Guess who got drugs? I got drugs!

Well, no. Medication. Yes. "happy pills". Against social phobia and depression. I hope they will make me happy. The trip to the doctor went sort of okay. Not perfectly though. Georg the psych had recommended medication and cognitive therapy. But I can't get the therapy he recommended. It's too expensive. The government won't pay for it. Bummer. So instead I'll have to go to the local psychiatry and get a referral to some other place. Where I can get cognitive therapy. As I believe it's called. Not really too handy. But hopefully it will be okay in the end. I'll probably have to go to yet another conversation where I explain my problems to some doctor/psych person. My childhood, my phobia. I'm getting tired of telling people. But oh well.

And the meds I could get right away. After the doctor visit I popped into a pharmacy, and after 10 minutes of waiting I had a nice little pill package. It's quite handy, having both my doctor and a pharmacy within 10 minutes walking distance of my work. Quick and easy.

So I'll start taking the pills tonight. Half a pill before bedtime for a week. Then a whole pill before bedtime for a week. And then I'm going back to the doctor to talk about how it's going and see if I should up the dosage.

Hard to say how long the cognitive therapy thing will take. Doctor Michael will refer me to the local psychiatry department and then I'll be called in for a conversation and hopefully they'll refer me to some clinic, I think it's actually the same angst clinic as Charlotte was talking about a while back. So it looks like I'll end up there after all, if it goes okay.

Doctor Michael also said I shouldn't have too high expectations to the medication. It's no miracle cure. He said the cognitive therapy is the effective thing. He didn't seem to have too high hopes for the meds. But then Knud Erik was more positive. His wife has social phobia too and she's had good use of the meds. So there you go. Nothing to do but wait and see how it works. It's not like it's going to cure me and make everything easy. But I do hope it'll help some. It can take months before there's an effect anyway. No miracles.

Outside the doctor I saw this funny thing:

Hah. One of Santa's elves, just hanging out. Maybe I should have mounted a rescue operation. Then Santa would have had to put me on the "nice" list!

But oh well. Hang on, Nisse. Hang on.

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