Yes, this may be a misleading or overly dramatic title. But it got you here! Now before I explain my brutal past two weeks and why I am writing on here after a year, I need to establish a few things:
- It can be okay to quit drugs.
- It can be okay to use drugs prescribed from a doctor.
- Everyone is different and what works well for one person may harm another.
- I recently got a puppy – his name is Koda and he is adorable.
So, what happened to me and why am I talking about drugs?
Well, as someone who has been saved by Christ and will eventually go to heaven, there is a good chance the past two weeks are among my closest encounters to hell I will ever experience. However, the story begins about seven months ago.
I often view my anxiety as my version of Paul’s thorn in the side. But last fall the thorn began to feel more like a dagger. After years of stubbornness, I decided to give medication a try. Lots of people are prescribed things to help them with mental illness and while I understood a drug would not cure me, I hoped it would at least lessen things enough to help me function. I still believed (and still do believe!) God has not taken away my anxiety in its entirety because it means I have to rely on Him, but I also believe He has created the chemicals and minds of doctors to help people like me who struggle, cope a little better.
I joined an online therapy center where I had a counselor to check in with on a monthly basis and a medical prescriber to work with me on getting the proper medication. I took my first pill a few days before Christmas and… nothing happened. These types of drugs typically take up to six weeks to actually work so this was not a surprise. I was also warned by my prescriber I could experience nausea and trouble sleeping. I now know there were many other side effects they should have warned me about but did not, but those details will come later. However, I was ‘lucky’ in that I had no side effects. Unfortunately, even after six weeks, there were no positive effects either. It was like I was taking nothing.
This is normal – people often don’t find the right medication on the first try so I got prescribed a new one. The same thing happened but I stayed on it a few extra weeks. Then my prescriber quit and I got a new one who tried increasing my dosage but nothing happened. Meanwhile, my counselor was extremely difficult to make appointments so I was not talking to her regularly.
In mid June, I tried medication number three. And once again, nothing. To make matters worse, I found out my counselor had been on a long term leave of absence since May but for some reason I never got an email notification or a notification through the app even though I was messaged about it. I began to feel discouraged because nothing was working and everyone was hard to contact. By this point, I felt as if I just threw hundreds of dollars into the trash can.
Two weeks ago, I decided to be done. The service was not meeting my needs, I spent a lot of money, and none of the medications I tried had done anything. I was only on the third medication for about four weeks. My prescriber never had me do any sort of taper to transition from one drug to the next since they had not been in my system long enough for me to develop a dependency. I messaged my team in the app and let them know I would no longer be using their services and that was that. Using the same logic my prescriber had when having me switch medications, I stopped taking my most recent medication cold turkey.
A terrible decision. And even worse, because it was a decision made where I was not properly informed.
For about two weeks now, I have been experiencing withdrawal symptoms and only finally began to improve two days ago. At first everything was fine. For about two days I had now symptoms. Then began incurable nausea that only worsened when I tried to eat. Even toast or bland crackers caused agony. I could not spend more than five minutes at a time scrolling through my phone without feeling extremely ill, let alone get any kind of work done to prepare for next school year on a computer. I experienced dizzy spells. I began getting brain zaps where your brain essentially feels like it’s been reset with an electric jolt. I got hot flashes which exacerbated my other symptoms. All of these things worsened whenever I moved around so I was confined to the couch in my parent’s living room (I have been living in my parent’s house because my previous lease ended and my next one doesn’t begin for another week!). The time I should have spent bonding and raising my new puppy was instead spent with me laying on the couch, sometimes sobbing because I felt like I was going to die.
Last weekend I had a couple of hours where I began to feel a little better. But that’s when the tremors began. When I got the brain zaps my head would often twitch. On this day this began happening to my left arm. In a matter of an hour, my left arm was out of control, moving wildly even without the brain zaps. Sometimes it would flap, other times I would accidentally hit myself. I could not hold anything in my left hand for fear it would either drop or get flung across the room. And then my left leg started behaving similarly. And all of my other symptoms returned in full force.
