I'm whining about my crazy & shitty health elsewhere

I've started a blog on Crazy Meds exclusively for whining about my mental and physical health problems.

Queror ergo sum  I complain, therefore I am.

Everything else, Crazy Meds updates, status reports, whining about other aspects of my boring life, and anything else I'd bother writing about, will still be here.

New Shirts at Straitjacket T-Shirts

Has anyone else complained about how painfully slow Cafe Press' process to upload apply designs is?  I think a better question is: where are the Cafe Press sux shite websites?

I think I'm going to migrate to Zazzle.  Their options for mugs look a lot better.

In any event, new sections, new shirts, and I've given the sections thumbnails:

Bipolar Rollercoaster Shirts to buy during a manic spending spree	alt.depressed.as.fuck As if you you deserved to buy these shirts	Anxious and Panicked Shirts that offer protection in a decidedly unsafe world, by letting people know you want them to leave you the fuck alone.
Obsessed and/or Compulsive OCD shirts. OCD shirts. OCD shirts. OCD shirts. Wash four times before wearing	My Brain Hurts Future rags to sop up the mess after your head explodes	Shizophrenia Nation Messages for you to project into the minds of others
Those Crazy Meds Shirts that let the meds express how you feel about your meds	Stigma Busting Come out of the mental health closet with these shirts	Say it with Pills Not otherwise specified shirts

Here are some of the new shirts:

Team Bipolar Show your pride of being part of the team everyone wants to be on for some insanely stupid reason or another.

Team Bipolar Captain We know who we are. You may know someone this crazy. You may even be this crazy.

Team Manic! When too much is never enough.

Team Depression As if you deserved to be on any team. Team Depression Captain The clock of your soul is stuck on midnight. Picked Last for Team Depression Because you suck that much.

Agoraphobia: Don't Leave Home Without It It's an old joke, but it's still funny.

Team PTSD You're not alone.

Team PTSD Captain Suitable for civilians and service personnel of all ranks.

Team Panic Captain If you think this is what panic looks like, you haven't seen a pro in action.

Team Epilepsy Shake things up in your life by joining team epilepsy.

Team Epilepsy Captain For those who've ridden the med-go-round too often, but aren't giving up.

Picked Last for Team Epilepsy We are such losers that we're even picked last for Team Epilepsy.

Team Schizophrenia Team Schizophrenia: It doesn't get any crazier than this.

Team Schizophrenia Captain Anyone can wear a tinfoil hat and pretend to be schizophrenic. Spelling out your trans-dimensional adventures in psychotropic meds is something else entirely.

Picked Last for Team Schizophrenia What's the stigma like? It's getting picked last for Team Schizophrenia, that's what it's like.

I don't know if I'm going to plaster what I've got uploaded onto any more shirts, let alone upload the remaining designs I haven't already, until I investigate Zazzle. It's taken over three solid days just to do what I've already done, and I've got over 20 finished designs still to go.

Not that these things are selling.

Crazy Meds Updates

15 June 2011

• Somehow I managed to skip converting the Thorazine (chlorpromazine hydrochloride) and Elavil (amitriptyline HCl) pages when I moved everything to the new format. I just finished the Elavil page.
• Added anticholinergic and antihistamine subsections to the common side effects page.

11 June 2011

• The Invega pages have been converted to the new format. These are the first pages written by someone else to be converted to the new format, so I’ve had to mess around with a bunch of stuff to get all the copyright information to appear correctly, which is why I didn’t include them in the first wave of meds.
• I finished up the Meds & Supplements page.
• The HONCode certification has been renewed for another year. You may have noticed we have the certification logo up on the forum. Sites that have collaborative aspects (blog, forum, etc.) are now reviewed as a whole. You won’t find many peer-run mental health fora with HONCode certification, although that’s mainly due to stigma. As I don’t have a problem putting my real name up all over the place, and I don’t care how much of a jerkwad people consider me¹ when I ask for some kind of source to back up claims of miraculous vitamin cures, we’re able to have a HONCode-certified forum.

Stats Whore

Statistics calm me down.  Comfort me.  Stave off depression.  Con me into thinking I'm accomplishing something when I'm just dicking around.  

I'm such a fucking stereotype.

Thanks to all the different tools available I can analyze Crazy Meds' statistics in so many different ways that I wouldn't have to look at the same ones twice in a couple of days.

Today I looked at search terms that resulted in the highest eCPM.  If you speak Googlese you understand what I mean.  If you don't, eCPM is a hypothetical potential of how much money a page could make if a buttload of people showed up and clicked on the ads there.  It has as much bearing on reality as the applicants' incomes on sub-prime mortgage applications.

