What's it like not to take medicine every day?

[hunter]

I guess I'll never know.

I have severe asthma, starting in childhood. The common meds for asthma then were primitive, well into the 'eighties.

When I was a little kid I took some kind of awful prescription syrup administered by my mom. It didn't always work and I'd sometimes end up in the hospital for a shot of epinephrine, some kind of inhalation therapy, and a prednisone prescription to go home with.

When I was 10 or 11 years old I was entrusted with taking my own prescriptions and it was hammered into me that if I took too much I might die.

The lethal doses for theophylline and albuterol are uncomfortably close to the therapeutic doses. The side effects are a caffeine-like buzz.

This all changed with the advent of low does steroid inhalers which improved my life immensely.

In late adolescence my mind went a little sideways and it took me about a decade to claw most of it back. In college I had a bad psychotic break which was probably caused by oral steroids I was taking for a bad flair-up of the asthma. The horrible thing about that was that the doctors and nurses assumed at first I was high on illicit drugs and did not treat me respectfully. They didn't figure out the steroid connection until later.

Throughout this period I got a lot of advice to suck it up, put on a happy face, and hide my mental health issues. That was always my mom's advice too. Later on I realized my mom had some of the same issues I did which she'd always kept hidden. Her mom, my grandmother, was a lunatic who was able to hold it together at work but when she wasn't at work, and after she retired, was a holy terror.

My mental health issues never went away entirely and up until the late nineties (?) the drugs to treat them had some potentially very serious side effects so I avoided them. I started taking psych meds regularly about the time I signed on to DU and it's been a bit of a roller coaster since that I see echoed in my writing. But I have learned ( ahem... several times now ) that quitting my psych meds is not a good idea.