Since the root canal from hell last Friday I’ve been doing something I’m probably not supposed to do. I’ve been taking two of my amitriptyline pills each night instead of one.

I got a new prescription last time I went to for a check up about a month ago, and when the doc was writing it she realised that she’d accidentally written on the old prescription that I should be taking two pills a night. She assumed I’d been taking two but when I said I hadn’t been she wrote one pill a night on the new prescription and off I went.

Ok, I KNOW I’m not supposed to be upping my dosage myself but it was an extreme situation in that I felt like someone was repeatedly kicking me in the side of the head and then stabbing me in the jaw with a hot poker.

I’d already taken normal painkillers so had run out of options. I swear, I’ve taken more painkillers in the last week than I’d taken in the previous month.

Thing is, I feel so much better right now. Self-employment, as much as I adore my job and wouldn’t want to be doing anything else, can be stressful. It stresses me out that I can’t work more because of the way M.E. restricts what I’m able to do (I keep reminding myself that I’m doing a huge amount more than I ’should’ be able to do) and it stresses me out when money is tight.

There are good months and not so good months when it comes to money. This is a not so good month.  It’s not dreadful or anything, just not as lucrative as last month, and things always do pick up again.

But I’m actually alright with it. I am usually beyond neurotic about financial issues, but not right now. Hell, I’ve even stuck with the whole ‘not being perpetually anxious and self-destructive about the way I look’ thing.

I do still wake up early in the morning and feel anxiety inching in from the edge of my brain but I can stop it from turning into a full-blown panic attack. This is a huge step forward for me.

Now I have two concerns which, to be honest, aren’t exactly life or death issues.

The first is the fact that two pills instead of one at night make me sleep longer than just one, but I figure my body will probably acclimatise to the larger dosage. When I first started taking the amitriptyline it hit me like a tonne of bricks at night and knocked me out for 14 hours at night.

After a couple of months I was back down to 8-12 hours sleep, although the positive effects of the pills didn’t reduce. I just get a bit bleh when I think of sleeping MORE than I already do. But the reduction in anxiety has made the hours that I am awake so much more productive.

The second concern is that I now have to admit to my doctor, who I’m seeing on Monday, that I doubled my dosage without asking her. A while back, the last time my dosage was upped I think, I asked if I could take two pills instead of one if I needed them and she said it wasn’t a good idea to use an irregular dosage.

I have an awesome doctor and I’m hoping that she’ll understand why I did what I did and appreciate the positive that has come out of it. Since she thought I was taking two pills a night before anyway, and I actually am feeling massive benefits from the higher dosage, maybe she’ll be cool with it.

I hope so.