I saw my psychiatrist today. I talked about options, and we are going to try Lamictal again- with the aim of getting off of Zonegran eventually. However, he wants me to go on the Lamictal before I go off of the Zonegran- which has me a little nervous that I will be unable to get off the the Zonegran and wind up on two anticonvulsants.
His other suggestion was Latuda. But I told him my fear about the intractable insomnia I get whenever I have tried to stop Zyprexa or to switch to another antipsychotic. And he told me that I could take the Latuda and keep taking the Zyprexa for sleep. But I don't like the idea of taking one antipsychotic, let alone two, so no way.
I asked him what he thought about Seroquel, as that might just help with the sleep enough to get off of the Zyprexa. He didn't think it did much as an antidepressant and had a lot of side effects. So I decided not to do that one.
I'm really not sure if I am doing the right thing with the Lamictal. I was on it twice before, but never as monotherapy, so it is hard to know exactly what it was doing. But also, maybe things aren't that bad. Today was a better day. And I really think that a lot of what is going on is life, not necessarily biology. So messing with my meds might not help.
And going off of Zonegran might make me worse.
It is too bad that psychiatry is mostly trial and error.
Have I told you about my clinical trial? I just participated in the pilot part and after they get 150 people in that they'll do the real study (but it will be a while I think because I think it has to go through an entirely new IRB which takes months at Cleveland Clinic due to size). Anyway, they are currently making sure that the test works and then will use results. The final goal is to be able to start using this specific assay which tests both how meds are processed along with specific medication levels in an effort to start to be able to treat based on physiology (first with the how the body processes drugs information and then adjustments based on how the drug levels are and have an overall more scientific approach than guessing based on reactions that are hard to determine the cause of with the usual polypharmacy.). It's pretty neat and when I do the 2nd part we'll actually get the information about how my body processes meds and where my levels are for most of the meds I take (I think all but one of them?). For someone like me that responds weirdly to so many things this is going to be wonderful when it is tested enough to be actually used. TO date it has been far too expensive but someone has figured out a way to make the labs affordable making this actually possible in the near future. I don't know how many people are tested in stage II and I assume after that it will go to a multi-site study but eventually this should come out unless it completely doesn't work.
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