Saturday, January 29, 2005
I had a good talk with my doctor yesterday. He's just a family practitioner, as I'm really being given the run-around about getting an appointment with Dr. Franco, the only LDS psychiatrist in this area. But my family practitioner was very caring and understanding. We talked a lot about the bipolar thing, and I told him that I don't like that word because it's usually associated with people who have spurts of "doing crazy things". I do not do crazy things. So he watered it down for me a bit, and admitted that I can more be described as "Hypomanic." He says it's apparent in many ways from my sleeplessness to my rapid speech, and I can't catch my breath when I talk.
So about the sleeplessness, I regret that I was so overwhelmed by our conversation yesterday that I failed to bring up the melatonin. I'd like to take melatonin as a natural sleep aid because real sleeping pills make me hyper. I've had good results with melatonin in the past, back in the states. But where to find it here in Germany?? Talking to my doctor, we went off on a tangent and forgot to directly address the sleeplessnes, hence I didn't get the chance to bring up my question about melatonin. My question was going to be, "May I take melatonin, if so, how much, and is it available through the pharmacy? If not, where can I get it?"
When I briefly researched melatonin online, I read that it ought to be taken with the supervision of a doctor. So I just called the 24hour information helpline, and you know what? They told me that since it's a Saturday afternoon, and my doctor is on his weekend, I ought to go to the ER within the next 4 hours. Well, forget that. I'm just going to stay awake until bedtime tonight, get my usual 2-3 hours of sleep, and then if it's absolutely necessary, I'll go to the ER after church tomorrow.
posted by Angela Marie at 4:06 PM