Here are some of the more interesting search terms used in the last 30 days that resulted in eCPMs between $2,000 and $450.  I'm not showing the eCPM numbers because that might violate something in the Adsense agreement.  In descending order of potential value, here are some of my favorite search terms that have led people to Crazy Meds, and my answers to any that are questions:

1. drugs that are named black boxed

2. how much remoron to takeremeron

3. intial dose wellbutrin sr broke in half

4. what is a doctor called who prescribes pi

5. how long for lamictal to show on blood test

6. cash price of nuvigil at schnucks pharmacy

7. sorrta remeber

8. why does my scalp twitch

9. can i take paxil with a factor 5 mutation

10. dexedrine minority psychosis

11. what if enzymes are taken near phych mess?

1. Black Box isn't a drug name, it's the name of a warning.  Drugs with black box warnings have side effects that are potentially life-threatening and everyone is sure it was due to the drug.  Unless a bunch of hysterical moms got together to pressure Congress to force the FDA to force the drug companies to add black box warnings to drugs that don't necessarily have those problems.

2. "Remoron."  Why have I never noticed that before?  It's brilliant.  In any event I think you might be taking a little too much Remeron.

3.  If your SR tablet broke in half, don't take it.

4.  She's usually called "Grandma."  Unless you're like me and are calmed down by some aspect of math, in which case the doctor is called "competent."  Or maybe "Grandma" as well, they aren't mutually exclusive.

5.  For all of its wacky pharmacokinetics, Lamictal is absorbed quickly and nearly completely.  It shows up in your blood plasma in 15 minutes.  How long it stays there is anybody's guess.

6.  I have no idea.  Why Crazy Meds is the first thing returned by Google for that phrase is beyond me.

7.  Whatever you're taking I hope it's working for you.

8.  I don't know.  Do you know where Mouse's pendent is?

That is not a question to type into teh googles if you're a hypochondriac.

9.  This is actually a very serious question that just looks weird as hell.  I honestly don't know what effect, if any, a factor V mutation has on any crazy med, or how any crazy med would mess with someone who has a factor V mutation.  I hope you find someone who has an answer for you.

10.  Minority psychosis isn't real.  The term isn't used in any of the literature, outside of dubious gray literature, or in the periphery when trying to succinctly describe extra-irrational racist behavior.  Racist scumfucks don't need Dexedrine, or anything else, to be racist, although abusing drugs would certainly make them even more irrational.  

As someone who is batshit crazy I find it really fucking insulting whenever racism is equated with an actual mental illness, as opposed to being generally irrational, or 'crazy.'

11.  It all depends on the enzymes and the meds.  As most enzyme supplements are a bunch of overpriced snake oil your biggest problem might be paying for your meds, so you're probably better off not taking the enzymes at all.

Nothing to see here

First the stuff that matters - 

I've updated the Know Your Sources section, which includes:

• What is the purpose of Crazy Meds?
• Who are these crazy people?
• Why do they think they know so much?
• Where does their money come from?
• Are they part of the CONSPIRACY that is monitoring my online activities?
• How do I get past their anti-telepathic mindcontrol tinfoil hats? 

That took care of the site's HON Code certification for the next 12 months.

I'm done with most of the Things You Need to Know When Taking Crazy Meds / Basic Crap all Neuro-Psychiatric Meds have in Common section, which includes:

• Tips on How to Take Crazy Meds 
• Tips on How to Stop Taking Crazy Meds
• Common Side Effects 
• Meds & Supplements 
• What You Should Know Before Buying Meds Online

I'm still working on the updated Brand vs. Generic page.  No telling when that will be finished.

I've also juggled a bunch of blogs between defunct and the panoply of stupidity etc.

No need to read any further...

Extreme couponing has arrived in small town Montana.  I moved out here to avoid shit like that, but I should know better; if I live where broadband is available, and near where cable TV is available, there's no escaping the bits of civilization I can't stand.  The clerks at the grocery store were acting like Elvis showed up to buy some peanut butter and bunny bread.  They couldn't wrap their heads around the concept of people 'buying' four items (I don't know what, just making it to Superior to get my meds and a couple things from the store was a heroic conquest for me that day) with nothing more than two coupons from two different sources, and purchasing nothing else at that.

Fifty-one out of 54 counties in Montana have had a state of emergency declared due to the flooding.  So far Mineral county is one of three with no flood emergency.  Yet.  Instead we have to have other forms of excitement, like a bank robbery in St. Regis and a murder in Superior.

