WITHDRAWAL CONTINUED

This last Tuesday, I think, the 16th marked the end of four full weeks at a 5mg reduction in Prozac.  It has not been easy.  At this moment the brain fog is palpable.  I keep losing my place on the key board, and spelling is difficult.  Still I was this  morning, for the second day in a row, a bit calmer and less frightened by the whole affair.  Since cutting back I am amazed at how much more I seem to be dreaming, according to my Fitbit.  If you can believe that.  I  woke up from a dream where people were shouting at me and I was shouting at people.

This is not a good time.  I wake and instantly I am aware that the pandemic is heading in a really bad direction.  People have been saying this would come for months now, and here it finally is: the Winter surge.  And the country is not really prepared.  Amazing and at the top we have an idiot who appears intent on destroying the frail structures of our democracy.  I am not sure at this point if we do have a democracy in any meaningful sense, but whatever it might be it is certainly better than the idiot-in-chief would like to make it.

My  heart is constricted.  No wonder I feel like shouting…..

And lately I keep stumbling across this word: Akathisia.  It’s a word from psychiatry denoting a sense of inward restlessness.  I have had that quite a bit lately.  It is associated with many forms of withdrawal and I remember it well from the time years ago I was prescribed Thorazene….Man was that nasty stuff.

Withdrawal: Change of Plans

Well, my wife and I had a discussion–no, it was an argument–about how to proceed with this withdrawal plan. She reminded me that we are married and partners of a sort and that as such she had a say in how I go about getting off this nasty drug. Because, you know, how I act affects her, and she remembered last time I tried this I became very easily agitated and started yelling about this and that. So after a while, I started listening to what she was saying.

Which boiled down to her vastly preferring I did not just plunge ahead as I am inclined to do and drop the whole 10mg on Tuesday, as I had previously planned. Why not, she said, cut one of the 10mg pills we had gotten and just drop 5mg. And see what you feel like. Why make the process, she wondered, any more miserable than it had to be.

That was a good question. But I just want to get the horrible process over with and dropping more, rather than less, would seem to get it done faster. But who knows? And after thinking about it and admitting to myself that I already feel pretty bad, I decided, OK, I would give it a go, and just drop 5mgs tomorrow rather than 10, as previously planned.

So that’s the plan for now.