Dumb joke : I am hoping that Wellbutrin will make me a Well Bertrand.

In the interested of squeezing out as much of my pain as possible out into these lonely pages of mine, I decided that today is the day that I will talk about my health, and my worries about it.

After all, talking out your worries is supposed to be good for you, and I could use as much wellness as I can get my fat, sweaty hands on lately.

What has me worried right now, what the current tense has me currently tense, is this vague but pervasive weak feeling I have been feeling ever since I started on my current dose of Wellbutrin.

It is tricky to describe, but I just feel sort of tired and weak, like my body is heavier and my head weighs twice as much and there is just not enough air in this old balloon of mine any more.

Now first off, don’t worry, I will tell my therapist all about this on Thursday, and we will see if this is a bad reaction to the Wellbutrin or what.

But it has me worried. When I first took the 300 mg dose, I had a reaction that mirrored the physical symptoms of a panic attack : pounding head, rapid pulse, profuse sweating.

Now Wellbutrin is of the stimulant class of drugs (technically), so that was not entirely unexpected, and I more or less dismissed it as an adjustment effect that would fade over time.

And so far, that has only recurred once. Normally, if I am already busy and active, I barely notice any kind of side effects at all apart from the faint sense of disconnectedness that I used to get when I was first taking Paxil.

And I figure, I am radically changing the very chemistry of my brain and hence shifting the very ground upon which my entire consciousness, and hence, my very being, rests.

That is bound to make me feel a little weird now and then. At the very least.

But this weak feeling is something different, and far more worrying. At first it came in waves, but now it is pretty much constant. I feel like someone turned up the gravity on me, and that is not a good feeling.

Now, I have had attacks of this sort of feeling before, long before I ever tried Wellbutrin, and so it might not be related to the new drug at all. It might just be one of the weirder stops on the long bus route that is my sleep cycle.

This could be part and parcel with the fact that I am catching up on sleep lately and that my sleep apnea has left me somewhat deprived of oxygen, and hence, tired and weak.

Heck, I might just be kinda dehydrated from night sweats. A lot of things can influence one’s energy levels and wakefulness, and so it is not necessarily the Wellbutrin that is to blame.

But still, I worry. I worry about my health in general, to be honest.

I don’t want to wind up a hypochondriac again, like I was in my early 20s. It was hard enough to dig myself out of that terrible hole the first time, and I did it all by myself. I was not well enough to seek therapy or even get some sort of useful answer from a doctor. I had no perspective on the whole thing as a mental health issue. I thought I was physically sick, and it took years to figure out that I was not, exactly, except for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

So I am working hard to maintain perspective. But I also don’t want to overcorrect for the problem either. The next decade of my life is going to be fraught with potential health issues, and I do not want to be one of those schmucks who ends up seriously ill because they ignored the signs of illness when they were minor and only end up getting treated for the illness when it forces them to pay attention to it by causing a very serious problem.

And I have ample reason to be worried. The years between 40 and 50 years of age are extremely dangerous for the morbidly obese like me. This is when that “morbid” part comes home to roost in a serious way.

It is when we start to die.

And before we die, we can end up in a very bad way. I am terrified of ending up debilitated to the point where I can’t even function at my current shitty level.

And that means that if I want to avoid such a terrible fate, I am going to have to find my way to losing some of this goddamned excess weight.

Maybe Wellbutrin will help me find the motivation to do that. Something has to heal this profound disconnected between intention and action that has kept me in the same place for my entire adult life.

I have seen little signs that the Wellbutrin is doing me some good. Doing things seems like less of an enormous effort lately. I sometimes even find myself doing things subconsciously, and yet doing them right. That must be how normal people do stuff.

And it would be very good for me if I could relax some of the hyper-vigilence that has been inherent to my mental state for a long long time. If I could trust the peripheries of my consciousness to handle small routine tasks instead of approaching every situation like I am a member of the bomb squad who does not know where the bomb is yet, that would do a great deal to relax my entire mental state and would presumably free up a lot of energy currently being wasted on paranoia.

And I am convinced that recovering that kind of energy is vital to becoming a happier me.

It takes a certain amount of mental horsepower to keep one’s mood aloft.

I am determined to get that kind of energy back from my neuroses.