This was scary enough to get me to go to urgent care where thankfully they reassured me I was going to be fine. But they also told me it was wrong to quit cold turkey and should have tapered, but since I had gone a week I should just keep fighting through because it may not be worth trying to get back on the drug. The nurse especially acted like I was thoughtless in choosing to stop the drug cold turkey. Like I should have known better. It’s true, I should have known better, but to have known better, I should have been informed better.
None of the drugs I took caused side effects. None of my switches from one drug to the next caused drug withdrawal. My prescriber did not even message me back when I said I was ending the service with any kind of warning about what could happen by quitting or with a suggestion to taper off the drug slowly. Upon more research and personal experience, I now know better, but for me it is a little too late. I know now how terrible not tapering can be even after only a month of usage. I now know withdrawal from a prescription drug can actually take several weeks, even months for some and that people can still experience symptoms of withdrawal even when they tapper and that some people have to spend a year tapering. I now know upon further research, the drugs I took included possible side effects of seizures, thoughts of suicide, and have even been linked to kidney failure. I now know the things a medical professional should have told me at the start of my journey for me to have actually given my informed consent.
And yet, it is I who paid the price (literally and metaphorically).
How am I doing now? Better than I was but still not all the way recovered. My arm is better, I can use my laptop without feeling extremely ill. There are now a handful of things I can eat without becoming nauseous. I have lost around seven pounds (which at my height and in such a short time is significant and harmful) and since I still cannot eat many foods and in adequate quantities, I may continue to lose more weight. My body is still out of whack to the point where my heart rate goes over 100bpm just carrying a load of laundry up the stairs. Yesterday I finally went on a big adventure – walking down my street and back which had my heart rate way up and increased my nausea for a few hours. But my head feels clear again, and I can at least type things and scroll through my phone again.
Mentally, I am thankful to be finally turning a corner and thankful I was at my parent’s when this happened because they could help me with Koda. I am also glad I chose to stop when I did because if this happened while on the job as a teacher, it would have been a disaster, because again, I may have experienced symptoms even with trying to taper. While this was nowhere near the same as a drug addiction, I now see why people often relapse during a withdrawal, especially when it comes to prescription drugs. I am struggling with feeling shame for not knowing better than to quit the way I did, even though I was not informed properly. I am struggling with feeling shame for getting so sick and having to depend on others, even though it was not my fault. And after going through this, I likely will not be trying any other medications to help my anxiety so I am also experiencing the defeat that comes with knowing there is yet another option taken away from helping me get better. I understand having it helps me in some ways and it is a great thorn in my side to aid me in relying on God. I just hoped medication would ensure it remained a thorn instead of occasionally growing into a dagger.
We see the reports about the issues stemming from recreational drugs all the time, but I rarely see anything about prescription drugs even though they have led to more addictions and more deaths than any of the recreational one. The current opioid crisis in America is real, and much of it originates from legal means.
Going back to those bullets from earlier, some people do need to take these drugs to function properly and not everyone is going to go through what I did. I am not anti-doctor or anti-prescriptions or any other radical notion. I am however, of the belief I was not informed of the possible ramifications of taking or quitting these drugs and I am of the belief many others are also not aware. I am of the belief doctors need to ensure their patients are informed of what can happen by starting AND stopping a prescription, even if they do it the ‘approved way’ which for my particular drug, I actually learned they have no official tapering process and it is actually up to the medical professionals to just give it their best shot when advising a patient.
At the moment, I never want to touch a prescription drug again if I can help it and I will likely struggle with feelings of distrust towards medical professionals I seek out in the future. Certainly, the medical industry has come far over the years (I took my mom and grandmother to see Elvis shortly before I stopped my medication and wow have we made some improvements to meds since then!) However, my experience and my new knowledge on what some of these prescriptions can do have made me feel wary. Ultimately, what is best for you and what works for you is going to be different than what works best for me. Whatever you decide when it comes to your health and medications, make sure you are informed – ask your doctor questions and do research. I hope in writing this, that perhaps I will help prevent something like this from happening to someone else, because I would not wish what I went through or any of my residual feelings of shame or my feeling of mistrust towards such an important field on anybody.