For Those Of You Keeping Score...

Well, back from a therapy appointment, the bosses have left and I can not do any more work for the day. My head is going to explode.

So, if anyone's been following, no word from my Dad at all over Christmas. I came back to zero, zip, zilch, nada in my inbox. No calls were made. Nothing.

Does this mean we are no longer speaking? Patient Anonymous is extremely confused. She doesn't even know if she's disappointed. She's not miffed...maybe not even baffled anymore?

*sigh*

So what would be the score, then?

PA: 0
Dad: 1398 (possible number of times he's proven himself to be unreliable, self-absorbed, stupid, shallow, irresponsible, thoughtless and yes, I guess, a disappointment?)

I don't know what to do. Contacting him (yes, that would necessitate the child parenting the parent yet again...) would only result in weak, empty apologies and promises to "do better" and "try harder" in the future. Yes, that's been heard before. A very empty ringing quality. Kind of tinny and it doesn't really resonate or even echo.

I'll have to think more about this (oh, great...looking forward to it!) and try to figure out what the hell to do.

And speaking of "keeping score," I had a dream this morning that I was a hockey player. This is quite amusing because I can't skate to save my life! Well, I can skate (sort of) but I can't stop. I do actually own a pair of hockey skates (figure skates--no way!) but I just can't master the "swish." I can't make my ankles and knees bend properly on such a slippery surface. I can do the "T-Stop" sort of thing and kind of turn around and manage to not fall. I usually just crash into the boards though--that does it.

It's also funny because if you could see little Patient Anonymous loaded down with all of the equipment, she'd actually be prostrate on the ice with her heart racing at about 200bpm (okay, maybe I wouldn't be that bad...)

This of course was all the more ridiculous in the dream because I was in the position of goaltender. You might think it wouldn't matter as you don't have to "skate much" as goalie but actually, you need to be a very good skater. And you need to have really strong legs for those pads!

I was playing in a charity women's tournament and our coach was Sylvain Lefebvre. There was some woman who I was in trouble with because I didn't have a "temporary NHL card" (whatever the hell that was supposed to be!) and I was trying to explain the situation in my very pathetic French to Sylvain as this woman could neither speak to him nor get his name right, pronounce it etc...

Then I woke up.

I don't take a lot of stock in "dream interpretation." They're just random thoughts bouncing around while we sleep. A lot of the time when I do manage to remember my dreams (very rarely) I can usually figure out why I was dreaming about the subject matter. This one has me completely stumped. Well, maybe not completely but it's a really bizarre one.

Recurring dreams are more worth paying attention to but I haven't had any of those since I was very young.

Did I Hear That Right?

I forgot about this. I meant to post about it the other night. I was watching Law and Order (too bad Dr. Deb is on vacation, even though it wasn't SVU--I could have ran over to her blog for a quickie on the topic.) Anyway, I wasn't really paying attention. There was too much going on in the house and it was late...anyway, my ears pricked up when I heard that a character died while overdosing on Depaquel(sp?). Huh? They said it was an antipsychotic. And just to be sure that I wasn't hallucinating, they repeated the drug name three times during the episode.

Okay. Now I know that certain drugs can be sold around the world under various generic names but Seroquel is fairly new and I don't know if the patent has run out yet for other companies to start producing it under another name other than the generic Quetiapine. So I was thinking, is this some new hybrid between either Depakote or Depakene and Seroquel? Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me. And you thought Zyprexa would pack on the pounds HA! And speaking of Zyprexa (aka Olanzapine,) it's the only antipsychotic that I know of that has been souped up with another med, an SSRI--Prozac (aka Fluoxetine.) That is Symbyax and I'm sure that was years in the making.

I have yet to hear of any plans to combine anticonvulsants with antipsychotics. To me, it doesn't make any sense. Granted, I'm no psychopharmocologist but anticonvulsants are too hit and miss. And although they may be considered mood stabilizers, technically they are not. They only true mood stabilizer as a class of drug is Lithium. The whole point of Symbyax was to assist with the depressive aspects of bipolar. So far in clinical trials (if memory serves,) the best drug in the anticonvulsant class (and what I've heard anecdotally--see, anticonvulsants are a crap shoot when it comes to treating the depression side of bipolar!) is Lamictal. So maybe the drug in the television show should have been called Lamiquel?

That got me thinking, maybe my spelling was off. Maybe it was Depoquel! That got me going down a whole different pathway. Maybe it was a combination of Depo-Provera (birth control) and Seroquel! Now this makes sense (and the victim of death was female...) This just might be marketable. Sometimes those manic episodes do lead to some pretty bad decisions... Hey, with the *new* "Depoquel" you certainly won't have to worry about racing to get the "Morning After Pill!"

Now I googled every spelling variable possible and I can't find anything. If someone in some country somewhere takes this version of an antipsychotic, please let me know. Nothing makes me angrier than misinformation in the media. I don't know if there was some sort of copyright thing going on but if so, then they could have resorted to good old Haldol/Halperidol and leave it at that.