Quick Post-Doctor Update

Howdy! I spoke to my doctor about the increased skin picking and some other things, and I wanted to keep you in the loop for transparency and accountability.

  • The skin picking is from anxiety, and phentermine increases anxiety.
  • I lost 10 pounds since my last doctor appointment!
  • We are cutting the phentermine dosage in half to see if that helps with the skin picking.
  • The sertraline is staying the same.
  • We are adding a prescription for hydroxyzine to take a night for insomnia, itchiness for the skin picking, and anxiety.
  • We added mupirocin 2% which is a medical, topical, cream to help my body heal all the sores and such from skin picking.
This is what mental health can look like.

If these steps don’t work, then we will probably stop the phentermine. Since phentermine was already a 3 month max drug and this is month 2, I’m not too sad about it. My goal is to use this month to make a plan in regards to eating habits and water intake, so I can continue losing weight once the medication stops. The biggest thing I have learned so far is that I was not logging calories correctly. I was vastly under-estimating how much I was eating. Just need to remember that moving forward.

I’ve only been on the new regimen for a couple of days, so I can’t say for sure if it’s working. The cream is super thick and has a faint odor. If I wear a sweater, then little fuzzies stick to the cream. The other night it looked like I had a hairy blue chest. So that’s fun. The new pill has helped me fall asleep faster, and apparently it is a deeper sleep as I did not hear cats or Taylor in the middle of the night like I usually do. In the mornings it is hard to wake up, but that could also be because it is cold outside my blankets. I have no idea if it is also helping with night time anxiety. I don’t really know how to measure it.

That’s where I am at! I had a couple bad picking sessions since I last talked about it, but not as many as before. I did change my nail shape last night, so it will be interesting to see if and how that helps any.

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