Sheila’s path through the dark, terrifying, magical, magnificent woods

[Sheila]

The Vestibule of Hell

It’s hard to say whether it did anything, because the stressful situation resolved almost immediately anyway. I would say the Paxil was an upper – I got some extra energy and I had moderate side effects that one would associate with an upper, including restless legs and dizziness.

A few months later, I tapered myself off because there was no need for it. I then spiraled into the worst depression I had ever had in my life – nearly vegetative. This didn’t make any sense, given my years of therapy and my age and my history. But, I over-psychologized, and assumed that I must have more repressed trauma in my childhood than I had realized. To her credit, my psychologist did not assume this. She admitted she was completely dumbfounded by my disintegration.

I went back to the nice psychiatrist and started Zoloft. I got better, but neither my psychologist nor my psychiatrist nor I realized that I had just medicated Paxil withdrawal.

Over the next three years, I gained weight, started smoking for the first time in my life, retreated from a social life, was diligent about my work, but exhausted by it. I lost my ambition. I only wanted to read novels.

I tried to get off the Zoloft in 2001, but quickly got back on the Paxil, still not realizing that I was addicted to the meds and that they were making my life extremely difficult to manage.

[Sheila]

The Upper Rings of Hell

In the Fall of 2003, at 40, I started getting severe occipital headaches, which I had never had before, and which made me miss work. I intuited (my first little epiphany) that this was the Paxil and that I had to get off. I started to taper, and this caused such intense muscle tightening in my head, neck, back, and legs, that I took the then-current suggestion of adding Prozac to help the Paxil taper.

Somewhere in there, my psychiatrist and I added Buspar. In February 2004, I was on Paxil, Prozac, Buspar, and Dextromethorphan for what, in retrospect, was probably w/d “flu” and not a real viral infection. So, I started to sweat, stagger around, look at the clock and see the same time I had just seen a few minutes ago, sleep in 15 minute increments for a total of three hours a day, and generally have a psychedelic / psychotic / psychic experience.

It was a moderate serotonin syndrome episode, for which I did not need to be hospitalized. My mental health professional best friend Barbara monitored me closely. And we Googled like mad – first finding out thanks to a friend that Dextromethorphan is a drug of abuse (who knew?) and then finding out that people were having trouble with Paxil w/d.

I got off the Dextromethorphan and Buspar quickly and continued to taper the Paxil. It took me 20 months to taper off the Paxil, going as fast as I could tolerate, working full time, waking up with my head tilted fully back and unable to touch my chin to my chest. This can be thought of as l’Hermitte’s sign, an indication of neurological problems, as well as a spontaneous Kundalini yoga kriya (fish pose), indicating that new energy was trying to find a balance in me.

The taper was miserable. I was emotionally labile, in extreme muscular pain, and exhausted. In May 2005 I took my last Paxil, and in June 2005 I took my last Prozac (which I “tapered” in only two steps). I thought I was done.

In July, I rented a beautiful new office in a place I very much wanted to be and proceeded to become astronomically anxious. Again, I looked for psychological explanations. I got worse – severe anxiety, and, once again, the kind of depression I had only had one other time in my life -- the other time I stopped taking Paxil.

I started to Google again. I had thought my w/d from Paxil was done. What was going on? I discovered that the taper is not the end of the recovery from Paxil; that people were having symptoms for years after their last dose; and that they were eventually recovering.

The day before Thanksgiving 2005, the penny dropped. I realized I had been in w/d from Paxil in 1997, and in w/d from Zoloft in 2001 -- that this was, in fact, my third w/d. This was my main epiphany.

I found an online support community, paxilprogress, where my username was Healing, and learned a ton there, and found w/d buddies, especially someone named Light.

[Sheila]

The Lowest Rings of Hell

The end of 2005 / beginning of 2006 was the very worst part of my post-taper, the infamous 5-9 months out period, when I was so depressed, I was not sure if I would be able to survive. I promised myself I could commit suicide if I had to, but I really, really didn’t want to. That depression ended and has never returned. However, 2006 was the worst year of my life, I was so sick from w/d. My physical symptoms were many, but the anxiety was the worst torture – anxiety that made the original 1996 anxiety seem like a cakewalk. 2007 was better.

Then, 2008 was worse! I had a setback that lasted an entire year, which was devastating.

It would take several pages just to list all my bizarre and mundane physical, cognitive, and emotional symptoms. Just one paragraph-worth – Unable to sleep more than four hours a night for a year, then five for several years, etc.; skin not healing; difficulty finding words; constant, severe sinus problems; incapacitating headaches; muscle injury if you so much as looked at me cross-eyed; hair loss in one spot; constant pain around adrenals; OCD which I had never had one iota of before; jaw snapping shut in sleep so often that tongue could not heal; sudden, extreme rage triggered by anything, including someone handling paper towel; extremely irrational paranoid thoughts; and relentless terror day and night for several years, to a degree that I would never have thought anyone could survive.

Another one of my w/d buddies Altostrata wrote: “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” Divine comedy?



“In the middle of the path of our life I found myself in a dark wood for the direct way was lost.” -- Dante