Home > Blog

Over the past three days or so, I have been exhausted and still slightly naseous. I haven’t done anything. Nothing at all. There’s stuff I’d like to do, like origami or building my Lego airplane or my model airplane, but I’ve just watched TV.

Why? I think it’s withdrawal from the Wellbutrin. I hope so, at least! Because there’s some hope that after a week or so, I’ll wake up again … but I’m sad :( I was SO excited to have been doing better. It’s not a big improvement by any means, but for me, getting off the couch and baking cookies (or doing ANYTHING at all, really) was a triumph. Now, I feel like a failure! I’m more tired than I have been in a long time. I’m sleeping well for 12 hours a night — geez louise, that’s a long time! But when I wake up, I’m exhausted.

Anyway, that’s enough of my pessimism. A big “thank you” to Ben for being understanding! Good luck to him tonight; he’s flown to Las Vegas for 20 hours of poker playing. May the cards cooperate and may you dominate!

Well, today was quite a day. Before I go into that, though, let me fill you in on our Christmas!

Ben was able to catch a flight to Denver on Saturday. He didn’t take the flight to Albuquerque that I mentioned earlier because the airline cancelled it. Anyway, he was lucky to get in on Saturday, but he was really tired when he got home at 1:30. REALLY tired. We got up to go to church in the morning, and when we got home we crawled into bed. I woke Ben up again at four to go to the supermarket, which we hadn’t gotten to do since the storm. Then it was back to church at seven. I agreed to read at the service, and I did pretty well at that, but I bombed the flute part I was supposed to play. I’m not sure why; part of it’s the stroke (I haven’t been able to play as well since; mouth coordination or something like that), and part of it’s simply lack of practice. I blew across the hole in the mouthpiece and no sound came out. :( Oh well.

Anyway, after we got home from that, we had a quick dinner and went to bed. I woke Ben up at 12:30 the next morning. After 15 hours of sleep, he was still exhausted. He also hadn’t had time to wrap Christmas presents, from him OR his parents. So he opened and I mostly didn’t. Chaco and Bonzo received some presents which were fun to watch them open; they got a pair of squeaky toys from Jessica and Jeremy (my sister-in-law and her husband) in Texas, and we discovered how deathly afraid of squeaks Bonzo is. One squeak and he pees all over the floor. Good grief! After that appeared, he didn’t want to open any more presents, thank you very much, but he made an exception when he saw the frisbee from the Boston Santa (aka my mom). He liked that very much, and decided to chew it up before we even got a chance to throw it. He swallowed a lot of it, and we’ve had the pleasure of picking it up off the floor in the form of vomit for the past couple of days. Thanks, Mom! :) (Just kidding. We thoroughly enjoyed watching him enjoy it so much!)

Yesterday I was supposed to meet my “sleep doctor” at 10:30 in the morning, so I got up early and left the house at 9:00 to catch the bus. Dr. Shane called home at 9:40 to say that he was sick and couldn’t make it. GRR. I went to the bookstore to kill time until my 3:00 appointment for speech therapy, which Ben joined me at. But, honestly, I was tired and kind of depressed at that point. Tired because I hadn’t gotten enough sleep in the past two days, and depressed because Ben was so tired. It’s not the presents that matter to me (honest!), but Ben not being willing to suck it up and wrap them hurt. I explained this to Ben, and he apologized and promised that he’d wrap them up when we got home. He kept his promise, and I got to have Christmas day when I returned home on the 26th. Boy! Santa was GOOD to me! Mom and Dad Brantley, thank you SO much. They have spoiled me with practically every therapy thing on my list, including a model airplane to build! Grandma and Grandpa Brantley sent me an electronic sudoku thingy, and Ben got me a Lego airplane kit. I’m going to be busy :)

That takes us to today. Goodness! I had a 2:30 appointment with Dr. Smith, my neurologist in Denver. It’s pretty far away, so we left at 12:30 to get there. First, we stopped in Boulder to have lunch (and to buy some GameBoy games). I wasn’t feeling too good — kind of nauseous (sp?) — so I just got some soup. At 1:30, we left for the doctor’s. Around 2:00, we hit a traffic jam. At 2:10, I threw up. I had about thirty seconds warning, when my mouth filled up with saliva and I knew I was going to hurl, so I rolled down the window to do it out the side of the car. Ben was on the phone, however, and motioned for me to put it back up. I couldn’t argue because my mouth was so full of spit that it’d have just dribbled out, so I put the window back up and proceed to spew vomit all over everything. Me, the car, my books, my GameBoy games, etc. It was disgusting.

