my Effexor saga
Now that it's (mostly) over, summarizing for posterity.
Going on Effexor was like climbing up a thorn three. Boost up to the first limb-- scratch! Headache. Scratch! Nausea. Poke! Mood swings.
Climb up to the next limb: scratch! Worse depression. Poke! Food cravings. Scratch! Weight gain. Etc.
So I got up into this very uncomfortably thorny tree, and I stayed there, getting poked and scratched. The headaches faded; the nausea could be averted by eating enough before taking the pill. The mood swings, including episodes of worse depression, stayed. Food cravings and weight gain, oh how they stayed. I've never been particularly fond of vanilla ice cream; usually I like chunky chocolate ice creams. But on Effexor, all I wanted was greasy food and vanilla ice cream. I still want vanilla ice cream right now, even though my husband and I had burritos for dinner and mine is sitting in my stomach like a cannonball, making me the opposite of hungry.
I waited for the benefits of being in this thorny goddamn tree for weeks. They never came. After the second week, the mood swings never really swung up. I was a little less anxious, but instead of feeling freed of my anxieties and more capable as a result, I felt unable to manage anything above bare minimum functioning. I wanted desperately to write, but I couldn't grind out more than a few words no matter what I tried.
After several weeks and a long talk with my psychiatrist, I started tapering off Effexor. Going on it was like climbing a thorn tree. Coming off it was like falling out of a thorn tree and hitting every single branch all the way down.
A continuous headache for days. Itchy spots all over my skin, with no accompanying bug bites or irritations. Insomnia, even beyond my usual disordered sleep. Black moods and suicidal thoughts. Stomachaches. Vertigo.
And I got off relatively easy. I could knock out the headache with naproxen sodium, though it was always hovering and coming back. Worse, some people experience what they describe as 'brain zaps,' a recurring shock-like sensation, or 'brain shivers.' I've been experiencing a milder variation on this: over and over, I feel as if I'm in a car that just braked hard and my head is lurching forward with the momentum. This sensation recurs again and again... sometimes going away for minutes at a time, sometimes repeating every few seconds for quite a while.
A couple of nights ago, all the withdrawal symptoms converged on me so heavily that I decided that I couldn't keep going like that, not for the 4 more days minimum that I was supposed to keep taking the drug at the lowest dose. I needed the withdrawal process to be over sooner. Subjectively I couldn't really see how it could feel worse, though of course that itself was probably disordered depressive thinking.
Anyway, I stopped taking it altogether, and I had one more very shitty day of withdrawal symptoms. But the next day the headache let up, and today I've been symptom-free except for some mild itching and the lurching feeling. Emotionally I feel miles better.
So, I tried something, it didn't work. The part that really sucks is that my cravings during this whole episode have probably put back on, in about 7 weeks, all the weight I lost through great effort over the last 18 months. (Which only amounted to about ~10 lbs, but losing any weight at all was a major achievement for me, involving exercising nearly every day for 25-50 minutes. And this med completely blew it.)
But I'm not out to warn anyone off Effexor. As much as it's been a 98% negative experience for me, I know people whose experience was 99%+ positive and life-changing.
And on a depression forum, I came across a woman with similar diagnoses and a similar situation as mine, who was put on Wellbutrin. I was helped immensely by Wellbutrin when I went on it a few years ago and I'm considering going back on it now (this time augmented by a second drug to help boost its effectiveness.) But this woman, who seemed to share so many of my problems, experienced just as terrible a reaction to Wellbutrin as I had to Effexor. Wellbutrin has been shown clinically to cause weight loss in most users, but for that individual, it caused weight gain, sluggishness, vertigo, all kinds of badness, much of it sounding a lot like my Effexor misadventure. We seemed to have the same disease, but what helped me, hurt her.
For a lot of us seeking treatment for mood disorders, there's just no way to know what's going to help until you try.
http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/167502.html |
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Going on Effexor was like climbing up a thorn three. Boost up to the first limb-- scratch! Headache. Scratch! Nausea. Poke! Mood swings.
Climb up to the next limb: scratch! Worse depression. Poke! Food cravings. Scratch! Weight gain. Etc.
So I got up into this very uncomfortably thorny tree, and I stayed there, getting poked and scratched. The headaches faded; the nausea could be averted by eating enough before taking the pill. The mood swings, including episodes of worse depression, stayed. Food cravings and weight gain, oh how they stayed. I've never been particularly fond of vanilla ice cream; usually I like chunky chocolate ice creams. But on Effexor, all I wanted was greasy food and vanilla ice cream. I still want vanilla ice cream right now, even though my husband and I had burritos for dinner and mine is sitting in my stomach like a cannonball, making me the opposite of hungry.
I waited for the benefits of being in this thorny goddamn tree for weeks. They never came. After the second week, the mood swings never really swung up. I was a little less anxious, but instead of feeling freed of my anxieties and more capable as a result, I felt unable to manage anything above bare minimum functioning. I wanted desperately to write, but I couldn't grind out more than a few words no matter what I tried.
After several weeks and a long talk with my psychiatrist, I started tapering off Effexor. Going on it was like climbing a thorn tree. Coming off it was like falling out of a thorn tree and hitting every single branch all the way down.
A continuous headache for days. Itchy spots all over my skin, with no accompanying bug bites or irritations. Insomnia, even beyond my usual disordered sleep. Black moods and suicidal thoughts. Stomachaches. Vertigo.
And I got off relatively easy. I could knock out the headache with naproxen sodium, though it was always hovering and coming back. Worse, some people experience what they describe as 'brain zaps,' a recurring shock-like sensation, or 'brain shivers.' I've been experiencing a milder variation on this: over and over, I feel as if I'm in a car that just braked hard and my head is lurching forward with the momentum. This sensation recurs again and again... sometimes going away for minutes at a time, sometimes repeating every few seconds for quite a while.
A couple of nights ago, all the withdrawal symptoms converged on me so heavily that I decided that I couldn't keep going like that, not for the 4 more days minimum that I was supposed to keep taking the drug at the lowest dose. I needed the withdrawal process to be over sooner. Subjectively I couldn't really see how it could feel worse, though of course that itself was probably disordered depressive thinking.
Anyway, I stopped taking it altogether, and I had one more very shitty day of withdrawal symptoms. But the next day the headache let up, and today I've been symptom-free except for some mild itching and the lurching feeling. Emotionally I feel miles better.
So, I tried something, it didn't work. The part that really sucks is that my cravings during this whole episode have probably put back on, in about 7 weeks, all the weight I lost through great effort over the last 18 months. (Which only amounted to about ~10 lbs, but losing any weight at all was a major achievement for me, involving exercising nearly every day for 25-50 minutes. And this med completely blew it.)
But I'm not out to warn anyone off Effexor. As much as it's been a 98% negative experience for me, I know people whose experience was 99%+ positive and life-changing.
And on a depression forum, I came across a woman with similar diagnoses and a similar situation as mine, who was put on Wellbutrin. I was helped immensely by Wellbutrin when I went on it a few years ago and I'm considering going back on it now (this time augmented by a second drug to help boost its effectiveness.) But this woman, who seemed to share so many of my problems, experienced just as terrible a reaction to Wellbutrin as I had to Effexor. Wellbutrin has been shown clinically to cause weight loss in most users, but for that individual, it caused weight gain, sluggishness, vertigo, all kinds of badness, much of it sounding a lot like my Effexor misadventure. We seemed to have the same disease, but what helped me, hurt her.
For a lot of us seeking treatment for mood disorders, there's just no way to know what's going to help until you try.
http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/167502.html |
comments | Comment at Dreamwidth