And because I mentioned this fear about my cognitive abilities, the doctor gave me the MOCA test. I answered questions about my life, my childhood, and my migraines. Most of my first appointment was pretty standard. It was a relief to finally get in to see a doctor. I spent much of January in throes of a migraine. This failed to fix my problem with speaking words aloud and dropped me into a deep depression to boot. In December 2019, I did something deeply inadvisable that a lot of people inevitably do when they can’t get mental health care: I tried managing my own medication, and tapered myself off Wellbutrin slowly. If I was talking about two concepts-say “pizza” and “football”-they’d be swapped by the time the sentence came out of my mouth suddenly we were ordering a football for the pizza game. Specifically, I was worried that Wellbutrin was doing something to my brain: Since I had started taking it in 2018, I noticed myself mixing up words. I held out hope, however, that the answer would involve my medication, and that a doctor might recognize my symptoms and suggest some obvious alternative cocktail of SSRIs that would fix the problem. I told the psychiatrist that I felt like I could no longer think of good ideas at work (please do not email me and say you agree) and that it felt like there was just something in the way whenever I tried to think through an idea for a story.Īt the time, I was constantly worried that my internet habits had impaired my ability to think and remember things: Spending hours on Twitter, training my brain to absorb and quickly purge thousands of tiny pieces of information, is probably not that healthy. I was having trouble concentrating, and my memory had deteriorated from pretty good to not being able to remember things I just said. One of the problems I was seeking help for could well be described as “cognitive function.” More accurately, I was worried I was becoming dumb-sort of like Lisa Simpson when Grandpa Simpson tells her it’s her genetic destiny to become stupid, but without the reassuring ending. In the spirit of oversharing that might make me unhireable to an even greater degree than my previous body of work, I feel like I need to offer some context for my less-than-perfect score. Waiting for a psychiatrist outside Medstar would have taken until March, but thanks to the arbitrary fact of my existing relationship with this hospital system, after just a couple weeks’ wait, I was ( movie hacker voice) in. Luckily for me, the neurologist I’ve been seeing for migraines since 2014 also works for Medstar. has an outpatient psychiatry clinic in the Glover Park neighborhood, but it only accepts new patients who are also under the care of another Medstar doctor. After years of trying and failing to secure an appointment with a psychiatrist in my ever-changing insurance network, I finally obtained one at the end of January 2020.
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