Mostly Good News

[akirlu]

My dad reports that he's had my mother in to a new GP. The new new guy ran a bunch of tests and concluded that the problem was that the old new GP, who claimed Mom's thyroid med dosage was too low, was stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins, and in fact had her on too high a dosage. Since the switch to a lower dosage seems to have had immediate positive effects on the symptoms that started this whole round of medical hoo hah, I'm inclined to agree with the new new guy. New doc also says: no cirrhosis, no organ damage, no sign of cancer. So it looks like we can stand down from the health watch.

Mind you, Mom is still depressed, but apparently she is at least back to doing basic stuff like cooking and eating and working on the second house in Mariposa. And she still has a fundamentally unhealthy relationship with alcohol, born of trying to self-medicate her depressions, but Dad says he's found a means to limit her dosage, and that may be the best one can hope for.

It all makes me wish this country had a more rational attitude toward researching the medical and psychopharmacological uses of THC, though.

And it still leaves me needing to work on building bridges with Mom. There's a downside to everything, I guess.

Comments

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear she's okay and the health crisis is gone. Well, at least not as bad. :-)

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Hoorah for corrected medication!

I don't suppose your mother suffers from insomnia at all?

"Sleep studied as potential depression treatment" (http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8238).

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Interesting article. She does indeed have periodic bouts of insomnia, though I don't know if they precede her depressions or not. But she's bipolar, rather than monopolar depressive, which for whatever reasons tends to diverge from monopolar depression in terms of response to treatment, and possibly causes also. It's what makes it so annoyingly intractable, really, because even if one is a good lithium responder, lithium is really best at supressing the mania, not at preventing or palliating the depressions, which from her point of view are the horrible part of being bipolar.

Still, I will mention it to my Dad.