Metformin

All posts tagged Metformin

I didn’t stay up all night playing Heathstone. The keyword in that statement is “all.”

Published January 14, 2018 by Malia

I blame the Metformin.

Seriously.

Okay, so Metformin is the medicine I have to take for my diabetes/pcos. It’s supposed to help both things. I’m not sure it does, but I’m taking the pill anyway. I am sure that it hates me.

On a good day, I take it and just feel a bit off. The way you feel when you’re about to come down with something, but you aren’t truly sick yet. However, on a bad day, things get ugly.

And the bad days are far more frequent than the good days

Here’s a bad round with Metformin. It acts like I’ve come down with a stomach bug. I get achy (head and all over), lightheaded and dizzy, hot, exhausted, everything in me liquifies and comes out the southern end accompanied by intense abdominal pain, and then there’s the nausea. So much freaking nausea. The good news is, I only feel this way the first 12-24 hours after I’ve taken my meds. Usually, by the time it’s time to take my next dose (24 hours later) these symptoms have abated. Just in time, to start the whole process all over.

Believe me, I’ve tried to appease the Metformin deities. It doesn’t matter if I make good food choices or bad, it doesn’t matter if I’ve been in constant motion or just been a sedentary rock for the day. This med just hates me, so very much.

I’ve told every doctor I’ve seen about how the Metformin hates me, and I pretty much always get the sane response, “Well, you have diabetes and pcos, and this is the med we prescribe for both those things.” My ob-gyn’s solution was taking me off the non-extended release form and putting me on extended release (er) so that I take it at night, before bed, and will sleep through the worst of it. Some nights this works, and then some nights are like last night.

Last night, I took my medicine and headed to bed. Instead of waiting for me to fall asleep, the stomach pain started and I knew I needed a distraction, because sleep was probably not going to happen for a while. So, I hopped on Hearthstone, and it mostly kept me focused away from the pain. Then, though, I got into competitive mode.

I’ve been playing Hearthstone super casually for over a year. Mostly, I only played when the boy had a quest he needed to complete and it required playing against a friend, or having your game be observed by a friend. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I learned about ranked play. I knew that there were professional players, considered the best, but I hadn’t a clue how they had become ranked. Did the game just log that they played a ton? It was genuinely a mystery. Then the boy received an in-game reward, and when I questioned how he had gotten it, he explained that I could actually play and get ranked and vet free stuff. I like free stuff. I felt so dumb for not having figured this out on my own.

So, last night, I was actually doing pretty decently and making my rank slowly crawl up, and I got a little sucked into the game. At one point it suddenly dawned on me that when I’ve seen pictures of the best Hearthstone players, they’re all male. And suddenly, something inside me was very annoyed. Brcause I know I’m not the only female who plays the game. Which made me then more determined to climb the rankings. Maybe it was because it was the middle of the night, but suddenly I was rambling to the boy about how this game needed way more female representation on the leader board, and I really think I should make it a goal to be one of those females. And he, being the supportive husband went, “Ok, babe.” Which may not read supportive, but it totally was.

And then it was 3 a.m., and I was finally so tired, it outweighed my abdominal misery.

I slept for four hours, woke up and had a half-hour of quality time with the bathroom and my angry tummy, and then decided to share my pain and craziness with all of you.

Weirdly, that late night fervour I suddenly felt to excel at Hearthstone, didn’t pass like the contents of my stomach did. I’m awake, exhausted, but awake, and I still want to try to see if I can become, if not a top player, a really awesome player. (Wow, that sentence had a ton of commas. Believe it or not, I actually excelled in grammar back in high school.)

At least it would mostly distract me from the Metformin.

Stormy Weather

Published July 7, 2016 by Malia

The clock just chimed four, and I’ve been wide awake since 2:30.  I counted 10 Mississippis between the most recent brilliant flash of lightening & the roll of thunder that followed.

