Due to my recent use of adderall, things have been going much better. As I (and billoddie) talked about in other posts, it's almost as if adderall breaks Gupta's vicious cycle. For me, at least (I won't speak for Bill), it's not that I have to continue to take adderall in order to feel better. One dose, alone, is enough to stop the cycle and get me back to feeling 95-100% (as a reference, when I'm at my worst, I have terrible migraines, bad brain fog, weakness, jitteriness, etc... climbing stairs, for example, is doable, but not something I look forward to).
I realize that not everyone reacts well to adderall, and when I read things like this, it does more to convince me that maybe some of us simply have different diseases. In any event, I know that my own benefits may be due to the fact that my body can "handle" adderall. Maybe some of what adderall does is simply too severe for those who are worse off than I am.
But here's the weird thing. Adderall also makes me "jittery." It's just that I've realized it's a different kind of jitteriness. It's like a good kind of jitteriness, where I feel energized, and eventually, I feel calm. For the life of me, I can't think of why my CFS-type jitteriness feels so bad, whereas my adderall jitteriness feels good. Are different chemicals being released? Gupta talks all about these adrenal cycles, and at first, I was nodding my head, thinking, yeah, it feels like adrenaline when I'm entering a relapse-- like little needles are floating down my arteries, into my legs, eventually pounding on my forehead. But now when I think about it, it doesn't really feel like a normal adrenaline rush. It's just this discomforting feeling, and the closest word I have for it is jitteriness, but really, it could be anything. It's like this weakness, combined with this feeling of being on edge. It's not even that bad, and yet I really, really, hate the feeling... I guess the point is that the English language doesn't have a word for the feeling, so we (maybe just I) just grasp around for the right word. So, do we actually know it's adrenaline? Shouldn't there be a way to find this out?
Anyway, I think some research needs to be done into what it could be in adderall that helps halt this cycle. I know billoddie mentioned dopamine, and maybe that's it? The other night, I was feeling something bad coming on, but the next morning, I took a pill (and then even did some light exercise), and once the adderall hit me, I felt all better... and once it was out of my system, I still felt good, and still do now.
On one hand, it is good to see that how adderall works does seem to support Gupta. For me, CFS behaves very much like a cycle. When things are good, I can do way more without feeling any bad effects. In other words, if the cycle hasn't started, it takes way more to get it going. But once it has started, the smallest things will continue it. The one constant is stress/cortisol (was just reading about how exercise increases cortisol levels, which might explain why we get post-exertional malaise?), which is always correlated to my symptoms, no matter what kind of stress it is: worrying or getting angry about school or relationships, hearing loud noises, etc etc...
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