So Ben was like, “Ahh! I can’t pull over right now!” All I did was hurl again. And again. Gross! It didn’t feel too hot, either. We finally pulled into a Target parking lot, and that’s when my real fun began. To start with, I took my sunglasses off and left them on the mirror in the bathroom. I didn’t remember that until ten minutes later, when I went back to exchange the pair of pants I’d just bought and COULDN’T FASTEN. Geez louise. Anyway, somebody walked off with my sunglasses — I checked with lost and found, and nobody’d turned them in, and I didn’t fit into the size pants I’d thought I SHOULD fit in to, what with essentially not having eaten anything all day and whatnot. We didn’t make it to the doctor.

I’ve learned several things. One, it’s probably not just that I’m not hungry; I’m genuinely nauseous (sp?). Two, I should carry a bag with me everywhere so that I can wretch into THAT when I’m not feeling well. Three, this Wellbutrin stuff is for the birds. I quit! I’d rather go back to being sad all the time!

Wow, did it snow! I got up this morning and let the dogs out, as per my usual, and Bonzo came back in, looked at his food bowl, and then hurried to the carpet. I was able to avoid a disaster, though, and sent him back outside before he did anything inside. I looked out the window and discovered that they’d made a J-shaped track around the car and nothing else. !!! They love the snow! When I went outside later, though, I discovered why …

It’s really deep. Really, really deep. Like 30+” deep. The dogs have to bound like rabbits to get around in it. I got out my snowshoes, but the snow is so light and fluffy that they just sink until I’m up to my thighs in powder. It’s very impressive.

I know you’re eager to see pictures, so here they are.

Our house:

I tried to get a shot showing how deep it is. This isn’t great, but you can sort of get a feel for it based on the lack of a view of Bonzo’s body:

And a curly tongue from Chaco:

And, just for fun, the aftermath:

Wow, it’s snowing here. A lot. I guess I should be more careful about what I wish for; I wished for snow, and now we’ve got so much that DIA is closed and Ben can’t get home. He’s stuck in Orange County, CA. Which sucks big time. He called this morning and said that the earliest flight they could rebook him on arrived late on Christmas Eve! I was like, “No.” So now he’s on a flight to Albuquerque tomorrow, and he’s going to rent a car to drive home. However, I-25 is closed from Wyoming to New Mexico, so unless something changes, I’m not expecting him tomorrow. Sigh.

It’s pretty, though! Here’s a shot off our deck, taken around 4 pm:

And here’s a shot of Bonzo, taken this morning:

And … Ben helped me erect our Christmas tree (white lights only) before he left for CA! We got a really big one. I don’t know how excited about it Ben was, but it’s got a cracked trunk, so it ended up being cheaper than the rest. Which is good :)

I woke up today at 7:45, because I couldn’t get Ben’s clock’s minute-changer button to work so I couldn’t set it for 8:00. I had to catch a 9:30 bus downtown to go to Dr. Stapleton.

But instead, when I woke up I blew my nose and my nose started to bleed. I held it and held it, but it didn’t stop. After a half hour of this, I called Dr. Fox, my hematologist, to complain. I left a message and the triage nurse called me right back.

“I’d like you to come have your INR checked,” she said. I groaned.

“Well … I can’t,” I explained. “The bus schedule’s pretty tight (there’s not another bus until 9:30), and I have to attend my appointment with Dr. Stapleton at 11:00.” She said it would be OK to wait until this afternoon.

But my nose didn’t stop bleeding. It was getting annoying. Blood was dripping into my eggs, for goodness sake. I called back and made an appointment. I’d have to drive into town.

They took my blood pretty quickly; apparantly I was “scaring the people in the waiting room,” to quote the phlebotomist. They had me lie down in one of the back rooms while the triage nurse consulted with the doctor; then, she came back and informed me that (1) they needed to take MORE blood to get a CBC, to ensure that my hematocrit levels weren’t high, and (2) I’d need to proceed to the ER after that to get my nose cauterized or packed up.

My trip to the ER was pretty uneventful. A nurse checked me in, gave me a very attractive nose clip to wear, and stuck me in a room. I waited there for a half an hour before a nurse practicioner came in. At that point, however, my nose had stopped bleeding! He checked me out, gave me some Afrin (nasal spray; it’s a decongestant), some saline spray, and told me to buy a humidifier.

“You’re on aspirin, Plavix, AND Coumadin?” the doctor asked me. “No WONDER your nose is bleeding!” Tell me about it!

When I departed, I left my keys in the examination room :( After retreiving them, I headed to Target to buy a humidifier. What a zoo! I thought that at 11 am on a Monday morning it’d be nice and quiet, but nooo. The parking lot was practically full, as were the aisles. I brought my stuff back to the car, and I couldn’t find my keys! They weren’t in my purse, so I wandered through the aisles hoping to find where I’d dropped them. I’d just about given up and taken the bus to therapy (I couldn’t have made it to Dr. Stapleton’s) when I found the keys in the bottom of the cart! I could’ve kicked myself.