 The boy is sleeping deeply beside me.  He’s completely exhausted.  In a few short hours he’ll be awake and gone; a 14-16 hour work day ahead of him.  These are the times I’m glad I don’t currently have a job, because if I did, I wouldn’t see him at all.  

I’m so tired and anxious.  I hate the Metformin.  I get that it’s supposed to help my health, but it also amplifies all my negative emotions and thoughts.  It makes everything feel so scary and overwhelming.  I hate it.  

More lightening.  7 Mississippis that time.  Storm’s getting closer.  

So…It’s Been Awhile…

Published June 10, 2015 by Malia

I think this pretty much covers it.

Turns out, thinking about writing blog posts and ACTUALLY writing blog posts are two different things.  Over the last few months, I’ve frequently had ideas and thought, “That’d make a good post,” and then never followed through.  So, it’s time to play catch up…

April

As far as I can remember, the last updating I did took place in April.  Which, while not a long time ago, is well over a month past.  April ended interestingly.

When the boy and I got married, we were on pretty different work shifts.  He would leave for work before 7 a.m. and get home mid-afternoon.  I, on the other hand, would start work at 1:30 p.m., and not get home until well after 10 p.m. (just in time for the boy to head to bed, and me to be wide awake with post work adrenaline).  Going into our marriage, we both knew this was something we were going to have to deal with, and I honestly thought it’d be okay.  Which only goes to show that I’m an idiot.  In truth, it was misery.  It was depressing.  It was lonely.  So, at the end of April, when I saw a perfect job opening at a local hospital.  So, I submitted an application.  And then a week later I got a call from the hospital asking me to come in for an interview.  It was one of those interviews that when I left I honestly couldn’t tell if I was going to get a job offer, but they assured me they were going to call my current job to verify that I really did work there.  Which meant I had to tell my boss that I had gone on an interview.  To cut a very long, boring story short, my boss wasn’t exactly thrilled when I shared this tidbit with her, and I didn’t get offered the job at the hospital.  However, my work offered to let me change schedules, which meant that I didn’t have to start somewhere new, and no more long, lonely mornings home alone.

May & Early June

May will be remembered as the month of medical drama.  About a week after the wedding (back in March), I started having bad abdominal pain.  Because I’m super stubborn, and completely convinced that things will just get better, I put off going to the doctor until May.  Finally, I broke down and decided to go get checked.  The first two weeks of May found me going to the Ob-Gyn and the Endocrinologist.  Neither were fun visits, and neither gave me a decent answer for the abdominal pain.  All that really happened was that I ended up back on Metformin (for diabetes and the PCOS).  My Metformin dose was supposed to start slow, and every week go up.  The first week I had to up the dose, I started getting super sick.  Migraines, pain, dizzyness, nausea, and other fun things plagued me for three solid weeks.  I couldn’t eat, was having trouble sleeping, and was generally miserable.  I spent a decent amount of time playing phone tag with both the Ob-Gyn & Endocrinologist offices.  Both just kept blowing me off and telling me it was just my reaction to the Metformin and to take upping the dose slower.

By the start of the third week, I had the worst sore throat I’ve ever had.  The start of the third week was also my first week on my new shift at work and it was a horrendous week.  Fearing that I might have strep, I ended up at a quick sick clinic.

I didn’t have strep.

No, as of last Thursday, I learned that I have Mono.  Not only do I have mono, but this is actually the second time in my life I’ve had mono.

I wish it felt this cute.

Through it all, the boy truly has been my steady rock.  He has taken such good care of me.  Definitely has made me feel valuable even when I have felt super worthless.  He’s nursing me through this mess, and gone on more chocolate milk pick-up trips than has been fair to him (side note: whole chocolate milk is so thick and creamy it’s the perfect thing to drink if you can’t swallow anything else).

So, in case this has all been TL/DR (too long/didn’t read)…Started a new shift at work, got mono, my husband is amazing, and I am now going to try to update more faithfully.