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.
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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