…continued from here…
Walking alone, along a stretch of beach in Florida, I came to the realization that it was time to try medication. My psychologist had been gently nudging me toward it for months, and I’d resisted, reasoning that I was as tough as a snake and could manage anything without the use of chemicals.
Ankle deep in surf, alone, praying (I still prayed then), I knew I had to do more than read books, write, talk to my doctor, and pray.
When I got home, sand still embedded in every item of clothing I possessed (and in every crevice of my body), I called my regular physician. She saw me, briefly, and prescribed my first psychotropic medication.
It did nothing. I wept. I spun hopeless inconceivable stories of death and destruction. My doctors advised patience. I waited, and wept, and spun. After several months, I eased myself off of the drug as gently as I could.
The pain. God. A sadist with a rubber mallet followed me around for a week, beating into the back of my skull. By the end of the day (when I’d already maxed out on advil), I was completely distraught. And–and!–electrical shocks ran down my limbs at every step. Lightning flashed across my lips when I spoke.
It was trippy, and so not in a good way.
Another trip to my physician was scheduled. She flipped dolefully through her little book of drugs that my health insurance found pleasing and then prescribed something else.
It worked. Within a week I felt marginally better. My mind spun less. I cried less.
Then the twitching started. Rapid-fire jerks rotated around my body, without pause. My pinkie twitched. Then my calf. Then a scalp muscle. Then my eyelid. I felt like a many-stringed puppet with a drunk master. My physician told me to stop taking the drug immediately; she made me wait two weeks before starting something else, something else found in the little book of covered medicines.
I waited, the twitching subsiding as the relentless mind-spinning escalated. Finally I was allowed to start on the next medicine–the third one, if you are keeping track.
Start it I did, and WHAM did I ever feel better. It was almost immediate. I had energy. My mind had focus. I felt rested. I felt normal. I Got-Things-Done. I could picture the rest of my life at this level of calm productivity.
And then, after only a few days on this amazing drug, the twitching commenced again–this time, only in my hands. I told my physician that I could live with twitching in my hands! I could learn to relish twitching in my hands! I could find it pleasant, in a vaguely eccentric Havishamian fashion, if the trade-off was feeling this good, this energetic.
No, she told me. I had to stop taking the medicine immediately. It would be dangerous to come off it gradually. It had to be cold-turkey. And, she informed me over the phone, her little book of medications was tapped out. I’d have to see a psychiatrist.
The second I hung up the phone with the physician, I put in a call to a the psychiatrist approved by my insurance. I needed a consultation, I told them. For medicine. Was I suicidal, they asked? No, I lied.*
They scheduled me–in two months. Two months. Two months I’d have to manage the withdrawal from this medication and the return of the original depression and anxiety. I called my physician back and asked if she could do anything at all for me in the interim. No, she was done with me. I called the psychiatrist’s office back and begged for a quicker appointment. No. It was impossible.
The pain. God. Wax melted from my wings; I fell and fell and fell before sinking into the freezing ocean.
It’s hard to remember that those tiny white pills contain mighty doses of powerful medications. When I stopped taking the third medicine, it was like I’d been knocked over by the hand of God himself. The world raced while I trudged. I could barely get out of bed, or draw breath, or dress myself or the child. I cried and cried and cried.
I felt utterly defeated. What kind of hopeless case was I that three different medicines had been either useless or intolerable to my body? My psychologist assured me that it often takes several attempts to find a drug that works. She told me that it’s a bit of a crap-shoot…and a crap-shoot that your average family physician is probably not prepared to manage. In cases of long-standing depression and anxiety (mine probably dated back 20 years, I realized), treatment is even more difficult.
After two painfully long, weepy, mind-churning months, the psychiatrist was treated to my tale of woe, which she listened to studiously in her tiny office. She pondered out loud the different options, having decided first that I was “too twitchy and irritable” for any drugs similar to the others I’d tried.
Twitchy and irritable–yep, that’s me.
She wrote me a prescription for yet another drug and I began taking it that very day, fully expecting the worst. I’m happy to tell you that the worst did not happen. It helped; very very gradually I could see a difference in the tears and the anxiety. It upset my stomach dreadfully but that side effect, my doctor assured me, was only temporary.
What a relief. I could go to sleep at night without spending an hour planning funerals. I could prepare dinner without planning trips to the emergency room. It was heavenly.
It’s been a few years now that I’ve stayed on that medicine; the thought of going off it terrifies me. Every few months, when I see the psychiatrist for new prescriptions, she gently asks me if I’d like to cut back or go off.
No. No I do not.
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*Wanting to die, I reasoned then, was not the same as planning to die. Very very foolish, I now realize.
