Prozac Withdrawal: Early Days

I don’t know why, but a while back I must have been feelin a little more energetic and decided it was time to get off the Prozac.  I have been taking 10 mg daily for maybe a decade.  And I saw all of sudden I was getting a huge mass of reading material with my prescription refills.  So I read some of it and didn’t like what I saw.  And I saw stuff on the web, as well as from my medical plan, suggesting old people like myself should probably think about getting off the junk.

So I had been thinking about it some time.  But I kept putting it off because maybe two years ago I did drop one of the 10mg a day.  I dropped the Friday pill in my medbox.  And I felt pretty damn bad.  Not at first.  The first four weeks seemed ok sort of.  And then in weeks five and six things got bad.  My wife remembers I was agitated and ready to fly off the handle at the drop of a hat.  I remember it having been really  hard.  So I procrastinated.

And now here it is in the middle of a depressing and anxiety producing pandemic, and I think, if I don’t do this soon, I will never do it.  So last Tuesday. I stopped taking the 10mg.  And-wham!-two days into the process and I feel symptoms of withdrawal.  Increased fatigue.  Increased brain fog.  Tighter muscles.  Disturbed sleep.  And mostly strangely, according to my Fitbit, an abrupt increase in the amount of dreaming.  I don’t remember the dreams, but they are so intense I feel like I am not sleeping at all.

I was taken by surprise.  I thought the symptoms wouldn’t appear so forcefully for a couple of weeks at least.  That’s one of the traits of Prozac.  It takes a long time to leave the system and a while then before you start feeling withdrawal. But this time: wham.  Last time when I dropped 10 mg, I was pretty deep in benzo withdrawal.  So maybe the one withdrawal masked the other.

Who knows?  But I am disturbed by this development.  I may decide to go back to taking my Tuesday 10mg.  Or I may just drop 5mg instead of ten.  I ordered and got Prozac pills that I can cut in half.  We will see.

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