Side effects

Side effects to medication are often forgotten about when the person doing the thinking is healthy.

I'm actually, genuinely lucky - I only have one medication to take daily which has side effects. I have a depot injection of progesterone in my upper arm, but I've never had an issue with that. The anti-mental meds, on the other hand, have shown me recently just how lucky I had it before.

Long story short, I was on some anti-mental meds, and they stopped working. When they did, and they did with a vengeance, I asked the doctor if he could change me on to something else. He did, and they worked for my mental state, but the side effects were... unpleasant.

I swelled up like Violet Beauregarde (albeit didn't turn blue). I gained at least two dress sizes, and had painful gastrointestinal issues constantly. In the end, I couldn't cope with it. I felt absolutely miserable. So I went back to the doctor, and he changed my meds again.

Within a week, I'd dropped the bloating. This one, however, also has side effects of lack of appetite, so I've been pushing myself to eat when I don't want to.

Thing is, with my food issues and tendency to disordered eating, I'm going to have to be very careful not to start thinking "Hooray, I can not eat!" I'm keeping a close eye on it, and making sure I have snacks with me for when I am hungry. It's all too easy to slip into that mindset and, considering how many years it's taken me to get out of it, I don't want to go there.

HAES and all. I'm not going to let myself get ill because of side effects.
I have that capability - the side effects aren't that bad - and that is why I am lucky.

A library in my hand

I love books. I have several thousand books.
We've run out of wall space for bookcases, and have run out of bookcase space (despite double horizontal stacking) for books.

And my best friend, who I'd imagine you all know is my beloved Nettie, and is the best best friend anyone can have, bought me a Kindle.

And I love it.

It can't replace real paper books for me, but it can damn well supplement them.

I have been reading, (free from the Kindle store) for the last three weeks or so, mostly Victorian novels, with a few forays into Edwardian. Thing is, most of these are difficult to get in paper format, either from the library or from a bookshop. But free digital copies? Yes please.

So, a few of the books I've been reading:
The Strange Case of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
The Lost World - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912
The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne, 1878
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins, 1859
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde, 1890
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott, 1868
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome, 1889
The Voyage Out - Virginia Woolf, 1915
Diary of a Nobody - George and Weedon Grossmith, 1892
The Damnation of Theron Ware - Harold Frederic, 1896

There's a lushness of language in novels from this time that nowadays, for better or worse, would sound ridiculous. I find it quite easy to get lost in the language. It's so pretty.

I won't say I've converted to the Kindle - I'm in the middle of three paperbacks as I type this, and spent £25 in a bookshop yesterday - however, I don't see why one can't have the best of both worlds and use both the Kindle and paper books. Because that means more books, and I can never think of that as a bad thing.

PS: Whilst looking up the links for this blog post, I downloaded Little Men and Jo's Boys by Louisa May Alcott, and the entire works of Jerome K Jerome. All for free!