Side effects? Serves you well, for trusting doctors and their poisons. One of our favorite topics at home is telling the stories of people from around here who were totally fucked up by incompetent doctors. They're only good for writing you a sick leave. Our lives are just a routine work for them, and people do mistakes at work. I don't believe in passive approach to one's health, 'hey doc, here I am, fix me somehow!' That is really asking for some nasty complication or endless treatment that will cost you fortune. You have only what you make.

This might be  true with MANY NON-University clinic doctors... and it is even more-so true with veteran doctors who are now motivated by $$$ and how to best use the legal loopholes of (my state, basically, but bad doctors aren't specific to ANY location) to exploit their patients to maximum efficiency.  However, this is not true with my current specialists. My psychiatrist is Chinese, has a hard time processing my native tongue (even though he's fluent in American English), but is generally very resourceful in terms of psychiatry -he even warns me about 'magic pill syndrome'! This, to me, is a level of care not easily found elsewhere.

However, so far... there has been doctors of all types with bad bedside manner, bad attitudes, with a complete lack of obedience to the Hippocratic Oath, croaking up for uppers, downers, opiate-derivatives, potentially highly addictive pills/injections in general... to any poor sop who's willing to take these things without knowing what's going to happen to them, eventually, if they keep taking them. (Think: Requiem for a Dream)

Of course, the current band of druggists suggest that the War on Drugs is over-rated, destructive (in virtually all possible manners), an archaic relic of a Previous (Nixon Administration) Era -as well as an era about 45 years before that one, and that humans are better at (self-)medicating themselves than what any other species on the planet is capable of- there is some measure of truth to this. However, this attitude overlooks the fact that Modern Medicine is best administered by a genuinely caring physician/therapist/psychiatrist, and that profit motive will NEVER be completely defeated by legalizing drugs, and that most people (Grandparents, Offspring, Siblings, Aunts, Uncles, Parents, employers, corporate executives, etc) are not able to take most illegal drugs (as well as a few legal ones) and be expected to live up to ALL of their responsibilites, and sometimes... not even most of said responsibilities.

Off the top of my head, the only exceptions to this rule is cannabis and peyote... but because politicians (and the idiots that continuously vote them in) are such hypermoralistic tight-asses, the odds of less restricted access to healthy(er) psychotropic drug choices in the near future  are almost non-existent.

There's also the problem with USA's Policy Decisions being for sale to the highest bidder..... a story for another thread/forum/blog post.

okay.... </rant off>

Wow.... I feel like hammered shit. Granted, stopping any daily medicine has side effects all it's own, but this is a kind of depression I haven't felt since adolescence. My endocrinologist said this wouldn't happen... that I had replaced pred with hydrocortisone... so that I shouldn't have felt a sudden onset of depression.

I guess she's wrong... as in 'couldn't have been farther off the mark if she tried'. Uugghhh. I am so emo...

(and I don't even have the emo haircut)

This sucks. Back and forth. Up and down. I feel better for a while, then I feel FUBAR again. uggggghhhhhhh

I seem to be feeling better today...Snowflake seems to sympathize with that.

Wow. That was nasty... I just got off the phone with one of my more dysfunctional relatives...  it is amazing, simply fucking amazing, how readily family members will unload emotional baggage on to the nearest pair of family ears. I just wish the elders in my family chose a better pair of ears than mine... because, well... I don't give a rat's ass, half the time. The rest of the time... well... I'm focused on something that actually stimulates my brain, such as RRS.

UUUGGGGGGHHHH........ depression is setting in, again.