A couple of days back I posted an update on myself & that things that I’ve been dealing with lately on my social platforms. I got a lot of interaction on those posts, specifically from folks who were curious about what specifically it was that I was feeling & dealing with. I gave those that reached out a bit more insight into the afflictions I’ve been dealing with, but I wanted to dive into them further here seeing as I can get more in-depth & really lay out a full timeline of events as they happened & where we are now.
If you’re someone who is unfamiliar with the process around medication for mental health, there is often a lot of trial & error before you find the proper medication for you. The thing that really sucks about that is that sometimes that process can take years. Additionally, sometimes the drug you’ve been on for a long period of time can suddenly take a turn & make you sicker than if you hadn’t been on any medication at all. The latter is basically what has been happening to me & the road I’ve been traveling for the last couple of years.
I was diagnosed with ADHD about five years ago now. It was something that I’d gone all my life without getting a diagnosis for & when I finally went in & got tested, we found that I was in the 87th percentile of those who have it. That’s pretty high up on the list, I feel. With this newly uncovered affliction, we then started trying different medications to try & ease the symptoms of my neurodivergence.
The first route I took was a non-stimulant called Strattera. I had previously been put on a round of immediate release Adderall by a psychologist that suspected I had ADHD, but never went through & put me through the testing. Well, that’s not entirely true. We tried to do the testing one afternoon, but the system crashed & she never had me try & retake the test. The problem with Adderall came with my lack there of, it gave me horrible mood swings & withdrawal symptoms. Any time I’d go without doses for extended periods of time I would essentially crash out for weeks at a time. So, when my formal diagnosis came in I had decided to go the non-stimulant route, because I was afraid of similar things happening.
Strattera ended up being even worse for me than Adderall. When I came home for one of the holidays while on the drug my mother described me as having had all of the joy & life sucked out of me. In addition to the depressive drain, it also didn’t make me feel good physically, so the trial of Strattera was short lived.
After Strattera we quickly abandoned my desires to stay off a stimulant & moved onto Ritalin. I was really great on Ritalin for a time; it helped my focus, brought my energy levels up, helped with my productivity, until it started to shift. It began to give me headaches & made everything taste & smell like iron. This made me immediately thing that I was having some form of micro vascular ruptures happening within my nose & mouth as the taste & smell was not entirely dissimilar from that of blood. So we shifted away from Ritalin as well.
The next attempt worked for a very long time, 2-3 years to be exact! That was Vyvanse. I loved Vyvanse, no lie. Vyvanse worked wonders for me. It helped me get things done, gave me energy, & didn’t seem to have any adverse side effects, at least not until about a year & a half ago.
I think I wrote on it in a blog that I now can’t find, but in the late autumn of 2024 I began to have very bad stomach issues. I’d be nauseous for days to the point where I was barely eating & what I was eating was bland or ultra health. I consumed a lot of fermented foods; kombucha, miso, kimchi, etc.. The ailment got so bad that I went to several urgent cares & even a gastroenterologist, but we never ended up finding the culprit for my problem.
I initially thought that the problem was the US food system as any time I would go abroad my symptoms would magically disappear & I could eat whatever. My other thought was that it was stress related with the 2024 election concluding the way it did & the rise of fascism in the US. Honestly, still haven’t fully ruled out either of these options as contributors. And so it went. For the last year & a half, off & on I’ve had this stomach problem that comes & goes & that we never found a solution for despite many visits to the doctor. Then it clicked for me.
Majority of the time when I go abroad I don’t take my Vyvanse. It’s illegal in a lot of the countries around the world as a controlled substance & if it’s not outright banned, you have to get clearance to bring it in through the government months in advance. It’s honestly a major hassle & something that will spring up again when we reach a more recent portion of this story.
I don’t know when exactly the dots connected in my mind that my Vyvanse was the thing that was making me sick, but it must have been around early May after having returned home from Malaysia & Singapore where I hadn’t taken the drug with me. I then expressed to my current psych that I had this concern, but told her that I planned to stay on it for the time being. I then took about a month & a half off of the medication entirely cold turkey.
