However, for a long period of time now (definitely over 6 months) I have experience chronic fatigue. I can say “chronic” because it interferes with my daily life. I don’t go to work several days a week, I can’t keep up with my friends, and I often sleep for 12+ hours at a time (reason for the missing work). I am not depressed while on prozac but I have also been taking ADHD medication since high school. When I started taking the ADHD meds my grades went from C’s and D’s to straight A’s. Now it seems that I have to take more and more ADHD meds to feel the effects and feel that I am abusing the drugs (more than I was to begin with–).

My mother said that when she took prozac she could not even get out of bed and I wonder if this is what is occurring with me. I can’t go on like this but if I stop taking prozac I don’t know if I can deal with another episode of depression.

I truly feel that the fatigue is not related to being depressed but is actually contributing to my stress and anxiety! I haven’t tried another type of anti-depressant but will others surely have the same effect? Is the anxiety possibly due to dependency on adhd meds? any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I’m always long winded, and I apologize. The message is readable, but kind of ugly!

Oh, well. I’m showing my age… (This time, I tried two returns, just to see if that made any difference. After all, it’s not paper!)

I have a son-in-law who works at a local university hospital and is involved in translational bioinformatics. He recently attended the 2008 summit of the American Medical Informatics Association. I’m going to pass your link along to him.

Just as an aside, I recall working in marketing and promotion in 1995-6 for a company in Lexington, Massachusetts, US. The name was MedAccess Corporation. It was a start-up company trying to get doctors to use laptop computers for their office visit notes, instead of dictating machines. There were several computer software manufacturers trying to gain a foothold in that business. We did a trade show in San Antonio for hospital management IT people.

MedAccess could not get beyond a couple of years. As I recall, they used up all their venture capital and the problem was trying to get doctors to even accept the idea. One of the difficulties at that time was capturing MRI and CT images that would be useful if sent from doctor to doctor.

Interestingly enough, one of the big hurdles was getting male doctors to accept the fact that they had to learn to type! Keyboards were the only interface into computers. In my age group, that was a woman’s job!

However, here’s a shoutout to my husband, now age 74. Twenty years ago, I recall him coming home at night and setting up a cardboard on the desk. Then, he practiced on his new keyboard:

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”

He is an electrical engineer, BSEE Northeastern University 1957, Boston, Massachusetts. He also spent many years in sales/marketing.

Originally, he did not type. In the 1980s, he saw the whole software steam train coming down the (rail)road. He was an early adopter. He wanted out of the travel (50-75% on the road), and took a software course on Wang computers during one period of unemployment. He got the highest grades in his class. Most of the rest of his work was as a software analyst, until we were forced to retire early in 2001.

I have officially dubbed him the Digital_Geezer, and even printed a certificate from the Internet stating his position. (I can’t find the site anymore.)

We celebrate our 37th Wedding Anniversary on Wednesday, February 4, 2009.

Thanks for reading,

EK

PS. Cheers from a couple of people who love Amsterdam! We visited there twice, and my daughter and family actually swapped houses with another couple and stayed there for a month on a sabbatical several years ago. What month do the tulips bloom? We have them here in Woodburn, Oregon — beautiful!

Recently, I found your page, and it is excellent. This compliment is coming from a 69-year-old woman in the media who has had a diagnosis of clinical depression since the age of 19. I underwent a series of ECT treatments in 1960 and have had a few admissions to the hospitals in Massachusetts to work on difficult adjustment of medications or personal problems that have come up in my life. I have been maintained on one of the old tricyclic antidepressants, but the side effects of dry mouth and weight gain have caused me to re-think everything, including a total revamp of my lifestyle. Recently, I consulted with Dr. O., and he has been kind enough to even email me through the HMO system in which we are enrolled.

He wants me to try Lamictal (lamotrigine) with the idea of replacing the trycyclic with another medication. When I went to the Internet to read about side effects, I was blown away. I know enough about ethical drugs (worked for Bristol-Myers Squibb in the 1980s, but in another chemical division) to realize that these potions we mix up every day do some wonders. I am on eight daily medications at this time. But the dark side of the equation is that they do horrible things, too.

Have you have any experience with Lamictal for depression? I went to http://www.askapatient.com and read the posts there. Like most drugs, some people have good results, and some wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.

I’ve told other doctors with blogs on the Internet that in some ways, I envy you good people. My excellent grades and strong scientific interests — which might have directed me to medicine or the law in college — were channeled into communications, essentially in my first semester of college. (In January 1957, I was chosen as the co-host for a live children’s TV show, “Popeye Playhouse”, in Dade County, Florida.) I migrated to talk radio in 1971 to replace Larry King in Miami, and then on to a daytime show in Boston. I have been interviewing doctors on important health issues for decades.

Thank you for this very interesting blog, and for responding to my question if you can.

Ellen Kimball
Portland, Oregon