Medication update

Not much to talk about tonight, just tracking the effects of the gabapentin on my various ailments and injuries.

I’m almost free of nerve pains after bedtime now, which is good. I’m not free of pains which is not good. I still get pains in my feet that are not the result of nerves not working to design specs, but appear to be from trauma from walking around. I’m also getting pains from muscles that don’t work right.

The really good news is my tinnitus is literally fading away, to the point that regular sounds feel way louder than they used to. When I get up regular sounds are like when I tried the hearing aids tuned for my hearing curve before the pandemic. The tinnitus comes squealing back as the day progresses, but those few hours without noise are heavenly.

That’s pretty much everything today, except there is a buttload of NASCAR and Indycar racing this weekend that I’m going to be glued to. I saw the CWTS race this evening including some scary wrecks when two cars running together had the lead car dodge and the driver of the trailing car not see what’s coming and pretty much shear off the right or left side of the truck down to the door bars. Actually the truck that hit the left side wasn’t too bad, one wheel and a little front sheetmetal. But the truck that hit on the right side was terrifying, everything was gone or broken.

And I’ll see you guys l8r.

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Trying to think straight through the fog

My new meds are starting to kick in, I didn’t have any neuropathy kicks or twitches last night and my tinnitus is getting quieter. But my sleeping is seriously borked because of the meds. I overslept and missed taking my laptop to get the bloatware removed because this med just knocks me out. Normally when I’m not getting sleep I’m not thinking too good, but for some reason when I get my coffee on this med I’m rarin’ to go, even though I’m still walking like an extra in a zombie movie. It’s the craziest thing, I’m thinking clear as a bell, but my legs and feet and fingers are acting like they never got out of the bed. I have been spending almost as much time fixing typos as writing because the fingers are only about 90% accurate in hitting the keys. And if you’re thinking “well that’s not too bad” just remember it takes a minimum of 3 keystrokes to fix a typo I catch immediately, and I’m averaging one mistake in 10 keystrokes. So, average of every 7 letters I have to fix something.

On a similar but not entirely related note, I love the verb “bork” when used in it’s non-sexual meaning of seriously SNAFUed. This is one of the few contributions to the English language from a SCOTUS confirmation that has survived longer than a couple of years.

On a brighter note, the cooling fans are going to fit the fan shroud nicely. One will fit in the upper right side next to the inlet for maximum heat transfer from the water coming from the engine, and the other will fit on the lower left to get as much as physics will allow from the second pass across the radiator. The idea here is to keep the coolant going into the engine as cool as possible to keep the combustion chambers cool for either best power or best fuel economy depending on which mode the engine is in. Don’t you just love thermodynamics working for you for once? And in case you don’t understand how this works, the formula for heat transfer from a radiator has the fluid temperature in the top half of the equation, meaning the hotter it is the more heat it transfers to the airflow. Which means most of the heat comes from the first pass across the double pass radiator, and by careful fan placement I can maximize that transfer for the lowest possible outlet temperature.

Going off on a tangent, current writing jam is “Dear Mr. Fantasy” by Traffic. There is an interesting dynamic that is peculiar to depressed people in the lyrics, how we use comedy to hide our depression. “You are the one that can make us all laugh, but doing it you break down in tears.” This was me for decades, “Laugh, clown, laugh!” while hiding my depression with comedy. “I love how your poetry makes me laugh,” for years.

Anywho, while I’m waiting on the parts to arrive I’m figuring out how they will be installed in the car, because what else can I do except write about it?

So, how was your day?

Still struggling with getting the meds and my sleep cycle right

OK as I begin this entry it is 0451 and I have been up since 2130 yesterday. My sleep cycle has gone totally bonkers and the cats and I are trying to get it settled out. The problem is I need to take my antidepressant about 2200 or so so I can get to sleep at a reasonable hour. I missed taking it Tuesday and didn’t get sleepy until 1300 or so Wednesday, took the pill and went to bed and woke up 2130 or so. I’m hoping I can stay awake until at least 2200 and get myself back on a normal sleep schedule.

