Good morning! I’m feeling more like myself again — I was off my ADHD meds for a week, and it was kind of awful. My doctor normally just fills the prescription when requested, but she hadn’t seen me in a year and wanted me to come in for a physical.
Which I am totally down for, because I actually believe an annual physical is a good thing, even if you feel completely healthy (as I generally do), so your doc can establish a baseline for the year, check your bloodwork, etc…
…BUT it was a little frustrating because I was about to run out of meds for the month (it’s a controlled substance, so they can only prescribe one month at a time), and she wanted me to come in first —
— which I get, that’s the way doctors actually make their money, seeing patients, I don’t expect her to work for free or not re-assess me, but it would have been nice if we could have scheduled the appointment AND prescribed enough meds to carry me until then.
And then it was a week before she had an opening (and I was lucky I could get that), and so I ended up just being unmedicated for a week, which means I had a very tense, stressed out, less productive than normal week. My shoulders were tense like rocks, and I had to keep apologizing to Kevin for my crabbiness (even though he understood). Grumble.
In theory, I suppose I could plan well ahead and make sure I had my annual physical scheduled, and make sure I request my next refill a little earlier in the month, etc. and so on, but y’know, when you have ADHD, that kind of executive functioning, tracking lots of little non-urgent things, is EXACTLY the kind of thing you struggle with. It does sometimes feel a little unfair to get penalized for it when you’re TRYING to take care of your health. Double-whammy.
I was talking to a parent at the OPRF booster club event I went to last night, and his son has ADHD and he was wondering whether he should be doing more to get his daughter checked out, so we talked some about how it often presents differently in girls, and also about the three main types of ADHD (hyperactive, inattentive, and combined), and I was trying not to go on and on, dumping info on the poor man, but really, it frustrates me that we are still just at the beginning of understanding the mechanisms here, and the general public has very little familiarity with it, and even many medical professionals are not actually up to speed on current research…
…which I get, it’s not like they can realistically be up to speed on everything these wacky bodies of ours do, I’m not mad at the doctors really, more at the system that has them working so many hours for insurance companies that they can’t allocate much time for research…
…but it’s still frustrating. I am a layperson! I should not be educating my doc about how ADHD presents in women.
Okay, she annoyed me a little this visit, I admit, because when I showed up and she asked how I was, and I said this last week was pretty rough because I’d been off the ADHD meds for a week, she kind of laughed and said, “I guess you know you really need them,” and I am usually very polite and soft-spoken, but there may have been a bit of edge to my voice when I responded, “Yes. I already knew that.” Awkward silence for a bit after that.
Sorry, this turned into a rant. I was actually posting to say that one thing that happens is that I make more mistakes when my ADHD is unmedicated, which is frustrating, but my loss is someone’s gain here, because I bought a magnet board for easier pattern-tracking, but I was having trouble brain-tracking, and so I accidentally bought three of them. Gah.
They’re cheap enough that I’m going to just give the two extra away in my local knitting group (Oak Park Area Knitting Circle, if any locals want to join), so it’s all fine.
But there’s an example of ADHD at work. We call it the ADHD tax, all the little ways that this way our brain works ends up costing us money, and time, and frustration. Sigh.
(Another example is that I accidentally killed some new plants I bought this week because I KEPT forgetting to water and/or plant them. SO FRUSTRATING.)
