Meds

My doctor put me on two new medications, one for my asthma, and one for the pain in my mouth due to having a tooth pulled. Both cause mood swings, one causes hallucinations. Every time I am prescribed a medication that causes mood swings, I think "Oh, it will be okay this time." But it never is. I'm highly susceptible to the side effect of mood swings, I have found. Every single medication I have taken that could possibly cause them have...well, caused them. I took the asthma medication anyway because I'm sick of not having full use of my lungs. The night before my appointment, I was laying in bed trying to sleep. My lungs were tight, as they always are. I tried doing deep breathing to calm myself down as I was having trouble sleeping, but the inability to breathe with the full use of my lungs was making me feel very claustrophobic, especially since you can't just walk out of not being able to breathe. A trip to a different city showed me that this will not always be the case, but for now I am stuck here. I have no job and no money, and moving away from this place will take at least six months, probably more. The idea of another six months of not being able to breathe was making me panic. I don't remember how I finally fell asleep. So I got this new inhaler, low dose steroids. Every logical part of my mind was telling me not to take it, that i probably don't have asthma, that it's because of my constant state of low-grade panic that I can't breathe. But I was desperate. I had tasted regular breathing and fallen in love, and the idea of being in my normal state was making me panic. So I used it, and I took the pain meds because I was sick of the stabbing pain in my jaw every time I ate or drank.
As I was trying to fall asleep last night, I had something like a hallucination. (Which is a rare side effect of the pain meds.) I didn't think it was real, though the sensation and images that came along with it were hard to get out of, and I didn't. I felt like I was full of dead, rotting, maggot-infested meat and it was slightly viscous and spilling out of me. I felt disgustingly sexual, like I was being touched and every touch created more rotting meat. I don't think I can convey through words just how horrified and disgusting I felt. Then I had the sensation that cockroaches and flies were squirming their way out of the meat and crawling all over me because they were attracted to filth. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed that I was made of nothing but dead, rotting, insect-infested fleshmeat. I remembered that I didn't start having the scared sexual feeling noticably until I stopped living with my dad and started living with my mom full time at thirteen, because my mind felt safe to feel it without my dad constantly around, I think. That feeling, the dead rotting feeling, was with me constantly. I had and still sometimes have nightmares about finding corpses in such a state of decay in my house, in my mattress, under my bed. They are the scariest nightmares, and I can't explain why in a way that would make sense. I think this is why I suspected my mom of molesting me in my sleep when I was fifteen, because the horrible dead raped feeling didn't flow out of me until I was living with just her. (Not to say that she is entirely innocent, but that is a different post.) I remember waking up every morning with wet spots on my blanket. I would check to make sure it didn't come from me, and it didn't. Everything was dry except for these spots on my blanket every morning. I knew my mom came into my room and dug through my drawers sometimes looking for clothes, and I knew she usually did so after showering. (I had woken up to the noise she made a couple times.) She would sometimes touch me in weird ways, like the time when she was making me a dress and she touched my breast without warning, presumably to see how it fit. Or the times when she would cuddle me after screaming at me for hours and her hand would come to rest too closely to my chest. Or the few times when she would compliment whatever I was wearing by jokingly saying "It's looks good on your boobs" in a jokingly sexual tone. Imagining her coming into my room and molesting me wasn't too far of a stretch. I think that the dead rotting feeling comes directly from her also. She told me when I was seventeen that her older brother had molested her, and all that did was refire my suspicions that she had done the same to me.

I have lost my point in all of this. I guess the whole point of the story is I'm not going to take either medication anymore.