how its going to turn out, but I hope to finish it sometime early this month. I obviously need to continue doing exposure therapy. And I'd like to get to the bottom of the headaches that I keep getting. They picked up in frequency a few weeks ago and I don't know if they're from tension, sugar crash, out of date glasses prescription, or the weight of my hair. Or a combination of all of them. But they hurt a great deal and I get them every day, so I'd really like to figure out how to not have them.
And that's about it. I hope everyone is doing okay. I still haven't been doing too good when it comes to posting frequently, but I hope to change that soon (I know I keep saying it but I swear one of these days I'll actually follow through).
Love always,
Sam
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