My First Day on Vyvanse / First Post

Hello everybody. First of all, since most of the readers will probably be ADHD, I chose the least distracting and best organized layout for this blog.

Since this is the first post, I will introduce myself:

I'm a guy in my mid-twenties who recently faced the music and decided to treat his ADHD (sounds like some sort of commercial LOL).

College degree: Physics

Activities: A lot

Smoking: ~10/day (now trying to stay on nicoderm and nicorette to quit)

Drinks: ~10 once a weekend

My first diagnosis was at the age of 3. In Headstart, (pre-K) my teachers told my mother I was mentally retarded and would run around the class, and basically do whatever I wanted. After seeing a psychologist, they diagnosed me with ADD. My mother refused to put me on Ritalin, after seeing what it did to other kids at the school.

Long story short, after two years of Headstart, and another two years of kindergarten, everything was not smooth. Although I graduated high school with a 3.9/4.0, college proved to be more difficult. The math problems became longer, and more difficult. The papers grew from a few pages to a few dozen. Something that was easilly managed and often funny became much more problematic. In school, I was constantly on detentions for talking back to teachers, defying teachers, and that type of thing.

Obviously, I studied my ass off with the new challenges in college. With ADHD I would spend hours studying, often barely getting anything done, just staring at the books, looking at every distraction, rarely able to concentrate on the materials.

The classes I did best in were the more interactive classes. Where interaction wasn't allowed, I would often interrupt the teacher with off-topic questions and annoy them to the point of surreptitiously lowering my grades.

OK, this is getting pretty boring, and I keep switching between AIM, Facebook and watching TV. So here's the rundown.

Story of the day:

Today I started Vyvanse, and decided I should take this seriously (as I really don't like taking prescriptions and medicine in general) and try to get the most out of it by documenting it. Only I realized that instead of documenting it privately, it would be help a lot of people if it is public. Each day, I'm going to try to document my progress with ADHD, the drug I'm taking, and any other steps to improve the symptoms.

Day 1:

Vyvanse (30mg):

Wake time: 10AM

Take pill: 10:30AM

Onset: 11:30AM

Peak: 2PM

Offset: 4PM

Effects (in order): lightness, less distracted by birds, cars, people, shower felt great, want to clean/organize, started to feel pretty focused

Activities: organized a little, did small tasks, went to Barnes and Noble read for 4hrs!

Side effects: 2PM headache started, thought it could be a caffiene headache so I ordered a small coffee at 3PM, headache persisted, kept reading until 4:30PM, came home, extremely fidgety from 6PM to 7PM, ate dinner, headache persisted, took 400mg ibuprofin at 8PM, headache gone by 9PM.

Overall: Felt pretty focused when I was reading at B&N, lots of noises, music, people, coffee grinders, noticed little of it, and was distracted less by things that I noticed until about 4PM. No real "buzz" feeling, which I was worried about, physically felt a little like Sudafed (either original pseudoephedrine or phenylephrine).

All in all - Good day, minus the headache.