Kimberly Emerson

At the beginning of this month, I was joking with some co-workers that we hadn’t had an office potluck in a while, and wouldn’t my birthday be the perfect occasion for another one? (I was kidding, I swear.) My beloved office friends decided that that was a great idea, and set to work organizing it.  One of the guys who has since switched offices even promised to come back for the occasion.  It’s helped a lot with my annual Birthday Blues.  It’s hard to get too depressed about an occasion when people around you are requesting a list of your favorite foods.

This summer has been different in a few other ways, too.  I do have a few activities lined up – a couple of birthday dinners, a friend’s bridal shower next weekend, a visit to Northern California to see Erika the weekend after that – but it is decidedly more relaxed this summer than last.  The weather’s been calmer, too.  This week started to get warm, but it’s still only in the mid-80s.  There are of course fires in the hotter areas, but I haven’t smelled smoke in the air in so long I’ve almost forgotten the sensation.  (Almost.  You never really forget what’s it’s like to have your olfactory senses assaulted once you walk outside the house.)

Global climate change?  Better scheduling?  Incipient senility making me forget to stress out over 41?  Any number of forces could be at work here, but I choose to believe that God has just decided I’ve had enough on my plate lately.

Earlier this year, I had my annual physical.  Confession: I’ve had issues with depression in the past, and have taken Prozac (truthfully, its much cheaper generic equivalent fluoxetine) for the past nine years.  It’s done the job, more or less.  I have my ups and downs, like most people, but I haven’t had any spiraling, no-end-in-sight downs in all the time I’ve taken it.  Honestly, it works so well that half the time I forget to take it.  Nevertheless, I don’t enjoy being The Girl Who Takes Prozac.  Something about it makes me think that I’m weak, that I’m giving something else control of my life, and I hate those feelings.  So, this year I decided to do something about it.

I mentioned to my doctor that I hadn’t had any depression symptoms for some time, so maybe it was time to think about lowering the dosage.  She consulted my chart and said she thought that might be okay.  I was taking 20 milligrams a day at the time.  “Why don’t you try lowering it to 10 milligrams a day for a while, and see how it goes?”  She wrote me out a new prescription for the lower dosage and made certain to tell me that if I experienced any ill effects, I was perfectly free to go back to 20 milligrams any time I wanted.

I was so pleased with myself.  Since I wasn’t actually taking it religiously in the first place, there couldn’t possibly be any problem with cutting down the dosage.  After a year or so of that, my doctor was bound to agree that I could just stop taking it altogether.  Problem solved, mastered by self discipline and all that therapy I’d had over the years.

My doctor had written me a prescription for three months’ worth of Prozac, so I could participate in Aetna’s mail-in prescription program.  It took me a few weeks to figure out how to send in my new prescription – not because it was hard, but because I wasn’t very diligent about looking it up.  Meanwhile, my current prescription ran out.  Upshot of all this, I didn’t take anything for about a month.

When my new prescription finally arrived, I took it faithfully.  One tiny 10 mg tablet each day.  I was in heaven, and felt terribly virtuous for actually making the effort to take the medicine every day like I was supposed to.

One small problem – somewhere in there, I started not to sleep very well.

It wasn’t a huge deal.  I slept about six hours, and then I’d wake up and not be able to get back to sleep.  As anyone who’s ever had sleeping issues can tell you, this is not a tragedy.  Six hours of rest may not give you all the energy in the world, but for most of us, it’s enough to get through the day without falling asleep in the middle of any meals.  I registered it, because the last time I had a major anxiety problem, my sleeping patterns were shot all to hell.  But six hours a night barely gets you to heck, and bypasses hell altogether.  Not a problem…for the first couple of weeks.  After that, the six hours thing started to get old.  I caved and went back to taking 20 milligrams of my friend Prozac each day.

A little while after that, I started sleeping four hours a night.

Four hours of sleep a night is more worrying than six.  I am an eight-hours-a-night girl.  Always have been.  (Seriously.  Even in college.)  Or maybe more truthfully, an eight-hours-a-night-is-good-ten-is-better girl.  Four hours of sleep landed squarely in the zone of Not Enough on the Kimberly Sleepometer.

One otherwise unremarkable Monday night, it went down to two hours.

At this, I squared my shoulders and sought help.  Calling in to take the day off from work, I made an appointment with my doctor, who could only see me the following day, and a therapist, who could actually see me that afternoon.  As God’s guidance would have it, I found a perfectly wonderful therapist right out of the gate.  I’m not a person who feels at all comfortable crying in front of strangers, so the fact that I found myself brushing tears out of my eyes within that first hour told me that I’d found someone I could relate to.  (For anyone thinking about therapy, this latter point cannot be overemphasized.  Find somebody you connect with, or there’s no point in going.  Most people don’t get so lucky as to have it be the first one, so don’t give up after one.  Try a few.)

I saw my doctor the next morning.  She advised that for the time being, I increase the level to 30 milligrams a day, just to get me through until my sleeping patterns evened out again.

Once I figured out that I wouldn’t actually choke on the irony, I had to face facts.  I am Prozac Girl, like it or not.  (Okay, I know, but it’s easier to say than Fluoxetine Girl.)  The stuff makes my life easier, and by extension, makes life easier for all the people who have to deal with me.  Instead of seeing it as a surrender of control, I might do better to view the medicine as something that enables me to make of my life what I prefer that it be.

And for all those times when I’m still tempted to think badly of myself for it, I have only to remember my dad’s advice when I first started taking anti-depressants.  I told him how much I hated the idea, and being the reasonable, loving person that he is, he said, “If you had heart problems, we’d want you to do what you needed to do to take care of them.  How is this any different?  It isn’t.”  As usual, Dad, you’re right, and nine years later, the words still help.

Perhaps this year, the best thing I can do for my birthday is to accept myself for who and what I am, and make the best of it.  Oh, and since I like to think of my birthday as a time of celebration for everyone, I encourage all of you reading this to give yourself the same present.

May we all come to learn that sometimes, the strongest thing we can do is to ask for help.

Kimberly had to write this column, because one of her friends told her that she was being selfish for keeping her father’s caring words to herself.