Effexor Withdrawal

Posted on November 20, 2005 in Psychotropics

I got over the nausea, the headaches, the agitation, the wildly swinging moods the day after I started taking my Effexor in its proper dose. Helping me ride it through were my old pharmaceutical friends acetomeniphen, Tagamet, Benadryl, and an extra Xanax. Tom Cruise would be ashamed of me. I didn’t align my en-grams to overcome my dependence.

I got in the fix by trying to modify my psychiatrist’s instructions ever so slightly. On Tuesday, she wrote a new prescription that dropped my dose from 150 mg to 75 mg. Wednesday dawned and I had not gone to the pharmacy yet. “Let me see,” I said to myself. “I need to bring the blood levels down. So, why don’t I skip today’s 150 mg dose and pick up the 75 mg tomorrow?”

Watching Crash that evening brought on swoons, headaches, and just a touch of nausea that I attributed to eating shrimp piccata pasta and tortilla chips dipped in chili con queso. The flickering, round-cornered rectangle of our midget television set jabbed and slowly sliced into my eyebrows in the darkness, so I turned on the lights. Twenty minutes from the end, I paused it to find my pain relief drugs. I read. I blogged, then went upstairs to finish the film.

My eyes did not accept the fact of daylight until about 1 o’clock in the afternoon. My stomach felt queasy, so I ate only a little. I performed all those perfunctories one needs to observe before going out — washing the body and its orifices, finding clean clothes, finding the wallet and the keys — and wound my way through an arcade of live oaks to the drug store. A slight headache hectored me and there was a blurriness about the world that had nothing to do with sight, a feeling of disorder that left me wondering why the lines of the oaks and the lines of light weren’t of the same stuff.

I had a long list of items to refill at the pharmacy and the woman manning the intakes was thick. Or perhaps I was swaying in a different place where every mangled sentence made complete sense; where my words at the other people, however, were confused, misorganized, and unintelligible.

She made me wait. I wanted to get out of there. The only place that wasn’t surrounded by thousands of items wrapped in electric hues was in front of the store. So I purchased an apricot-mango sherbert in a sugar cone and sat on a stone bench. Sat there until I finished the ice cream and went inside.

They had a back-massage chair set up for demonstration. I sat in it, let the hidden rollers do my lower back, and then turned it off. The colors, the colors began to hum in my eyes. I saw a pharmacist who knew me and told him that I was going manic. He got my prescriptions and let me get out of there.

The symptoms were the worst when I got home. The winding road and the pharmacy were the glove over the crushing withdrawal. I called a friend who told me how when she went off Effexor entirely she had to cut it back ever so gradually. “And still, I was bouncing off the walls.” To prevent this accident, I lay myself on my bed and pulled the covers over my head.

It took several hours for the lower dose of Effexor to ease my torment. I waited an hour before I eased my other pains with different orders of drugs. Another friend told me that of all the psychotropics, withdrawal from Effexor was the worst.

That may be.

Yesterday, I shared my story in my group. In a friendly manner, my peers chided me for not being compliant with my doctor’s treatment plan. “There’s one thing Joel won’t be doing again,” said one guy. We shared the laugh, the laugh we know from having known that those who laugh have been there, too. There’s not mockery of the suffering: it’s just an affirmation of the crazy state of mind the disease can put us in and that we are human nonetheless.

And I have to admit that that doesn’t get at the mood of that joviality and teasing. Suffice to say I was not threatened by it at all. I was glad to be out of the place where the steel wool aureole burned through the bone of my skull.

But I miss that state of mind where the lines of the live oaks and the lines of the sunlight were the same stuff.

Broke tells a story of a manic episode which I found particularly poignant and true.