Anyway, I made it to Dr. Stapleton’s in time for my newly-rescheduled 12:30 appointment. No new drugs this time! Dr. Stapleton is encouraged by my new desire to do stuff, like make cookies. It’s a small improvement, but for me it’s frankly pretty exciting. I haven’t been able to work up a desire to do much of ANYTHING since the second stroke … why, I don’t know, but I haven’t. Lately, though, I’ve started to. It’s slow, but I’m starting to feel uncomfortable sitting on the couch watching TV all day. I’m getting up and making cookies, going to the grocery store, thinking about exercising. Small steps, right?

Then I headed to therapy with Mark and Melissa. My sessions were good as usual. Melissa said that she had a visitor, a CU student who she said was observing; I said that was fine. It turned out to be Ellen, a girl from my class at the university! The one that I quit because it was too hard! How embarrassing. She was very nice, though; she had a lot of good recipe ideas, and some “bad dog” stories to share.

Anyway, that was my day! It was pretty tiring, but not as bad as the people in the hemotologist’s office thought it would be. I’m now resting on the couch, but out of exhaustion, not lack of initiative. I hope I get better soon; I’ve had just about enough of this nonstop bleeding stuff! Good grief! :)

I’m feeling a little bit better (thank goodness!). I’ve been sleeping better because I’ve been taking the Wellbutrin in the morning, and not feeling naseous. I figure that’s because I’m taking it with food (I haven’t been hungry because I’ve been sick to my stomach), but Mom reminded me that I HAD been taking it with food in Massachusetts, so who knows. But I am feeling better, so that’s good!

Moreover, there’s snow in the forecast — and lots of it! This makes me very happy :) It feels like Christmas. Plus, our living room may not be so bright if it’s cloudy. My eyes have always been sensitive to the sun; I don’t know why, because my eyes aren’t blue or anything like that. I would like to blame it on the stroke, but they were pretty sensitive before then as well. Anyway, I would like to install blinds in the living room, but Ben doesn’t.

“It’ll cost $1000!” he said first.

“$217.” I checked.

“That’s for the cheap blinds. The ones with cords that always get tangled up.”

“The fancy ones are $300-something. Your Bertha budget should cover it because we have to watch TV in the living room now, which is very difficult when the sun’s in your eyes.”

“I don’t want you watching TV anyway.”

GRR. I understand that watching TV is bad, but when you’re exhausted and it feels like the only thing you CAN do, well … I’ll take it! I long for a day when I’m not exhausted. Yesterday, for instance, Ben was helping me make Christmas cards. I kept messing them up; putting the picture on crooked, letting the adhesive show through, etc.

“What could you do to stop making mistakes?” Ben asked.

“Put the stickers on the picture instead of the card,” I mumbled.

“You see, you know the answer! You just need to put the energy into coming up with it when you need it,” he said. I KNOW. I know. A little more energy and I could save us a lot of time. Sometimes it just sucks to not be good at anything, though, you know? I have addressed 47 Christmas card envelopes, which is no small feat because I’m writing left-handed now. The addresses look like a first-grader wrote them. It took me two weeks to do. And I can’t even make the cards correctly! IT SUCKS!!!

Ben, I know you don’t like it when I make you look like the bad guy, and I’m sorry. :( It’s not your fault, I’m just really frustrated with myself. I love you :)

But anyway, we’re getting snow :)

So I called Dr. Stapleton this morning. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Would it be OK if I took the Wellbutrin at night instead of in the morning? [As I've been doing for the past two days.]

Dr. Stapleton: No!!! You won’t be able to sleep. Wellbutrin is a stimulant, and of all the antidepressants, it’s the strongest.

Ohhh … well, that explains why I’m so tired today! And yesterday! This makes me feel much better. I was worried that something was seriously wrong with me — I haven’t been able to sleep. At all. Two nights ago, I was exhausted from travel; I went to bed at 7:30, took my Wellbutrin, and BAM! I was awake! I reorganized all my blog into google’s blog reader. (Unfortunately, it didn’t feel like the sort of “awakeness” I used to feel from Adderall; I don’t think it’s going to help.) Last night, Ben woke up at 4 am to shower and fly off to Texas; I woke up when he did, went to the bathroom, and then checked my email. Sigh. I just want to go to sleep. Why is it so hard? And why do I need to keep taking this medication? Either I’m tired or naseous during the day. Today, it was both :(

On the bright side: I slept reasonably well at home, and I had some pretty vivid dreams. I realized something during my last dream, in which I got married to Ben again and changed my name to Kathy Haley; I’m not bothered by crowds in my dreams! It’s very interesting. There was a scene in my dream that took place in a crowded street, and I was fine. I find this very interesting; the piece of my brain that takes in information (my basil ganglia, presumably) must not be activated when I dream. Anyway, I thought it was cool :)