Tag: britain

Back to methylphenidate

I can’t remember the last time I was unable to fall asleep. I mean I’ve lost sleep on several days in the last month or two, but on all occasions it’s been after I’d gotten woken up in the middle of my sleep. Today is different – it’s nearly 1 am, and I’ve been in bed for two hours tossing and turning, and completely unable to fall asleep.

I think I left it until it was a bit too late today to restart my methylphenidate, after a three year gap. The dosage is half of what I was used to in 2012-13 and 2015-16. Just 5 milligrams to be taken twice a day. This convinced me that it would be okay to take it in the afternoon. Big mistake. I’ve been completely unable to switch off this evening.

The good thing is that this afternoon ever since I took the tablet I’ve had the kind of hyperfocus I hadn’t been able to achieve for I don’t know how long. I continue to get distracted, but it’s easier to get back to where I was. The big change is that I no longer feel the constant need for stimulation. The need to “feel accelerated”, as I call it, which would result in my opening dozens of tabs on my browser and checking websites one by one without any need to do so. Sometimes it would end in the rabbithole of playing online chess, and wasting hours at a time.

I’ve written about ADHD before on this blog, and elsewhere. I’ve written it as a condition where you’re unable to hold attention on what you are doing, and getting distracted easily. In the past I’d come off medication because I missed being distracted – in my methylphenidated state, I have missed the ability to think laterally which I’m so capable of in my “ground state”.

Thinking about it, though, it’s not distraction or the lack of it that’s the problem with ADHD. It’s the constant need for “stimulus”. It’s the constant need to “keep doing something” that makes me fidgety. It’s possibly the same feeling that made me run out of class when I was in kindergarten and do somersaults. The same feeling that would make me open my computer and open a dozen chat windows upon coming home from work a decade ago. Well the latter had its good parts – a lot of the time, one of those dozen chat windows would involve the person who I later married.

It’s funny how I got here today, in this methylphenidated state. As you might know, I’ve been living in London for nearly two years now. And the medical system here is government-run.

In October 2017, when I was in the middle of my last (and largely unsuccessful) full time job, I felt the need to get back on to ADHD medication. I got an appointment with, and met my general practitioner in November 2017. He asked me to share with him my diagnosis of ADHD from back home. In December 2017 I was back in India, and I got back my medical records, and shared a copy with him in January 2018.

In February 2018 I got a call to set up an appointment with the mental health practice. It was at a clinic some distance away from home, and I met the psychiatrist in March 2018. I was administered the usual ADHD questionnaire and told that I would be contacted by the “national ADHD centre” in a “couple of months”.

It was finally in January of 2019 that I heard back about this. It was my GP once again, saying my prescription for methylphenidate was ready, and I should start taking it asap. The next day I got a call asking me to meet the psychiatrist again, in the faraway mental health clinic. And today I started taking the medication. And I’ve been so unable to switch off that I’m unable to sleep!

PS: I’m publishing this a day late. I wrote this last night but couldn’t publish it since daughter started crying and I had to rush back to bed. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep well tonight

BrEntry

So we moved to London yesterday. The wife has got a job here, and Berry and I have tagged along as “dependants”. My dependant visa allows me to work here, though it has been mentioned rather complicated as “Restricted no doctor/dentist training no sport”. Basically I can do everything else. The five-month old’s visa stamp simply says “work permitted”! Go figure.

This is not the first time I’m living in London. I’d very briefly (for the length of a mid-MBA internship) lived here twelve years ago, and as luck would have it, our cab from the airport to the temporary apartment passed under that office on the way (that employer has moved offices since, I’ve been told).

London welcomed us with some fabulous weather yesterday – I actually considered getting my sunglasses out! Wasn’t too cold (one jacket was enough) and mostly didn’t rain, so despite being sleepless and tired from our journey, we ended up setting out to put beats and meet some friends. While we were waiting at the bus stop, though, it did drizzle a bit, making me reconsider whether we should really go out. Then, my wife reminded me that we weren’t in Bangalore any more, and poor weather is no excuse to put NED.

We took Berry in her stroller yesterday. Walking around with it was peaceful – for the large part, footpaths exist, and though not as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks, there are no problems at all with taking the stroller around. It’s not a problem on buses either, but the tube is a real bitch. Most stations don’t have elevators, and you need to carry the strollers up or down stairs. And we haven’t yet figured how to hold it while climbing down escalators, which left little Berry rather scared as she got on for her first tube ride. Henceforth, when a tube ride is involved, we’ll most likely put her in her baby carrier rather than the stroller!

Keeping her warm is a challenge, though. As a good South Indian kid, she refuses to wear any warm clothes and we need to endure significant screaming when we make her wear a warm jacket. We also need to figure out a strategy for the rain. We’ve got this plastic cover for her stroller, but a different strategy is required when carrying her in her carrier (the carrier is also hard to wear when wearing a coat of any kind).

Finally, a note about coffee. Firstly, it isn’t that expensive – a typical coffee at Costa is around £2.25 (I’m still conditioned to thinking GBP/EUR = 1, though I realise I need to add 15% to convert pound prices to Euros, which I’m used to). But the coffee at Costa itself was disappointing.

They promised a Cortado, which is a Spanish concept where very little milk is added to a shot of espresso, giving a rather strong coffee. Costa advertised at their door that they served some three kinds of Cortado (a travesty in itself). And the cortado itself had way too much milk for it to be called a Cortado!

I hope to continue to make pertinent observations, unless I join an employer where continued blogging might seem too dangerous (I’ve worked for those kinds of employers in the past but don’t want to take chances again)! And you might remember that this blog “took off” in terms of the number of posts the first time I was in Britain!