Well today was the big day. After much much extremely trying (understatement) effort these past months and with the waiting of the opening in the place I finally got in (and can pretty well afford!) I now have a local actual professional in my court! A PMHNP (Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practioner), so lesser trained than a P-doc, but it's like a two-fer as they do both meds and therapy, which is a more economical approach for me right now (no insurance, barely employed, etc).

So! Got all my stuff together yesterday and Google Mapped how to get there. Left extra time. Realized this morning that I should stop by the ATM and get $ out. It rejected my PIN! Not a good start, but only a mini-launch. Then I was right in the zone (after 1/2 hour drive) and got lost. Oh yes. I pulled over to consult my maps, but by this point, it was time to be there and I was a shaking stressing mess. Had to turn my car off because I was vibrating harder than it was! I couldn't even find where I was on the map and trying to look at it, the roads were just jumping all over the place. I was in a state. Made a call over there and got the answering machine and left a message. I just *barely* kept from crying. There was no being able to hide the meltdown in my voice or message. At all. (And this may seem funny, but I actually think I'm doing quite well now. Good grief. Maybe not so much! Lol.)

Backtracked and after driving around a couple plaza parking lots managed to get to an area it looked like it might be. Drove past the sign indicating *other* addresses in that complex when I looked over and saw her name on one of the entrances! Yea! Got in there to about a zillion pieces of paperwork. Sheesh it was hard to concentrate. My writing was all over the place, still shaking and trying to concentrate and not to eat up too much time. (And you know how they always have some of those questions where you're just thinking... holy cow, where to start! So I just put something like "too much") Some hanging around time. Breathe. And this was so weird. They haven't been able to connect via my phone! (I know it's working as others can get through.) Double checked it and even tried it while I was waiting. No go. Very weird.

Went in and talked, covered quite a bit of ground. It went very well and I quite like her. Just the right amount of verbal bounce back, where you're not left doing all the talking, and she always managed to keep the conversation focused to my experience. Good. Very personable. I was still pretty keyed up between the morning's events and general nervousness, so I'm sure it was a challenge for her to keep me somewhat on track, lol! (Or even keep up -- I'm either very quiet or a verbal hurricane! Hehe, which is probably fairly obvious by now via posts!) I confessed my self-adjusted med thing and she upped it more yet.

Sooooo, good. I'm a relieved and happy camper over this. We also spoke a bit about me trying the generic (the brand on the main one costs way more than I can actually afford). Now that I don't feel like I'm flying entirely without a net, I will give it a go. I was always so afraid to without anyone in my psych corner since the move. Too many changes and stress and no docs, so I knew that if it went bad I'd lose it altogether, and I just couldn't chance it, however economically enticing it was.

(She was picking up right away on something my old P-doc had been hinting at. ADHD. I've always resisted this as I had really good grades. Yeah, I know, but that was my logic, such as it was. Glancing over the thing I have to fill out, chuckle... oh sheesh . She'd encouraged looking up some information about it. So I thought where better to start than PC?! I pulled up the page and started in, and pretty soon found myself saying inside, "ack! I can't read all this!" It wasn't even that much. Catching myself thinking this was like a lightning bolt, and I just started laughing at the irony. Ok. Maybe they're on to something. Lol. My BF is supposed to weigh in on this questionaire too. That should be interesting.)

So glad to be able to share some good news at last with my forum buds. (and kudos to you if you actually made it through all this. I'm realizing that while I tend to write a wall o' words, in the edit, re-edit, re-edit, I can barely read it myself! )