A Taste of Your Own Medicine

Trial and Error (?)

It all started about a year ago. I knew that a 13 year old feeling like they couldn't stand, shaking horribly, and feeling dizzy all of the time wasn't normal, but I never bothered to tell anyone. Who would believe me anyways? I never seemed to be dealing with it around others, it was always when I was alone when it would start up. Nausea without throwing up, hunger without wanting anything to eat, headaches that wouldn't go away with over the counter medication, exhaustion without the ability to sleep, all of those were some of the symptoms that drove me insane. I gave up on even thinking about telling someone after about a month of it, so when it started getting worse, I had to give excuses as to why I couldn't eat pizza with the rest of the "fam" and why I didn't want to partake in any nonsense. Of course, after a while, I couldn't avoid most of the shenanigans, so I did my best to do as little as possible during them. An unavoidable consequence of such experiences was heightened mental issues, the isolation and stark differences from my family was enough to push anyone into a depression. As much as I enjoyed believing I was similar to a robot, devoid of emotion and only functioning based on priority, I couldn't help but feel lesser than those around me. 

Of course, eventually I would have it with the experiences I was going through and try to solve it alone. I was a child prodigy, I could handle any problems on my own without problem. That was my reasoning, anyways. What did any of that even have to do with the present, though? Well, that's when I started actually trying to do something about it other than trying to force the problems to go away by working even harder on things I usually did. I was sitting in my lab, trying to think of what to do when it dawned on me. I could research medications used for depression and anxiety, then replicate them and take them! Sure, it could be dangerous to test a possibly incorrectly made medication on myself without doing any form of testing on anything else, but at this point, it felt like I was always doing that anyways. I was willing to do anything to get it to stop and tackling the mental issues was the first step. Maybe they were the cause of it all and the symptoms would go away, many of the symptoms were ones that could easily be caused by depression and anxiety. I started researching the medications that would treat the symptoms and eventually settled on one called Loratadine. It was one that was commonly used, it seemed to have a high success rate.

"Whatcha doin, Dee?" Mikey's voice rang crystal clear from behind me, I jumped since I'd had no idea that he'd been there until that moment. 

"Hello, Angelo." I turned in my chair and looked at him, not directly at his eyes but somewhere near so he wouldn't think I was being rude or something like that. It was something I'd learned to do after a while of people thinking I was ignoring them. "I'm researching mental conditions in case one of you dumb dumbs manage to get yourselves messed up in the head." At that point, it seemed like I had an excuse for everything.

"Oh, okay!" Mikey smiled and sat beside me. "Can I help?"

"Unfortunately, no. My understanding of the materials isn't impacted by the presence of another person, so it wouldn't be helpful for you to be here at the moment." I answered honestly even though I knew it would likely hurt his feelings in some way. I didn't want him to find out that I was trying to replicate drugs, even if they were legal ones. I also didn't want him to delve too deeply into the subject and realize that I was dealing with something I never bothered to tell them about. A 13 year old shouldn't have to worry about their older brother dealing with something like this, even if the older brother was only 14 himself. I patted his head with one of the mechanical arms in my battle shell, then changed the tab on my computer so he wouldn't get a good look on my research. "You know you aren't allowed in my lab without permission unless it's urgent, is there something you need?"

"Yeah, you weren't answering the door when I asked to come in, so I got worried and came in. When I saw you were fine, I just wanted to see what you were doing." Mikey smiled to me, an innocent smile that showed he hadn't a clue what I was really going through, how  valid that worry was.