I had the snow tires swapped for the 'regular' (i.e. all terrain) tires on the truck, so at least I didn't have to deal with inclement weather when I drove to Spokane to see my shrink.  Twice.  Because the there was appointment confusion.  I should have called when I didn't get the usual appointment verification call, but thinking clearly hasn't been one of my strong suits of late.  It still took me three hours each way, and not because there was snow on the road (but plenty on each side) going over Lookout Pass, but because the shocks were shot and I couldn't drive any faster than 60.

 

Tuesday night Stephen Colbert smoked a pipe on his show.  It's not the first time he's done that.  While the main reason I smoke a pipe is a bowl of pipe tobacco is about all I want to smoke in a day, another reason is the chance of pipe smoking ever being cool-popular like cigar smoking is somewhere in the neighborhood of non-existent.  Still, I think even Mr. Colbert won't be able to elevate the pipe from eccentric curmudgeon territory.

Brace yourselves

The switch to the new server just happened.  It will take anywhere from one to 48 hours for the DNS to propagate all across teh interwebs, so some of you will still see the old stuff for a day or two.  I unfortunately jumped the gun and reset the forum to full featured mode on the old server, so the only way to tell the difference is to look for an announcement about the site being on a new server.  Although you might be able to get on the new server before I do, especially since I haven't had breakfast yet.

Up, up and away!

I'm getting the server upgraded.  The sudden increase in popularity warrants it.  Expect even more outages throughout the night.

The forum's back, for now at least

The forum is back, with a bunch of features turned off.  I'll keep you all posted on dealing with everything.

What's in a named?

I don't know how the fuck it happened, but the named service stopped.  So it was a nameserver problem after all.

The drug pages are back up.  The forum is still down, but that's intentional until I finish doing what I was trying to do in the first place.

Still have no clue

I've opened a ticket with tech support.  I still have no idea what's going on.  I've put everything back the way it was, but only some people are able to get an HTTP connection to crazymeds.us or crazymeds.com and I'm not one of them.  I can't even get a connection to the non-forum part via a proxy site.  Traceroute fails to the name crazymeds.us, but works to the IP address.  That indicates a nameserver problem of some kind, but I didn't go near the nameserver.

But some people are able to access the site.  I can telnet and see active HTTP connections.  Not only that, the access and error logs are showing typical activity.  The traffic is way lower than normal, but the usual files being accessed.  It's not stuff from Google's cache, but live data.

Crazy Meds offline

Both the forum and the medication pages are off the air until I can figure out what the fuck is causing HTTP session to use unholy amounts of CPU time.


Update: the medication pages are available.  The forum should be up soon, although some features may be a bit constrained. 

Update: the forum is back up now. 

Update: I've taken the forum is offline for a bit.

Update: well, I thought it was going to be just for a bit, but I've run into that problem where I can't get an http connection.  I can see all sorts of http connections happening for other people, I just can't get one going.

Crazy Meds Ver 2.0 Beta Is Now Up

Due to med pages coming up blank at random times for anyone using the most recent versions of IE, Firefox, and Chrome, along with assorted other technical issues,  I've had to convert the non-forum part of the site to the new format a hell of a lot sooner (i.e. now vs. whenever I managed to get enough of it done to open it up) than I wanted. 

So there's a lot missing, far too many of the pages are fugglier than shit with no updates to the content like I wanted to do prior to unveiling it, and it's full of missing links, dead ends, incomplete and barely started pages. But at least you can see all of my incompetence instead it merely taking the form of empty space.

The new URL is http://crazymeds.us/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/.  Redirects should be happening automagically, so don't worry about too much about updating anything.

No more frames, although there is a menu down the left side.

Pay attention moron.

As if I needed anything else to go wrong.  Shortly after waking up this morning I take the pills that were in the pill case, just like any other day, right?  Except that I took the night doses, not the morning doses.  And didn't notice until after I swallowed everything except the lamotrigine, which, of course, is the same dosage (100mg for those keeping score) both times.

So that was 250mg topiramate vs. 50mg and 30mg protriptyline vs. 10mg.

Other than being extra super spacey and completely unable to drive - hence screwing my plans for the day after they were hosed yesterday because the lack of antifreeze was enough to freeze me more than the truck - I'm not really worried about the early Topamax.  It's the protriptyline that has me concerned.  60mg in the course of 11 hours shouldn't be that big a deal, except protriptyline is one of the few crazy meds with an actual warning about, and recommendation of a dosage adjustment for people who are poor metabolizers of CYP2D6; and 60mg a day is the maximum in-patient dosage if your liver isn't as lazy as mine is.

One of the reasons why protriptyline isn't prescribed very often: complicated pharmacokinetics makes it tough to nail down a good dosage.  W00t.

I'm having second thoughts about Torrent's topiramate.  It might be as unreliable as Teva's used to be.   Or it could be I'm especially sensitive to being sleep-deprived.  I had a total of eight hours of somewhat restless sleep last night.  If I don't get that full 9-10 hours a night - and naps don't help, they just mess with me - I'll just do shit like this.

Missed the aurora, had a great aura instead

There's been a lot of solar activity lately, some of which has hit the earth's atmosphere.  For details see:

Latest solar events.

Space Weather and their March Aurora Gallery

Spring is Aurora Season

The only aurora I've seen so far made the sky look like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were the same shade of faded green.  It's been too cloudy on nights with events that could be seen at this latitude.  Or I don't get the alert until it's too late.  Or I've been too out of it.  Or there's a full moon.  And when there's a lot of snow on the ground a full moon is as bright as, if not brighter than dawn.

Yesterday I had one hell of an aura.  At first I thought I needed coffee, as I've been drinking the extra strength stuff I make that's like a weird hybrid of Vietnamese and Turkish.  But no.  The headache was still there after the coffee.  Getting the electric-shock tingling sensation in the palms of my hands was new, so I thought I had slept on my arm in a strange way.  Nope.  The odd feeling in my stomach wasn't from hunger, as it stayed around after I ate.  I just zipped through the Sunday crossword puzzle, so I could think relatively clearly.  For awhile.  Eventually that stopped.  And the tingly-shocks started running down my legs as well as my arms.  My stomach tightened up, the headache was getting worse, and I began to get disoriented.  It was an aura, no doubt about it.

So take a 1mg lorazepam tablet, an extra 25mg of topiramate, 800mg of gabapentin, my usual afternoon 10mg of protriptyline and 25mg of topiramate a few hours early, crawl into bed and, for everything to go away and probably take a nap.

No such luck.

I don't know if the lorazepam has reached it's expiration date or the aura is just too strong, so I take another 1mg of lorazepam.  Eventually I pass out around 3:00 p.m.  I wake up around 1:00 a.m., stumble into the kitchen to take my nighttime dose of 250mg of topiramate, 100mg of lamotrigine, and 30mg of protriptyline.  Then it's back to bed.  Where I sleep until nearly eight this morning.  Seventeen hours of sleep and I'm still groggy and somewhat out of it.

I have no idea what brought it on.  Is Torrent's topiramate crap?  Have I been working too much on Crazy Meds?  Some days I'll work on it for five hours.  Am I sleep deprived?  Lately I'm getting only 8 to 8.5 hours a night.  Have I been drinking coffee that's too strong?  Or was it just some random epilepsy thing?

Life in epilepsyland, one never knows what could trigger a seizure.

You still haven't found what you're looking for

Every now and then I get fed up with all the whining I've done about my boring life and how much it sucks.  Considering how I don't live in Haiti, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or wherever people wish they had my problems I don't have much cause for complaint.

So if you were looking for things like "Whaleshit on the Bottom of the Ocean," or "Nothing Nice," they've been relegated to bit heaven some time ago and are unlikely to return.  I've been using what time I have when I'm functional enough to do more than feed the cats and wash dishes to work on long-overdue improvements to Crazy Meds.  I may whine more here in the future.  If you're lucky, I won't.

Crazy Meds was temporarily off the air.

We were off the air for about an hour and a half today.  This was due to several spambots, spiders looking for non-existent files, and one brute-force crackerbot all converging on the site at once.  The result was the same as if we were hit with a denial-of-service attack.  We weren't, it just had the same outcome.

It's back to the usual insanity now.

Happy Fucking New Year. Those Mayans had best be right about 2012.

Nothing starts the new year right like a fuel tank lid refusing to come off, a blinking "check engine" light, and spiraling into depression.  So much for driving into Missoula early New Year's day, so I could deal with shit when everyone was hungover and the stores wouldn't be too crowded.

I've had plenty more to whine about for the last two months, but I didn't want to write about it.  What little functionality I've had has been devoted to keeping my life barely together or working on Crazy Meds - mostly behind-the-scenes crap.  I've become socially avoidant to the point of rarely answering e-mail and just occasionally checking in on the Crazy Meds forum.  That's it.  Not this blog - the blogrolls need a lot of pruning - let alone other blogs, no other sites, nothing.  I'll use my laptop exclusively as a radio for days at a time.  I haven't been depressed.  Sunday was the first time I felt real, near-suicidal depression in months, maybe more than a year, and I'm already getting over it.  I'm just fed up with clogged drainpipes that prevent the washing machine from working, and yet another mystery leak in the plumbing, and all the other problems people in Haiti wished they had.

I did find one thing that still cracks me up.  Best off-label application ever:

Exorcism-resistant ghost possession treated with clopenthixol.

Background: An Indian man now in Britain explained his criminal behaviour as episodic ghost possession. Traditional exorcisms failed to help.
Method: A 'Western' diagnosis of dissociative state or paranoid schizophrenia was made. Treatment commenced using trifluoperazine and clopenthixol.
Results: The patient underwent remission during neuroleptic treatment, despite previous evidence of genuine possession.
Conclusions: Many cultures give rise to apparently genuine cases of ghost possession. Neuroleptics may relieve symptoms of exorcism-resistant possession.

Forum software upgrade completed.

I'm doing yet another software upgrade.  I hope this will resolve some of the problems users of mobile devices have been having, as well as some of the problems with searches.  I also hope this will be relatively quick.

No notice because my functionality has been dodgy, and this sort of thing has to happen on a weekend when traffic is minimal.


As of 2:15 PM Mountain Time (GMT -7) the upgrade is complete.  Nothing appears to be broken.  Yet.  However I don't see much in the way of fixes regarding the search function or mobile devices.

Now it looks like the search feature is working like it should.  Cache, cookies, the usual Interwebs wackiness was messing with me.  I'm still not sure about mobile devices.

Fuck if I know what the problem is, part 2.

I still don't know what's going on regarding the sporadic connectivity problems I'm having.  Just like last year I have found that if http://www.crazymeds.us is unavailable http://crazymeds.us works just fine.  I haven't been messing around with apache, so I don't know what the deal is.

I'll probably change all internal links that explicitly reference the domain from the flaky www.crazymeds.us to crazymeds.us.

Fuck if I know what the problem is.

Suddenly Firefox and IE can't find Crazy Meds.  But I'm still connected via telnet and ftp.  I can ping the site from domaintools.com and traceroute goes through fine, but ping and tracert fail from here.  For shits and grins I restarted the HTTPD service, but that didn't make any difference.

I'll ask tech support, but my money's on it being due to Internet weather or something else between here and the server.

--------------------------------------

Update: We're back on the air.  Whatever and wherever the problem was, it's gone now.

Dave's not here man

You know how you get to keep your cell phone number when you switch carriers?  What they don't tell you is your previous carrier may give your phone number to someone else, so you both have the same phone number.  Anyone who calls the number using your old carrier will get the person who was just assigned your phone number.  Anyone who calls using a landline or any other carrier winds up calling you.

This happens to me three or four times a year.  Usually it lasts two days and is no more than a minor inconvenience for the person with my phone number, while I don't particularly care and, if I feel like answering the phone, tell the callers what happened.  Over the last two weeks it's been alternately annoying and amusing for me.  I have no idea what it's been like for the very popular B., as it took him long enough to both get a new phone number and let everyone know what it is.

I wasn't up to talking on the phone most of the time, but they couldn't get a clue from my voicemail message that I'm not B.  I kept seeing the same phone numbers on the list of missed calls.  B.'s wife kept calling because she didn't update her contact list.  Only one person left a message, and he had just got out of jail.

The jailbird called the other night asking for B.  I tried to explain what happened and he couldn't quite understand it, because he kept asking for B.'s new phone number.  He said he had a wad of cash and wanted a big bag of pot.  That certainly explained why he couldn't grasp the situation, why B. is so popular, why it took so long for B. to get a new phone number and inform everyone he knows what it is, and why no one could take a hint from my voicemail message that I'm not B.

After telling this guy several times I didn't know B.'s phone number or where he could buy some pot he got pissed off at the world, ranting about the Mayans and 2012, and got pissed off at me.  He told me that everyone I know will die some day, that I'll die some day, and so forth along those lines before hanging up.  I think he was trying to harsh my buzz or something.

Blog roll updates

Once again I've moved some blogs to and from the defunct list.  Nothing new was added.  Anyone who reads the blogs regularly will notice, most of you won't.  I still feel like crap, so I was barely paying attention to what I did.

Video of Brent Arthur Wilson's Guilty Verdict

I know it's a month after it happened.  I've been ill.

Like the other videos of Brent and Jackiya you'll need to turn up your speakers to 11.