Health update, things are looking good (Patreon)

Hey all, gonna be another entirely personal update this week. My week was a lot busier than I realized it would be, between the two separate appointments (and the anxiety that came with them) and my visiting friend, who I thankfully got to spend a lot more time with than I expected. They were visiting from the other side of the USA, and they're in college right now so it's not a trip they can make often, so I'm really glad we got to hang out so much, and we had a great time. I didn't have the time for the CPE scripts I was planning to work on, but the good news is most of the script writing for this update has been completed for a while, so there's not too much left to do once I have the time for them.

So, healthcare update time. I haven't heard back from that therapist yet, so I'll be contacting them again soon to hopefully get that going. Until then, my behavioral doc is seeing me monthly to basically fill the place of a therapist temporarily, so I'm not navigating this completely alone. It's going well and she's helping me take some steps towards getting out of my comfort zone, but I won't talk about that side of things more than that; it's a little too personal, and also pretty boring. For the medication side of things, though, I was thankfully able to get the EKG as hoped - it was much cheaper than I feared it might be, and the results came back good. I do have a high heartrate as we already knew, but the EKG didn't show anything unusual or concerning beyond that. With that result, my medication doc cleared me for stimulant usage, and I started taking them just this morning. So far I don't feel too different, but I do feel a bit more alert than usual - I talked to Orexius about it as well, since he started taking stimulants several months ago, and he also didn't feel very different when he got on them, aside from the benefits when he's actually working. I think I already feel a bit of a difference there, too; normally I put off writing weekly updates for a while, but I was able to get into it much more easily today, so that bodes well.

Since I only just started with the stimulants today, I don't know if there's any noticeable side effects yet, or how effective they will be, but I should have more to report on that next week. Plus, even if this kind isn't the right one for me, now that I'm cleared for stimulants we have a lot of other medications we can try, so it's only a matter of time until we find one that feels right!

Aaaand that's pretty much all there is to report. Now it feels like we're really getting things moving, and I'm really excited to see how I'm feeling by the end of the year. I'm going to wait a few days before I try diving into work again, so I can get used to the new medication and see how it makes me feel outside of the context of work, but at some point during this next week I'm going to give a "normal workday" a try, and then we'll go from there. Thank you all so much, again, for your incredible patience during this - it's safe to say that all of you are directly responsible for me being able to take this time to work on my mental health, not only because of the financial side of things, but also just because you've been so accepting and supportive of me taking this break from development. I can't imagine what it would've been like if I was dealing with this and a standard 9:5 dayjob, and I am eternally grateful to each and every one of you for the opportunity you've given me. You guys are the real MVPs here. We'll see you again in next week's update, and it's one I'm very hopeful for!