When I was a teenager I had chronic insomnia. I have gone once without sleep for 5 straight days until hallucinating once. I still am an awful sleeper, but orders of magnitude better than back then.
Anyways during sophomore year I was missing a lot of school because of insomnia, either I was crashed out asleep when I needed to be in school or I felt awful because it had been so long since I had restful sleep. I basically went to school only for the first two days after I crashed and slept, maybe the third day after last sleep session, but there was no real pattern to my sleep schedule at all.
Helpful doctor’s advice, “Stay up an hour later each night until you’re on a proper sleep schedule”. :rolleyes:
Ahh! Every single doctor I’ve talked to about my insomnia has been like this. No matter how many times I explain that there is no pattern to when I sleep because I regularly go days without sleeping and then just pass out from exhaustion whenever I do, they still keep pressing for “Well, about what time would you say you *usually *go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning?”
I had one doctor tell me not to eat after 3 PM. This was after I told him that I usually didn’t even wake up until that time. This guy knew that I was diabetic and on insulin. Still, I was supposed to fast from 3 PM until something like 6 AM, which is when I generally got off work and went to sleep. I don’t know how a diabetic with even a REGULAR day shift was supposed to skip dinner and not eat until breakfast the next day without passing out.
Same doctor wanted me to become vegan.
And he told me (yes, still the same doc) that I needed to read my Bible daily. I told him that I was an atheist. That doesn’t matter, reading the Bible was GOOD for me and somehow it would help my diabetes if I read the (Christian) Bible for half an hour a day.
Changing docs was a pain with my insurance, but I was thinking that this guy was hazardous to my health.
“Take some Benadryl for those hives” sounds like okay advice, right?
Me “Oh, perfect, I just picked up some generic Nytol (sleep aid) I’ll take that”
Him “Yeah, um, I’d rather you took Benadryl” [huh?]
Me “It’s the same thing” [thinking he just didn’t know what the ingredients were]
Him “I’d still rather you just took Benadryl”
Me “They’re both 25mg of Diphenhydramine, I’ll just take one pill instead of two, it’s the same as Benadryl”
Him “I’d rather you just picked up some Bendadryl”
I gave up after a few back and forths since I wasn’t getting anywhere. If he had given me some reason for saying that so I’d understand where he was coming from I’d understand. My guess is that it’s easier to say Benadryl then to assume I was taking the right thing, but that’s why I specifically said “Diphenhydramine Hcl” hoping he would say “Oh, as long as you know it’s the same thing, then it’s okay” but he didn’t.
Another time, for some back pain he told me to take 4 motrins 3 times per day. Okay. So I asked him for a script for 360 (30 days) of them. When he asked why, I told him that buying them over the counter would be very expensive but if he wrote me a script for for either 360 pills (or 180 400mg pills etc) my copay would be $5.00 it would save me a lot of money…he refused. This wasn’t bad advice but these two things together where amongst the reasons I left him.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure the first part was bad advice either, but I still classify it as something stupid he said. Especially since I clarified that I clearly had a generic version of the same drug and he didn’t defend his reasoning for wanting me to take the name brand…had he, I may have been persuaded. I’m not against listening to other peoples opinions, but if you’re not going to give them to me, I’m just going to stick with mine…so there.
Not me, but my grandmother: back in the 1940s, she was advised that having another baby would “be good for her nerves.” Today, a doctor would likely have diagnosed her as bipolar.
19 years old, part-time job, part-time community college, living away from my parents for the first time with 4 roommates, one of whom is an emotionally abusive fellow that I’m dating. I also have a yeast infection, and my period’s late, so i go to a friend’s GYN to get a scrip for Monostat ( this was before it was OTC) and a pregnancy test. The following dialogue takes place:
“The pregnancy test is positive. We need to get you started with prenatal…”
“What? No, no, good heavens. I’m going to have an abortion, of course.”
“Oh. OH. I wish you wouldn’t do that. Well, before you decide, call this number - it’s the Precious Life Hotline, they can help you make the right decision.”
I was furious - I KNEW I was in no position to have a baby, I already KNEW what the right decision was, who the HELL did he think he was sending me to some anti-choice pseudo-counseling bullshit group?
It still pisses me off. Precious Life Hotline my ass.
As president of a nonprofit related to a genetic neuromuscular disorder primarily affecting young children, I’ve heard my share of bad medicine. It’s sad. It’s also stunning how much some medical professionals don’t know and are unwilling to learn.
The worst effect was crippling memory loss. I ended up losing my dream job because I couldn’t remember how to do it or the names of many of the people I worked with. I was completely unable to work for more than a decade, had a damn near successful suicide attempt, was forced to file bankruptcy despite my husband’s valiant efforts to avoid it, and I have lost most of the detailed memories of my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Sometimes I tell people, “Glad to meet you,” only to find out later that I’ve known them for years.
The “treatments” also affected my understanding of time. (Understanding is not the right word, but I can’t figure out what is.) I very often can’t tell you if something happened yesterday, last Thursday, or 4 years ago. I have been know to suddenly switch back to a medication I was on previously and still had in my medicine cabinet because my brain “skipped” back to that time. This Thanksgiving I asked my nieces about their new dog, which they’ve apparently had for 6 years. Yeah, I’m the crazy aunt :(.
I can work now, but only at a job that uses about 10% of my former abilities and only part time, at home, for very little money. I’m fortunate to have a husband who loves me a lot and has been willing to do a lot of caretaking, but every other aspect of my life before ECT was destroyed. As far as the purported benefits, in my scattered memories around that time I was gone for a couple of months, simply absent from myself as if I were under general anesthesia; then I was really baked for a month, giggling at everything; and after that I fell into a pit of depression that made my pre-ECT depression seem like a trip to Disney World.
Anyway, that was my experience, and as always, YMMV.