I am on week 5 of the official bon voyage to Paxil, due to schedule a doctor’s appointment within the next few weeks.  May I just go on the record here as saying this has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  This is part of the anti-depressant experience.  Technically, I should still be sailing on 10 mg but my final refill ended just over a week ago, so I had to make a decision, which became a no-brainer just thinking about the hoops I would have to jump through to refill a script for only a couple weeks.  So I decided to jump off a bit of a cliff and go cold turkey from 20-25 mg.   It has been hard, so so hard, on my body.  I know that this is just part of getting back to “normal”(as in not on legal dope), but that doesn’t make it painless.  I have been spending the first five or so minutes of my mornings in a comma over the toilet. Nothing comes up.  I’m rocking the inner tube of pinpricks and tweaks and cramping.  I would say the first half of my day is a slave to random dizzy spells and nausea. I hate the dizzy spells most of all.  They just hit and run, and I can’t do much but stop walking/stop climbing the stairs/stop typing/stop talking/stop stop stop whatever it is I’m in the midst of and get through it.  I know it will be over soon, although in the moment of symptoms it feels like I’m sentenced to always be readjusting.

I know: wah wah wah woe is moi, right? I don’t care what you think.  Until you go through it, you will never understand.  Just because the drug is legal doesn’t make it any less addictive, or scary.  Honestly, I’m finding the legal dope to be much more creepy than the illegal.  Look at oxycontin–I know way too many heroin addicts/recovering addicts that started their addiction through this medication.  Some other stats that may be of interest:

In its study, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked at 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in visits to doctors and hospitals in 2005. Of those, 118 million were for antidepressants.

High blood pressure drugs were the next most-common with 113 million prescriptions.

 Antidepressants work for 35 to 45% of the depressed population, while more recent figures suggest as low as 30%.

Standard antidepressants, such as Prozac, Paxil (Aropax) and Zoloft, have recently been revealed to have serious risks, and are linked to suicide, violence, psychosis, abnormal bleeding and brain tumors.

from: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus.htm

I’ve tried and tried and tried to keep my personal information to myself regarding this but I had no idea how difficult it would be to get off of a legal drug like anti-depressants.  If you are one them and want to get off, make sure you have someone monitoring you, taking you through it.  Do your own research.  The key word is: wean.  It’s going to suck, it’s going to hurt, it’s going to take time.  But it’s possible. The payoff?  Feeling like yourself again.  I have been a trillion things in the past five or six months while on an absurdly high, daily dose of Paxil.  A trillion things but not me. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, there is something.    I will never, ever ever ever be on this medication again.