Yep. It's Tuesday.

[lunabee34]

1. I met with my chair today for evaluations, and it was a really gratifying conversation. She encouraged me to apply for promotion to full professor next year and told me that my vita is very, very strong in all areas except scholarship; if I can get an article published this year, she thinks that section of my vita will be in line with expectations. I have worked my ass off in these last ten years, and it is so gratifying to hear my boss say that my teaching and service and community outreach are exemplary. I have an article under review at a peer reviewed journal right now; I suspect it's going to be rejected (I already got a revise and resubmit, and they're taking way longer to get back to me on the revisions than they projected, so that seems a bad sign to me), but I've made my peace with that. I'm going to submit the article I'm in the process of writing about the camp I created for the local high school students, and I'm going to submit a chapter of my dissertation somewhere this summer and cross my fingers. And I might try sending the article that's out now somewhere else if it gets rejected; IDK. In any event, feeling really good about my work right now.

2. Which is good because physically I feel like shit. I assumed when I started taking the vitamin D that it wouldn't take me long to start feeling better. And in that first week, I did start feeling better. I see now that it was entirely due to placebo effect. I feel so tired and worn down and like I could just pass out all the time. I have no energy, and exercising is such a struggle. The only noticeable effect I have from taking the D is that when I take it each week, within a few hours and lasting for about a day, my eyes are much less dry and vision much clearer. And then it tapers off and they get dry and blurry again. Even though taking it doesn't make me feel better or more energized, by the of the week when I've got a day or so left before I can take it again, I start feeling I've been beat up. This just sucks so hard. Everything I'm seeing on the internet says it takes a really long time to get over a D deficiency (and I think it had been building for about a year before it was detected), but I'm so tired of feeling so tired. It seems like a whiny complaint to have. I'm ambulatory; I can work; I'm not in pain. But my mouth and eyes are so dry, and I'm so bone tired, and I have brain fog, and I'm depressed and sad. Woe is me. :(

3. We finally watched another episode of Jessica Jones.

I like the nods to the larger MCU universe like the mentions of the Raft where they kept Team Cap prisoner.

At first I was really glad that Trish and Jess cleared the air. No more secrets. Trish admits to sleeping with Malcolm and to being an addict. Everybody knows the murderer is Jess's mom.

But then it's clear that Trish is still a trainwreck, and no matter how off-putting Jess's mom may be, she's got Trish pegged. I mean, what she's doing is tied up in her addiction issues and everything else, but she is jealous of Jess and she feels inferior and she can't let this go. I mean, one of the shots in this episode or one prior is of her watching her former boyfriend do some important journalism work. She wants so badly to do something meaningful and important, but she is fucking up her friendship with Jess and with Malcolm. This season has made Trish really deeply unlikable for me and I hate that because her friendship with Jess is like the best thing in the whole show. :(

Jeri breaks my heart. I was so shocked for it all to be a scam. Wow. Carrie Ann Moss totally nails that scene when she comes home to a burgled apartment.

I don't know how Jess is going to get around killing the guard. I mean, he's clearly a serial killer and it was accidental, but it's murder.

Comments

[sholio]

*huuuugs*

Since I don't know the specifics of your situation, there might be some reason why this wouldn't work for you. And I don't want to give you false hope.

But for most people, D is hard to overdose on - it does build up in the body, but the actual dangerous doses are SO high that most people can't easily get there through reasonable supplementation. Most people I know who take it, take it every day. Since you notice distinct benefits after taking the supplement, do you think switching to daily dosing, or at least two or three times a week, might work better?

Most people with healthy D levels can easily take 1000 IU daily with no risk, so if you're deficient, you should be able to safely handle a lot more than that. Back when I looked into this, what I recall is that the risk of toxicity starts to appear if you're self-administering over 10,000 IU daily for months. But obviously being under a doctor's supervised supplementation is a bit different. Both my sister and I have doctor-diagnosed vitamin deficiencies - B vitamins for her, iron for me - and we're both able to handle extremely high supplement levels due to being naturally low; in my case, the amount of iron I can safely take would be unsafe for anyone who's not deficient, but it's fine for me. And the amount of supplemental D that's safe for even non-deficient people is A LOT.

I looked into all of this when I started taking supplemental D to help deal with my winter low-energy levels. As it turned out, D doesn't make much difference for me (lightboxing was what worked), but I came away with the discovery that overdosing on D requires taking so much of it that any reasonable amount of it is safe to take even without having your D levels checked beforehand.

So basically, unless your doctor has you on extremely high megadoses, you ought to be able to add in a couple of doses during the week. If they're giving you such a high dose that it would be unsafe to add a few lower doses (like if they're giving you 40,000 IU once a week or something), you could ask them about cutting back on the megadose and going to lighter doses a few times a week instead. It seems like that would be healthier anyway.

I don't know if it'll help with the brain fog, but it might at least get rid of the dry eyes!

ETA: And if this is stuff you already know and have taken into account, sorry for giving you redundant information. *hugs* I'm sorry things are so rough right now.

[lunabee34]

Thank you! This is really interesting. You're raising some issues one of my RL friends brought up that I don't have a good answer for.

So, the doctor prescribed 50,000 units to be taken once weekly. I have a couple of RL friends who had D deficiencies who were also treated this way, and my interneting seems to suggest this is SOP for treating a D deficiency. Take the once weekly 50,000 for 6 months to a year, and if the value is in range, switch to daily supplementation. What I can't figure out is the rationale for treating that way. The closest I saw on a site was the idea that you're a sieve, and all your D has been leaking out a hole in the bottom, so you need these huge dumps of D to get the levels up while it's still leaking out the bottom and that smaller doses would all just leak out more quickly? Or something like that. But I still don't really understand why doing it this way is better than on a daily basis, especially with the ledge effect at the end of the week. Naturally, when I found out I have the deficiency, it was after the doc visit was over and the labs had come in, so it was the just the nurse calling in the RX and leaving me a message about it. I think I might call them and ask for some more info; I don't want to go back in because everything I'm reading has suggested that a severe D deficiency takes a really long time to get over and a really long time to start feeling better, so I'm guessing I just have to suck it up, but I think I should call and ask about the rationale and etc.

I've been trying to eat more foods with vitamin D like milk and cheese and eggs and fish. Now that it's warm and sunny, I've been going outside for a little every day and getting some sun, too.

My B12 was within range but at the very low end of the range, so I've been taking B12 every night in the hopes that will help too.

*hugs*

[tabaqui]

That seems really weird to me, too. It might actually be to your benefit to switch to a lower dose daily, because if you're actually getting a benefit from it, but only *right then*, then....dealing with that for a year is kinda crazy.

I suppose i wasn't super-deficient when my doc told me to start taking D (and go outside, for god's sake!), but nothing like what you're taking was even discussed, let alone mentioned as a thing.

I think, like most meds, this needs adjustment so you're feeling better more often.

Good luck!

[lunabee34]

Thank you!

I'm calling the doctor's office. I think y'all are right that maybe some adjustments could be made.