And I have this sense of deja vu like I have posted the previous paragraph before, probably because I did less than a month ago. I wish I knew why I’m having so much trouble keeping aligned with the rotation of the sun and how everybody else fits their lives to that rotation. I think it might be related to my depression, because I started having problems with my sleep about the same time my depression started.

Another problem I’m having is cats sleeping on my lap keep me from getting close enough to my computer to type with it on the desk and keep me from moving my laptop to my lap to type with it from there. I don’t see this as a real problem-problem and more of an annoyance. And the lap cats have suddenly decided the warm carpeted floor that doesn’t move around while they sleep is preferable to my lap. Since I can’t think of an Olympic god in charge of cats I will send gratitude to Freya who uses them to draw her chariot and somehow manages to get where she wants to go instead of where her cats want to go.

Now, on the hot rod front no progress has been made since Monday. The body still sits in a cage with bolt-on ends that are changed depending on the drivetrain. I can’t improve on that so I’ll quit trying. I’m sure there is some genius who could make it better without knowing which drivetrain they were designing for, the Sheldon Cooper of hot rodding, but I’m not at that level of genius. At this point the things I don’t know are more than the things I do know about this car because of not knowing the drivetrain. The drivetrain will change the front suspension, the rear suspension (especially if the RWD donor vehicle has independent rear suspension), the fuel tank size and location, battery location, and everything else, except the front and rear roll hoops. And the only reason those don’t change is because “I said so.” Literally those don’t move because I’m designing the car and I decided that they don’t get changed.

And just now I discovered that my semi-new phone doesn’t work. The entire audio side of the phone has gone dead, nobody can hear me if I talk, and I can’t use any function of the phone that requires audio output, so no alarms, no music, and no ringtones to let me know someone is calling. My phone has been rendered mute. Which makes me wonder what you call a phone that has no telephonic capability but still has other uses that work? I can still send and receive texts, Tweets, Facebook messages, and pictures. I think I’ll just quit now and stew a while so I don’t post anything I might regret later.

Things have been difficult adjusting to my meds

I accidentally took my meds twice night before last and spent more than 12 hours having really strange dreams.

Seriously, very strange dreams, but nothing resembling a nightmare, which is a minor blessing in and of itself. I haven’t had a nightmare since I started taking the new med, which is fantastic, since I have been dealing with nightmares almost every night for more than 3 decades to go along with my PTSD. Getting a change in my nightly mental programming from horror to farce takes some getting used to. The good part is the new med works at keeping me from being depressed, I’m almost completely non-depressed now.

But the bad thing is my sleep schedule has been majorly disrupted by being unconscious for 12-14 hours and waking up around 1700 yesterday. So I’m doing another all-nighter and staying up all day to get back on a normal schedule. Seriously, I’ll be clunking along semi-conscious all day today until my normal 0100 bed time Tuesday morning. And I’ll be using the down time to just kinda do a random write post overnight. I’m also watching YouTube videos of people building cars of various types, including a guy putting an OHV head on a vintage Briggs and Cleetus trying to put an engine into a side-by-side designed to use a FWD engine turned sideways so the wheel diffs are 1:1 and the reduction is in the gearbox of the donor engine.

On the TGS2 I’m still looking for street tires for getting to and from the track on wheels that don’t break the budget. Seriously the tires that would balance the car require wheels that run $250 and up each meaning we are looking at about a $3000 budget just to get wheels and tires for the street, with the race wheels costing maybe $500 for all 4 and another $1000 for tires. Whoever heard of a dual purpose car where the street budget had consumables more than 3 times as much as the race budget? That’s insane.

While I was prowling YouTube I was thinking about how badly I was hamstringing this build by using the T-bucket instead of making a decent body around the frame to streamline the car and generate downforce, especially since I’m building what’s called a monoposto or center seater. I could make the car a lot shorter without the Bucket body also, but I wouldn’t be able to run Goodguys like that. Goodguys doesn’t really want sports racers running their autocrosses, and there is a class the TGS2 fits as long as I use the bucket body and pickup box (Truck). I could make it street-legal without the bucket body, but all that would get me would be I wouldn’t have to trailer it to get to the next race. I would be faster in A-Mod but at the cost of not being legal for Goodguys.

