Update on My Psych Drug Withdrawal
It’s been 19 months since a psychiatrist cold stopped drugs
she’d had me on for years. First she said don’t take any more of (like, bring
in what you have left tomorrow) these 3:
- quetiapine ER 400 mg
- benztropine Mesylate 2 mg
- gabapentin 600 mg
And then 2 weeks later, after I’d spent
2 days in ICU due to severe withdrawal from no tapering off the first 3 meds,
she cold stopped these 2 as well:
-
pramipexole 1 mg
- desvenlafaxine ER 50 mg
And then, because I asked for a
psychiatrist switch at the mental health center and was denied this for months, and I no longer had a prescriber, I was forced off these 2 without much tapering
at all:
- lithium 900 mg
- Vivitrol inj. monthly supplemented by daily naltrexone 50 mg one week prior to next inj.
Initially, withdrawal knocked me off
my feet with extreme sleepiness, when I wasn’t running to the toilet with
nausea and diarrhea, and confused thinking. The psychiatrist said it must be
the flu. The nurse at the mental health center, being far more concerned, called
the paramedics to my apartment, then I was in the ER, then I was in ICU, then I
was stepped down to a regular medical ward, then I was sent home to deal with
the rest myself.
For months, I still had digestive
issues, exhaustion, sleep problems, psychoactive symptoms (police took me away
to psych units twice and withdrawal wasn’t addressed), UTI’s (leading to kidney
stones and back to the hospital to remove those), rapid dental decay (that was
expensive to repair), joint and muscle pain, sinus problems, and other more
minor yet hard to deal with symptoms.
So how am I now? Am I still in
withdrawal 19 months later?
Well, it’s hard to know, and the
medical establishment isn’t willing to even admit I was ever experiencing psych
drug withdrawal, so how would I assess this question properly, is my answer.
It’s complicated because I’d been on
psychiatric medication for so long, and that had caused its own issues such as
weight gain, low vitamin D, hypothyroidism and sun sensitivity, so my health
wasn’t optimal before the drugs were ceased without tapering. Also add into the
mix that my activity level the first year in withdrawal consisted of showering,
grocery shopping, then basically just dying on the sofa for 3 days from that
energy expenditure, plus I wasn’t up for chopping vegetables and cooking, so I
had to opt for too much prepared food.
But I fight on, and so now I do chop
the veggies, broil some meat, keep a bunch of refrigerator dishes full of good
things so I can concoct good things to eat, even if I’m not feeling great. And
I push myself to clean or use the rowing machine I had delivered, or I take
time to write or call my family or just watch the birds in the woods right off
my balcony.
Yet, I pay for what I try to do.
Yesterday I used the rowing machine for 20 minutes and now the carpal tunnel syndrome
in my right wrist is nearly intolerable. Eating leaner seems to make my insides
want to clear everything out, in a massive way at times. I’ve developed
horrible allergies that have me sneezing, and I’m noticing tinnitus (a sort of
constant static-like sound ringing out of my ears), and sometimes I sleep so
hard I can’t wake up well, while other times I can’t sleep or slow down and I trip
over my own feet or accidentally cut my finger chopping those vegetables up.
However, once the psychotic mania and
frightening nightmares as I came off the psych meds cleared up, they haven’t
revisited. I don’t wish I’d just die already. I don’t even think about self-harming,
and that was a constant when I was on psych drugs. I have my mind back, and for
that I’m grateful, yet I wonder how much I’ll be able to recover of my body.
Time will tell.
