I'm halfway through the bottle now at day 13. I'm still not sure what to think. It seems that the most consistently effected thing is my mood and my thoughts. I have body aches here and there in addition to increased fatigue but it's not the horrible reaction I've read so much about.
I hope it doesn't meant I won't be a responder. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few weeks.
It seems that the drug stirs up the neurons though, I've been having some interesting memories. I'll find that I'm caught up in memories that I haven't thought of in years. One particular memory that has been haunting me this week is the day my mom died. Every awful detail of what happened after I arrived back home that day has always stuck with me. Luckily those memories have faded into the background with time. But this past week there have been a couple times when it's as if I'm having a flashback of my car hurtling down the freeway at speeds reaching over 100 miles per hour in the desperate hope that I would reach home by before she died. I wanted the chance to say goodbye to her. By the time I arrived she was in a coma but alive. I remember being behind the wheel weaving in and out of traffic, driving like a maniac from SF to Pleasanton where she was. I remember at one point after I'd almost driven off the freeway having a strong sense that if I didn't slow down I would get into an accident and in doing so would be robbed of the chance to see her one more time. That thought slowed me down enough to keep the car under control.
Then last night I was swept up in other memories that escape me at the moment. I've also been having some very strange dreams. This morning I kept dreaming that I'd hit my head and knew I needed an MRI. I kept showing up at a liquor store trying to order my MRI. Clearly I need to have my head examined.
I don't like the mood symptoms. I started reading Rilke again. This time I was reading through Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet. I found this entry:
Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?....If there is anything morbid in your processes just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter; so one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and break out with it, for that is its progress.
I hope it doesn't meant I won't be a responder. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few weeks.
It seems that the drug stirs up the neurons though, I've been having some interesting memories. I'll find that I'm caught up in memories that I haven't thought of in years. One particular memory that has been haunting me this week is the day my mom died. Every awful detail of what happened after I arrived back home that day has always stuck with me. Luckily those memories have faded into the background with time. But this past week there have been a couple times when it's as if I'm having a flashback of my car hurtling down the freeway at speeds reaching over 100 miles per hour in the desperate hope that I would reach home by before she died. I wanted the chance to say goodbye to her. By the time I arrived she was in a coma but alive. I remember being behind the wheel weaving in and out of traffic, driving like a maniac from SF to Pleasanton where she was. I remember at one point after I'd almost driven off the freeway having a strong sense that if I didn't slow down I would get into an accident and in doing so would be robbed of the chance to see her one more time. That thought slowed me down enough to keep the car under control.
Then last night I was swept up in other memories that escape me at the moment. I've also been having some very strange dreams. This morning I kept dreaming that I'd hit my head and knew I needed an MRI. I kept showing up at a liquor store trying to order my MRI. Clearly I need to have my head examined.
I don't like the mood symptoms. I started reading Rilke again. This time I was reading through Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet. I found this entry: