My Brain is Borked

I think I've mentioned that my brain has been foggy from the medicine I've been taking for my herniated disc, but it recently took a turn for the worse in the form of:

• Writing a check with the recipient's address in the dollar amount line.

• Forgot to click my usual payment method for a meal service that we've been using pretty regularly for about six months, so when Jeff was picking it up, they said I clicked cash and boy was that a lovely mix up.  Luckily they were really nice about it and let Jeff take the food without paying.  He did tell them "my wife doesn't make mistakes like this but she's on some medicine that's working against her brain" and they were all "oh we know she always pays, we'll just run the card" - which is what I always click as payment when I order online.

• Wrote a check to our yard guy and put his name in the dollar amount line.

• Finally picked up my knitting needles after several months off.  Continued with a sock that I'd started, going round and round for about an inch, which was fiddly on tiny needles but I did it.  Then it was time for the heel.  Had to look up how to do the heel I've done many times.  Fine.  Started that and about four rows in I'd both dropped a stitch and messed up a decrease.  At least I was able to rip it back to the beginning without too much trouble.

• Since socks seemed to be too challenging, I pulled out a prewound skein of larger yarn, got out bigger needles, and decided to cast on for an easy hat.  I had the yarn in my fingers correctly to begin the cast on, but had to stare at it for a minute before it came back to me as to how to do it.  Got the correct number cast on and joined in the round to begin the K2, P2 ribbing.  About 10 stitches in I realized I didn't actually join in the round and was just knitting a straight piece of fabric.  Undid those stitches and correctly joined it in the round.  Once again I began the K2, P2 ribbing.  Got to the very end of the round and it was evident I would end on a K2, which is wrong.  Looked back at my work to see if I went wrong toward the end, in which case I could tink back a few stitches, but no.  I did it at the beginning.  And then toward the middle.  Two mistakes on the first round?  Time to unravel and put it aside.

• I've been listening to a podcast while I do my PT exercises and I was telling Jeff about it - well, it's about a huge art theft from a museum decades ago and there's this psychiatrist who tricked a patient into giving him his house in the Hamptons and access to his fortune...and oh my god I've been listening to two different podcasts.  No wonder I'm confused.  The Shrink Next Door and Last Seen, in case you were interested/wondering.

There's been more, but you get the picture.  The reason behind this stems from me stopping the use of the Butrans pain patch, which is an opioid.  Basically I've been on one form or another of opioids for four months, and while I didn't have withdrawal symptoms (because the patch delivered a small amount of medicine every hour for 7 days, don't ask me how that works), I had the above-mentioned mistakes abound.  One sleepless night I googled opioid withdrawal and discovered something called post-acute withdrawal symptoms, or PAWS.

From Psychology Today:

Post-acute withdrawal varies in intensity and duration from one person to another; again, usually in correlation with the intensity and duration of one’s substance use. Its manifestations can fluctuate in severity, coming and going in wave-like recurrences, and include impairments in energy, concentration, attention span, memory, sleep, appetite, and mood—most commonly anxiety, irritability, anger, and depression.

Yep, that pretty much describes me, with the exception of depression because I'd started taking an antidepressant a month ago; I just couldn't stop crying, every day, for months.  My doctor said I had situational depression and once all of this is behind me, I most likely won't need what I'm taking.  Starting it before I stopped using the Butrans patch was an inadvertent stroke of good luck.

It figures that this has hit me - if I can experience side effects, it seems like I will.  Steroid injection?  Check.  Opioid withdrawal?  Check.  Chicken pox vaccine?  Check.  Oh yeah, let's not forget scopolamine (motion sickness patch) withdrawal - that was a fun one.  Can I just say that I'm getting tired of this?  Because I am.

If you see this person, treat her like a 3-year-old, please.

Oh - I wanted to stop using the pain patch to see if I was feeling better because I might be getting some relief from the steroid injection, or if I was just getting really good pain management.  It's a little of both - I do hurt a bit more, but so far I'm able to tolerate it without having to go back on the patch.  Now if I can just move beyond PAWS, that would be swell.

P.S.  One more thing to add to the list:  as I was typing this post, I noticed that my fingers were blue.  Turned them over and my palms were, too.  I kept thinking that I knew my jeans had been washed enough to not bleed dye onto my hands but that's what it looked like.  Finished the post and got up to wash the blue off my hands.  Hey guess what?  It didn't come off because my. hands. were. really. blue.  HOW did that not occur to me?  Sigh.  Borked brain.  Eventually they returned to normal, but geez.