Supplements.

Let me show you my supplements.

My supplements.

Let me show you them.

I really love this photo.

I normally fill my pill boxes every Monday evening, but this week I ran out of 5HTP (this morning, actually), and will run out of multi’s on Wednesday, so my normal fill was disrupted both last Monday and tonight. That’s OK. I figured I’d use the change in schedule to go into my supplements a little more in-depth for you all.

Let me precede this with the standard warning: I’m not a Dr., or any sort of medical professional. These are supplements that are [at least for the time being] working for me. I don’t know if they’ll work for you, nor do I recommend that you take any of these without doing your own research and speaking with someone you trust to be a medical professional.

That being said, let’s look at my evening supplements.

The first in the box is the big tan bar on the left of every day’s compartment. That’s my multi. For my multi, I use Rainbow Light® Just Once® Naturals Women’s Oneâ„¢ Multivitamin. (Boy, that was a lot of special characters!) They were recommended to me by my beautiful friend Maya, who said they made a huge difference on her hair and nails. Well I pay $30 twice a month for good nails, and I bleach my hair, so both of those issues are N/A, but I like these. They don’t upset my stomach, and it’s a company I trust. Plus, they’re VERY complete (as far as multivitamins go), AND vegetarian. Good times.

The next thing that goes in the box is my 5HTP. You can’t see them in the pill box, but in front, they’re the white tablets. That’s the one I feel is the most important in my night pills, although really I don’t like being without any of them. 5HTP has been shown to help people with fibro and some other chronic pain/insomnia issues. It both helps with my constant pain and helps me sleep. There are TONS of different brands and formulations of 5HTP, and I’ve found that not only do some work better than others, but some are downright BAD for me to take. The brand I was taking immediately before finding the ones I swear by now were giving me nightmares. After about a week I flushed them down the toilet. Now, I take ONLY Carlson® â„¢Healthy Mood 5HTP Elite. What makes me laugh every week when I do the pill boxes and every month when I buy a new bottle is that the bottle calls them “tasty tablets,” and they really are. They’re chewable. I don’t chew them, but they leave a nice taste in my mouth when I swallow them, and they smell good too. I’ll end this paragraph with a link to some further information on fibro and 5HTP: HERE.

The next one into the box is my herbal sleep aid. They’re the orange tablets. For this help, I take Nature’s Way® Valerian Nighttimeâ„¢ Natural Sleep Aid. They don’t stink like most Valerian supplements do, and like my other stuff, they’re vegetarian. I don’t have a lot to say about these, except that they seem to help me sleep through most of the night, something that I have a hard time doing.

Second to last to go in are my iron supplements. For these I use supplements that are actually made just for Ellwood Thompson’s, my favorite local natural market. I chose chelated iron, as this is supposedly an easily digested form that doesn’t tend to cause tummy problems, and again, vegetarian.

The last ones to go in the box are my “traditional” sleep aids. These are your standard generic 50mg dose of diphenhydramine. You probably know it as Benedryl, but it’s the same as most over the counter products listed as sleep aids. If you don’t believe me, look at the ingredients of them all next time you’re at your pharmacy. I’m especially grateful to have something over the counter that makes a significant difference in my quality of sleep, and is not shown to have any problems associated with long-term use. These are the only ones that are not vegetarian, and actually the only real gelatin that I ever consume. The tablets just don’t seem to work as well for me.

What I’m waiting for at the moment is the drug I took in the sleep study I participated in last year to be released for general sale. It was a reformulation of the drug gabopentin, which is sold under the brand name Neurontin. It was this drug that actually lit the fire under my ass to go talk to my Dr. about fibro – this drug in yet another form, that is. Earlier this year, the makers of Neurontin were given the OK to sell the first FDA approved treatment for fibro: Lyrica. I saw an ad for Lyrica and looked at the webpage, realized it was another form of the gabopentin, which I found to help me sleep AND hurt less, and put two and two together. It chewed on my brain for a few days before I went and talked to the right person about it. If Pfizer doesn’t end up releasing the drug I took then I will request a prescription for the Lyrica, and if that works as well for me then I can stop taking the diphenhydramine. I really hope I’m eventually able to take one or the other, as the one I took during the study was amazingly helpful to me, more so than anything else I had ever tried before. I cried the day I took the last one and begged the nurse running the study to let me keep taking it. DENIED. But I keep hope that I’ll be able to take it again someday.