Did I feel better? Yes. But to be real, the cost of that trial was pretty steep. My productivity ground to a near complete stop & the executive dysfunction aspect of my ADHD took ahold of the wheel entirely. You may notice how the entirety of June only features a singular blog. There were a handful of days where I couldn’t even get out of bed.
In addition to the executive dysfunction my body went in search of other quick dopamine hits, most of which I am still trying to detach myself from. Sugar, carbs, doom scrolling, all of it became all consuming to me. Working out became hopelessly hard for me. I was slacking in my workouts because I neither had the energy to get through them, nor the desire. I had to drop down drastically in the weights I was lifting as well as my ability to do cardio.
After about a month & a half, I decided enough was enough & that it was time to try again. The nausea was near immediate. The first day back on Vyvanse it tricked in a little bit, but was what I expected after taking a medication again for the first time after essentially weening off of it. The second day it was much worse, to the point where I actually felt so sick that I threw up. I continued on with the trial, despite my issues, for around a week or two after that just to make sure I wasn’t just dealing with the side effects of a ‘new’ drug interacting with my system. After that I concluded that the Vyvanse must be the culprit for it.
The type of nausea that I feel from it is a little hard to describe, but with a bit more distance from it now, I feel actually leans more into the lane of vertigo than it does outright nausea. The symptoms aren't overly physical, most of the time I don’t feel like I’m on the verge of throwing up & antacids, anti-nausea meds, & other relief medications & tinctures don’t seem to have any affect on the feeling. It feels mostly mental, like it’s living in my brain. It’s lightheadedness & vertigo when I turn my head. It’s more of a motion sick feeling than an illness I would say. Either way, it wasn’t something I found that I could live with so I went back to my doctor.
She agreed that we should try something else & immediately ordered me two things. The first was a very low dose script of Focalin which I could take & step up in as I saw fit til I got to a dose that I felt was right for my needs. The second thing that she ordered was a genetic cheek swab that takes your DNA markers & shows you what mental health medications are more likely, less likely, & not likely at all to metabolize well & have not be riddled with side effects.
The Focalin seemed to be doing great. I took the smallest dosage possible for around a week & a half before I double up. Once I doubled up all of my symptoms immediately returned, the nausea came flooding back in. So, I went back down to the lowest dose once more to see if more adjustment was needed. Even on the lowest dosage, my nausea came through swinging, so I once again booked an appointment to talk it out & try something new.
That appointment was yesterday, during which time we went over my cheek swab results & laid out all of the options for me to try & help ease life for me as someone with ADHD living in a very nuerotypically angled society. This is where the travel issue once again came in.
Since I travel abroad so often & since a lot of the places that I travel to are very hot climates, it greatly limits the angles at which we can come at altering my ADHD. SSRIs, SNRIs, & the like all have very lengthy onboarding & off boarding processes. They also make you much less heat tolerant & make it so you are much more likely to run into heat related problems such as heat stroke. This basically knocks out most of the non-stimulant treatment options for me.
On the other side of that coin, we have tried a lot of the main stimulant options on the market for me, many of which are variants or derivatives of one another. According to my cheek results, the two drugs that should work best for me in the stimulant family are Focalin & Ritalin, though there are no available genetic markets for Adderall, Vyvanse, or, what we ended up trying, Dexedrine.
So we’re honestly a bit stumped. If the Dexedrine doesn’t end up working then our options are basically returning to the other & trying to come at them from different points of administration. This could be the new form of Ritalin that is taken at night & releases much slower than the extended release does. It could also mean trying a topical version of on of these medications like a patch. We aren’t quite sure, but we’re back to the beginning of trial & error once again & in the meantime I’m back to living in the world of rampant untreated ADHD that does everything it can to sniff out quick dopamine fixes & sink me into executive dysfunction.
Naturally, I really hope this is resolved soon. I hope we come up with a solution that works wonderfully & allows me to get back to a place of productivity & growth instead of feeling like I’m stuck buffering for days or weeks on end. I’ll do my best to keep you all posted along the way as well!
As always, much love to you all,
-C