I am now one week in on trying out Concerta. I’ve been reading a lot about the medication and how it works. It looks like most people will go through what they are calling a “honeymoon phase” for the first week to a month of being on the medication. It seems to be caused by the additional levels of dopamine that your brain is able to utilize, and you just aren’t used to it. This can cause feelings of euphoria until your body/brain adjusts to the new ways it interacts with the dopamine. I believe I have moved out of the honeymoon phase into what may be “normal” for me. I noticed yesterday that I didn’t feel as magical 😆 as I had after starting the medication. I still feel good, and I still feel the medication working and allowing me to focus and interact with others much better, but I no longer have the feeling that I am superwoman and can do anything and everything, lol!
I am going to be so honest…I totally wore myself OUT from Wednesday of last week until this past Sunday. I was doing ALL THE THINGS! I didn’t have any hesitation on starting tasks, so I started and completed them all! It was amazing, magical, euphoric!!!… It was exhausting come Monday afternoon. Yesterday I felt tired, run down, irritablie, and slightly anxious. I realized that I had pushed myself so hard without really taking any breaks, and my body was pretty mad about it. I took Monday afternoon/evening to sit in place and just rest. I had to force myself to do it, because I was still thinking of all the things that I could/should be doing. Luckily I have not had any issues so far with sleeping through the night. Apparently insomnia and sleep troubles are a potential and common side effect of Concerta. I started sleeping with my smart watch on again recently, so it helps to see what it is tracking to ensure there has been no change. I couldn’t imagine not getting good sleep after all of that effort and energy I expended when I started the medication.
The other thing that I have noticed is that I start to get headaches around the time that the medication is wearing off. I am hoping that this is something that abates over time, or I may just have to pop an ibuprofen each evening to counteract it.
Aside from those differences, I am still not hearing a million thoughts and songs in my head throughout the day, which allows for clearer thoughts and way less over-stimulation. I have still had a much easier time shifting focus when needed at work. In the first several days, shifting focus was super easy and didn’t cause me any frustration. Today I noticed a slight feeling of frustration when I had to shift my focus a few times throughout the day. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it used to be, but it was still there.
I have also determined that the medication has not really done anything for my absentmindedness. I’m honestly not sure if it even is supposed to, but I guess I just had the hope that it would. I am still having a hard time with making connections that I feel like I should be making. For example, I needed to do something for a client on Friday around 10am. I had my appointment with my oncologist at 9:30am in a completely different city. I committed to both of these things with full confidence that I could do them, never making the connection that I could not be in two places at once. Things like this frustrate me so much, because it seems like it should be easy for me to just realize/remember that there is a conflict. Maybe over time this will improve as well.
I have a follow up appointment with my doctor this Thursday, so we will see how she feels about my reaction and tolerance of the medication so far. I haven’t had a long time with it, so I expect that we won’t change anything this time so that we can see how it works over a longer period.
Speaking earlier of my oncologist, I had my routine six month check up with her at City of Hope on Thursday. She said that everything is looking good, and we will continue with the same plan we have had all along. I will continue to take Tamoxifen until it has been five years since the cancer was removed. She was pretty pleased that I haven’t really been dealing with any side effects from it. Apparently most women have at least hot flashes to deal with while taking it. I had them for probably the first year, but they have pretty much gone away. It is only when I get frustrated or angry that I feel them now. I also asked her about how we are monitoring for the possibility of the cancer returning, because I will not have to get mammograms for the rest of my life, and we aren’t doing any other types of screening proactively. She stated that my appointments with her are also a time for her to ask me questions to see if anything has changed symptomatically for me. If we notice changes like pain that doesn’t go away over time, lingering cough after a respiratory infection, swelling, unusual weight loss/gain, changes in stool, etc, that can trigger her to request scans to see if anything is going on beneath the surface. She said they don’t like to do routine scans if they can avoid it, because they come with their own cancer risks which makes complete sense to me. I do sometimes get in my head about it, because I didn’t have any symptoms at all with the two different breast cancers. If it weren’t for the mammogram and breast MRI, we would’ve never known they were there until they were much more advanced. It is a hard place to be in sometimes. I know that I am taking the hormone blockers, and they should prevent any cancer cells getting into my hormone receptors. I also know that the chances of any cancer still remaining after the bilateral mastectomy are slim to none, especially considering the sentinel lymph nodes were negative for cancer cells. Even knowing that, I sometimes feel a little anxiety creeping up. Luckily I have a positive outlook and can shake it pretty quickly.
I will be seeing my plastic surgeon Dr. Durden next Friday, March 13th for my six month check up. I am very pleased with how everything looks. I have a privacy app on my phone that is password protected, and I used it to document my body’s changes and progress throughout the three surgeries. I looked through the photos last night for the first time in a while. It was almost shocking to see. I definitely teared up some seeing the damage done to my body and remembering how it felt. I also have a different perspective now about everything, being on the other side of it all and healed. I joked about my therapist asking me if I’d had any trauma in my life, to which I responded with a simple, “No.” She looked at my medical history and confirmed with me what she was reading. She explained to me that three surgeries in one year for not one, but two breast cancer diagnoses was absolutely traumatic. I had just never looked at it like that. When I was going through it, I was just trying to take it one day at a time and stay positive. Now, looking back at the pictures that documented my body’s journey through it, I can see that it was. While it did make me tear up, it also made me somewhat proud of myself and my strength. I did that. I came through it with my core self still intact. I think that is pretty beautiful and amazing.
Till next time-
Rachel 🩷