Also I have still been thinking about sitting on the normal driver’s side even though the car would be a single seater, just to make it a bit more “normal” going down the road. The frame would be slightly more complicated, but mounting the top separately from the rest of the frame as a bolt-on takes most of that out of the situation. Making the rear hoop part of the bolt-on part of the frame makes putting the driver on the left less complicated than trying to wiggle the body around the full cage less the fore and aft braces when it has to be offset to protect the driver in a roll-over wreck. Making both hoops bolt-on also would have made building the Sprint-T a simpler task as the frame would have bolted together around the body instead of trying to finagle the body around the frame, but I never got the drivetrain to build a Sprint-T full scale.

I just got a reminder call I have an appointment with the lab rat keeper tomorrow. I will have to get up early to catch the bus for a 2+ hour trip across town because DART still doesn’t understand what “frequent headway” means. I’m only spending a little over an hour on the bus, the rest of the time is walking to and from the bus stops and waiting for the next bus. I live about as far from a bus stop as I can and still consider the bus as a viable means of transportation, but still the next-largest chunk of time is waiting for the next bus to show up.

After 14 hours of sleep or heavy drowsiness today I don’t think I like this new med

OK here’s the sitch with the new med. First and foremost is I’m really slow today after having slept 14 hours today and falling asleep during RPG group yesterday. Second it will be at least a week before I know if the new med is actually reducing my depression, but the side effects kicked in with the first pill. My reaction to this is “Really!? I get zombified right from the get-go but no positive effects for a week?” At this point I have to make Hobson’s Choice with 3 bad options: No meds and stay depressed with basically flatlined emotions, take the SSRI and wave bye-bye to my sex life but have some emotional range, or spend all day asleep so it doesn’t matter if I have emotions because I’m not awake to experience them. The pharmacist said the side effects will diminish as the medication builds up in my system and my system learns to adapt to the med. All I can say is I hope so. Because I hate living like this.

Because of spending so much time asleep I haven’t been able to get anything done on the TGS2, like, at all. I’m going to keep trying but given the situation medicinally I don’t see much of a solution to this conundrum. To use the standard automotive simile I’m stuck in gumbo mud and just spinning my wheels.

It’s kinda like the dream I had this morning. I was part of a space crew orbiting a planet that had been completely wiped out by a global thermonuclear war, no biosphere and an atmosphere so radioactive that nothing could live, trying to create living chemistry. The location was chosen so as to have a “safe” place to crash the project should something go wrong. If anything could survive that hell-hole it damned well earned the right to. Anyway in my dream we had gotten to the point that the chemicals were self-reproducing and organizing, when something almost woke me up and “changed the channel”.

Tl;dr I’m getting tired of this brain BS and just want to be not-depressed and everything else work like it’s supposed to.

Almost done with the washout and the heavy rebound

One of the really bad things about this change on meds was the rebound effect from the washout period. I went through hell because I rebounded much worse than if I had just never taken meds. But the washout phase is almost over now so I’m actually starting to feel closer to “normal”, for values of normal <1.

A second side effect of the washout is racing thoughts, ideas that just barely even slow down to register, much less be able to transcribe them to permanent record. An example of this was working on the idea of a different donor vehicle than the 1996 Chrysler Town and Country minivan, in case I don't get it to work with. I was barely able to look up local auctions for salvage and junk title vehicles, much less get them bookmarked for future reference. But what was really sad was the number of flood cars with no minimum bid because they will never be driven on the road again, some with very low miles. There were several vehicles with less than 100 miles for sale with junk titles because they were in dealer's lots when Harvey hit Houston. And the racing thoughts have derailed my train of thought, where was I going with this? Home, I was going home. And to sleep.

And I'm getting the new med today at the store, so things will be improving on the mental front.