Life without medication

I had, for all intents and purposes, pretty much abandoned this blog. The reason I am back is because of the sheer number of people who contacted me when I first started writing in here, thanking me for being so open and honest about my experiences. If anyone gets anything good out of this crap, then it's worth sharing :) .

I may regret this post, but I think I should leave it up as a cautionary tale, if nothing else...

Ahem...

It's been months since I posted something which, honestly, is a sign that things were going really well...but here I am about to post something new...uh oh.

I had to look back at my last post from almost a year ago to make an attempt the fill in the gap by seeing where I left off. The last time I wrote I was back on Lexapro. It did ultimately, successfully, even out my mood, and I did get back to some semblance of feeling like a "normal" person. Dangerous word, normal. Unfortunately, the insufferable chronic pain from fibromyalgia compounded with the exhaustion from being on Lexapro was making my life barely a life at all. I had no energy and was in almost constant pain. My life revolved around the small relief I would get from taking very strong painkillers, which gave me enough relief that I could function, but also made me kinda stupid and, ultimately, even more tired. I was under the impression that most of the exhaustion was due to the fibromyalgia and was therefore something from which I could not escape. After months of this, my doctor suggested I go do a sleep study. The study revealed that I was only getting 22 minutes of REM sleep each night. The doctor was convinced that this was not a result of the fibro, but a result of the Lexapro. Also (vanity), after 4 years of being on Lexapro or something in the psychedelic drug family, I had gained 32 pounds. 32!! Enough! I decided I was ditching the Lexapro, ridding myself of psychedelic drugs altogether, and that I would battle my anger demon on my own. Besides, maybe I was old enough that I would have grown out of it by that point.

***I am not proud of anything that happened in the following paragraph. I am writing about it because I don't think there is enough said about things like this. Hell, I am writing this whole damn blog as kind of a cautionary tale. Yes, it is cathartic for me to write about it, but I do genuinely hope that it helps at least one person who has gone through/is going through/could go through the same thing. You're not alone. You're not crazy.***

So, in November of 2013, I jumped off Lexapro completely in about 1 week. I cannot stress this enough: NEVER DO WHAT I DID. You are supposed to wean off those types of drugs very slowly. I thought I would be strong enough to get through the withdrawals and just wanted to be done with it, so I jumped off way too fast. As a result, I went through the worst extremes you could possibly imagine. Desperate, despondent misery, suicidal tendencies, rage, misery again, having the constitution of a newborn kitten: I was a mess. I can't even remember the specifics that well because I have blocked most of them out. At one point, my husband wanted to tie our legs together so that he would be able to feel if I woke up, potentially with the urge to do something insane. When I say suicidal tendencies, I mean I had to sprint from the kitchen so that I couldn't be near anything sharp. At one point, I did take a knife to myself. It's a very, very strange thing. The desire, the craving to cut myself was like the craving you get when you want to eat a whole bowl of cookie dough, except much more dangerous and, of course, insane. I cut the top of my arm multiple times with a steak knife. I cannot stress enough that I am not proud of this. The insane, intense urges completely take over your body. You're lucky if you can feel "you" in there at all. "You" are not in charge anymore. When you take away a drug like Lexapro that quickly, your serotonin level falls through the floor. For all intents and purposes you become, chemically, a depressed crazy person. So, if you or anyone you know is thinking of coming off their anti-anxiety/anti-depressant please, for the love of God, tell them to wean off it very, very slowly. From what I have been told, 60% of people will have no side effects at all. 40% of people will experience some degree of what I went through. There is no way of knowing which category you will fall into so, I beg of you, please be careful. To be honest, if it weren't for my husband, I don't know if I would still be here.

Ultimately I did come back to planet earth. The chemicals in my body finally evened out, and I felt like myself again. It took about 3 months for my emotions to recalibrate themselves, and about another 2 months for the physical side effects to subside. No, I'm not exaggerating.

So, a few months pass and, finally, I had most of my energy back. My biggest fear was, of course, that my anxiety would come back now that I didn't have any pills in my system to even me out. For a very long time, I felt perfectly fine. I was actually getting a chance to enjoy my life: my family, my amazing husband, our dogs, our house, our work, even the cats! Every once in a great while, my anxiety/rage (my demon, as I call it) would rear it's obnoxious, evil little head. In those moments, I would lose myself and the demon would take over. It wasn't until the given situation went too far (I said something I regretted or finally broke down into tears) that it would pass and I could, once again, get me back. The situations were much more rare than they had been years ago, but still happened nevertheless. The fact that they were happening at all was unacceptable to me, but I refused to take a pill. Not after what I had already gone through, and put those around me through.

Through sheer serendipity, I actually found the cause. After years and years of thinking that this is who I was, thinking I was crazy, hating myself for allowing anger to consume me at times for no apparent reason, losing control of myself, it turned out that is wasn't me at all. I met up with a friend who I hadn't seen since high school. At one point during the hours we spent catching up, she mentioned that she had needed to come off birth control pills because they made her a crazy rage monster. I had been on birth control pills since I was 16 and had never given a second thought to the possibility that all this insane rage I had experienced on and off all those subsequent (16) years was anything other than me, the stereotypical "crazy chick." I had driven myself absolutely nuts, many a time thinking I was a horrible, awful person. I had put myself on these awful, mind-altering pills for years (Lexapro, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, Abilify, etc) that almost killed me when I came off of them. All of this because I was absolutely convinced there was something inherently wrong with me. All those years, and not until I was 32 did I reconnect with a girl who had experienced the exact same thing, but she realized it was a result of the birth control.

I have never taken another birth control pill and my anxiety/rage, the evil "demon" that took over and made me feel like I was just a huge pile of worthless, wicked crap: gone. Insane. 16 years of thinking there was something wrong with me, all because of a little birth control pill. Who knew?

So, this blog entry is a giant mess, isn't it? Well, I'm not much of a writer. There is more that I want to share, but I think this entry has gone on quite long enough, so I will save it for next time.

I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that at least one person out there gets something out of this, whatever it may be. Then this whole mess of crap won't have happened for nothing :)