So I was already rather dizzy by the time we exited the grocery store. I managed to climb the stairs with my shopping bags and get myself safely into the apartment; and this is when, despite the stupendous amount of water I had steadily ingested all morning, the headache hit me. Hard. It was not one of my usual headaches, which tends to indicate that it was, indeed, a newly experienced side effect. I swallowed more water, and after having checked all over the Interwebs that there was no contraindication, also took some ibuprofen.

The headache eventually faded out, and I was left feeling tired, sorry for myself, and generally in a bad mood.

But it's really after dinner that I thought I couldn't stand it anymore. Maybe because of the heat (the day was particularly warm), I started feeling dizzy again even though I had just eaten and about eight hours had passed since I had taken the medication. And it felt worse than ever. I had to lay down on the Fabulous Feline's couch and stay there while waiting for the room to stop whirling around. He obligingly turned on the TV and started watching some show or other on Discovery Health, in which people were suffering extremes that made me feel ashamed to complain about something as minor as slight giddiness. So I sat up, snuggled with him, and kept on vaguely staring at the televisor, my brain feeling like if it had been carefully enveloped in layers of cotton that were buffering all external signals unless they were very, very loud.

The evening went by, painfully slowly. The shows on TV were worse and worse, the commercials more and more unbearable, and as I took another pill, my mouth went dryer and dryer and I slowly started to lose my mind. When we eventually switched the set off and went up to shower (in a failed attempt to cool down ‒ the bedroom remained at 85F all night, for the Fabulous Feline's apartment gets incredibly hot), I was tired, unable to think, increasingly uncomfortable and fucking fed up. So when he turned off the light on me, instead of saying "Thank you so much, but I'd like to take my glasses and jewels off first" ironically, I snapped at him and broke down.

I started crying uncontrollably, stopping only to express how fucking insensitive (and not to mention condescending) of him it was to try to minimize everything by saying that well, if the side effects kept on being unbearable on the following day, I would just stop taking the medication and be back to my normal self. I might have overreacted a little. But I didn't wanted rational comfort, I wanted patient understanding for my current feelings. Which was maybe not the thing to ask from a Feline worried by his very near future, who had just seen the last 9 months of his efforts amount to little more than nothing at all, and further irritated by the general crappiness of a hot and boring evening.

But crying felt good.

And after that, it eventually seem that I started getting used to the drug. I have been, since Sunday, rather less efficient and less able to focus than usual, feeling easily dizzy after a minor effort, but not drastically so nor to the point of feeling incapacitated. I have been able to get some work done, to lead an important meeting with collaborators from several departments, to walk to and back from campus without having to stop halfway to catch my breath and gather my strength, and even to perform a few turns in my ballroom dancing class on Monday. (We had a substitute teacher. He got us started on rumba. The class was, all in all, unusually stiff and boring, but I enjoyed the last fifteen minutes or so of it.)

So, I'll soon try to up the dosage to three pills a day. Maybe on Thursday after discussing it with my physical therapist. I'd rather do it on the week-end, so as not to lose a whole workday should it be as bad as last Saturday, but right now I don't really want to be an oversensitive, irritable and sofa-bound partner to the Fabulous Feline in the few moments we have together, given the bitterness of his situation. Plus, we have a lab party on Saturday, and I don't want to be drowsy for that. (But is there even a good moment?)

In the meanwhile, I'll enjoy being able to carry along almost as usually ‒ and dearly hope that the medicine has some kind of positive effect in the end.