What’s New, Pussycat?

My Geodon dose, for one thing. I just started weaning down from 80 to 60 mg last night. This is the first step in what I hope will be a successful reduction of the medication burden I’m taking. It’s a good time to try it; I’ve been stable for a few months, and my stress levels are low. Besides, even as sensitive as I am to meds, I don’t think my brain is going to notice a 20 mg decrease.

Of course, I thought the same thing about decreasing the Zyprexa last summer, and we all know how well THAT turned out. But the circumstances were a lot different then; I was somewhat unstable, and my life was in utter chaos thanks to my being out of work and the changes wrought by being unable to afford our accustomed lifestyle. There’s no reason to think this attempt will be anything more than a small blip on the radar, if that.

The other thing is, it looks like we might be moving again…..only this time, it will be to our youngest son’s home. He, his husband, and even his mother-in-law all have asked us to come live with them, and now that there’s room at the inn, we’re seriously considering it. We like where we’ve been for the past five months, but this is family. Ethan and Clark want to “take care of us” and, if truth be known, they don’t want me to live alone when Will is no longer with us. (Not that it’s going to happen any time soon, but we all know that the cancer will win eventually, and that I’m going to need to live with someone for my own good.)

There are, of course, some disadvantages, number one being the need to drive 25 miles or more to all the places we need to go: doctors, church, club meetings etc. We’ve lived here for the past 26 years and aren’t going to change any of those things. But I drove that same stretch of freeway five days a week for over two years, so that’s not really a deal-breaker. Neither is the fact that we’ll never be able to have a cat again—Clark is wildly allergic to them, I mean grab-the-EpiPen-NOW kind of allergic—but we have our dog, and they have their dogs, and all will be well in the pet department.

Besides, if it doesn’t work for some reason, Will and I would be able to afford a small apartment thanks in no small part to my Social Security. In the meantime, we would be paying less rent, have free cable and Internet (ye gawds, how we’ve missed TV!!) and there’s plenty of room to move around, unlike here where the bedroom is our only real living space. Nothing else here is ours; we feel more like guests than people who live in a house, and we have thstress of small screaming children on days when our landlady’s grandkids come over. We’re not used to that anymore, and the only way to escape it is to go to our little room or leave the house.

But it’s certainly not unbearable, and if this hadn’t come up for discussion, we would stay here until we save up enough money to move into our own place. Our landlady is a sweetheart and I am beyond grateful that she literally rescued us from the streets when Ethan had a full house and couldn’t move us in. Still, our minds are 95% made up that we’re going to do this, and if you ask my husband he’d tell you it’s 100%.

We’re all going to talk about it this weekend and work out any potential bugs before making a final decision. Nobody’s going anywhere for at least a couple of months; I’ve got major surgery coming up next week that will take several weeks to heal from, and we want to give our landlady a fair amount of notice because she’s been so good to us. We shall see…..I’ll keep you posted!