Posted by Caslon540 on February 18, 2005, at 14:57:54
Do you think taking 25 mg ephedrine when I've had 30 mg Adderall and 100 mg caffeine already this morning (it's morning for me, I just got up) would cause anything really bad to happen, like some weird heart freak-out? During a routine exam a few weeks ago, a doctor listened to my heart (while I happened to be on caffeine and Adderall) and said it sounded perfectly healthy.
Usually I have 50 mg Adderall and 200-600 mg caffeine a day, but for the past week and a half they've had no effect on me (besides chest pains sometimes, but that *just started* in the past week—AFTER stims stopped affecting me mentally—and oddly, the pain has happened from as little as 100 mg caffeine) so I'm thinking about trying this ephedrine I have before I take anything else today just to see if there's ANY stimulant left (to which I have easy access) that will actually stimulate me mentally, because my life is rapidly falling apart here.
It's so weird that caffeine AND Adderall both went from having the usual, expected effects to suddenly being COMPLETELY ineffective (and sometimes causing an adverse physical reaction), at the EXACT SAME TIME, which happened to coincide with my roommate leaving the gas kitchen oven on in our small apartment for 15 hours with NO ventilation. I was literally in a stupor that whole day (at least when I wasn't asleep...I could've passed out for all I know), and I haven't been the same since. I've told my psychiatrist and my therapist about this, but they both say that the sudden ineffectiveness of both caffeine and Adderall is due to anxiety about my responsibilities at this point in my life (i.e., it's a psychosomatic thing—I'm psychosomatically causing any stimulants I take to have no mental effect on me whatsoever). They say that this is also why (since the oven incident) I have increasingly been unable (and am now completely unable, apparently) to feel pleasure. My motivation is totally screwed up now—it takes suffering through hours of hunger pains to get me to work up the motivation to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and put a frozen dinner in the microwave.
I took some OTC sleeping pills last night before bed, thinking that if this is really anxiety, then maybe when I wake up all "relaxed" from this antihistamine, and continue to be "relaxed" for a few hours while it wears off, then when I take my morning caffeine and adderall, they might have an effect on me mentally because I won't be as able to "block" their effects psychosomatically. Well, they have given me an uncomfortable feeling in my chest, but that's it—I still feel like I have some kind of major neurological deficit in my head.
It's like something is totally missing in my brain. It's the same exact feeling I get during Adderall withdrawal (like if I'm used to taking 50 mg every day, and then decide to take a break for 3 days), except that I'm still taking my full dose of Adderall every single day! What the hell is going on here?!?! Could anxiety really be the cause of so much dysfunction? Or should I see a neurologist about damage that may have occurred from possible carbon monoxide poisoning?
We have a carbon monoxide detector in the apartment and it has never gone off, even though my roommate irresponsibly used the oven to heat the apartment (with our regular heating system turned to "OFF," no less!) for about 15 hours on each of four separate occasions in the past month, with no ventilation. But maybe it doesn't detect levels that are low enough not be lethal, but still cause damage?
I apologize if any of this is written to sound REALLY stupid—my mental functioning has really declined over the past few days. I feel like I'm writing with brain damage. I can't live like this!
poster:Caslon540
thread:460016
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050217/msgs/460016.html