Hello, my name is Ashley and I was diagnosed with Major depression and Major anxiety roughly 2 years ago. I have been suffering with bouts of depression since I was in middle school and most never lasted more than a month tops. As time went by, the depression grew worse and worse lasting longer and longer to the point when I finally sat on my husband's lap and decided that I was tired of feeling this way and I wanted to do something about it!
As someone with depression, it's like trying to trying to shoe horn them into seeing someone for your issues. I knew something was wrong and I knew that it was depression but I just wasn't really sure of a few things:
1) Does everyone feel like this? Perhaps I'm just being a wimp because the world is a harsh place and I never really dealt with it properly.
2) So what if I have depression! I've been dealing with it since I was a little girl. I should be able to continually approve overtime on how I deal with this right? "Man Up" so to speak
3) Am I worth it to get better? This one is extremely tricky because you don't go to a doctor when you're feeling at your tip top shape right? You go when you feel at your complete worst. With depression, I felt like the bottom of a shoe. Seemed like a waste of time and energy to get better to me. Perhaps I could do it for someone else, but never for my own reasons.
4) I'm horrified at what the doctor is going to say! What do I say? "Hey Doc! I'm depressed and I want to ball up and cry a lot for no good reason... got some pills for that?" Yeah, usually not a great ice breaker huh?
There are probably a few more things but these are the things that I can recall right now. Regardless, I was a blubbering mess but I was still a very productive person in society. I'd graduated from college on my own in 4 years, and I'd been holding a steady full time job down with little to no issues prior to this. I just felt like I could be better. As one of those stupid anti-depressant commercials claim "Depression hurts!" blah blah blah well for fuck sake it sure does but damn it! I'm too stubborn to quit!
So, my husband and I had decided that it was time to seek medical help. I went into my doctor and sure enough "Major Depression and Major Anxiety" Boyah! She didn't really say much more about my medication at the time other than "Do you have any questions?". PROZAC the all mighty drug that everyone gets thrown on. She wrote me a proscription without mush of a fuss and said that I will have "side effects" going on to them.
Mind you, that was over two years ago. Prozac made me so ill that I called her back after I tortured myself for a month on it. Then we tried Cymbalta and I turned into a freaking looney toon after only a few pills of that. Next up, Lexapro. I was on Lexapro for quite a while; I think from April 2010- December 2011? I can't really remember. I gave it the old college try with upping the dose and then some more but I never really feel like I was all that less depressed on Lexapro. Hell, I was starting to miss work from side effects and just an overall feeling of dread and hopelessness. It was terrible. She added Buspar to the mix to liven things up a bit! Why the hell not I say! Nothing else was working. Let's throw in the kitchen sink too while we're at it bitch.
Around the holiday season in 2011, I started having massive panic attacks and stopped being able to drive to work let alone do much more. I was at a family gathering when my most severe one occurred I thought I was going to die! I started vomiting so much that I couldn't breath, my heart was beating so hard that I thought I was having a heart attack, and I felt like I saw death's shadow standing over me when I was gasping for air begging to die. That's when I decided, enough was enough of Lexepro. Let's try something else. My sister had been on Effexor before but it was purely for anxiety reasons. Which, prior to being on any sort of anti-depressant, I'd never once had any sort of episode. Now, I'm a fucking mess!
I stopped going to my regular family doctor for this sort of thing and started seeking more "focused" advice with a psychiatrist. He put me on the Effexor and put me on these drugs that would get me over my major anxiety situations. I really have no clue what they were called but OMG I was on a Cotton Candy Cloud for a week. The only thing that I could do was go outside and pull weeds and sit in front of a TV. I guess they worked for that time being because I was never anxious... well, I really didn't have feelings during that time either. Perhaps that doesn't really matter does it ;-)
I've been on 150mg of Effexor for over almost year now and lately, I've been experiencing massively elevated heart rates for no particular reason but it just wont stop! It's been happening for almost 3 months solid. Every time someone took my pulse, they asked me if I was all right. I was like, sure? The only reason I noticed it was this bad was because I went to my local church's blood drive to donate and I couldn't because my heart rate wouldn't come down to a normal level. If I could get it below 90bpm I was happy. I finally went to go see my psychiatrist again and he told me that this side effect could occur from Effexor. I thought perhaps I'd been having an anxiety episode for 3 months straight and I was just too stubborn to let go. Told me that I should get off of it and switch to something else; That something else is Viibryd. He told me that I'd need to stop down my dose on Effexor first in order to switch over to the new stuff...
He wrote me a prescription for a lower dose of Effexor and wrote me a script for Viibryd. "I want to see you back in a little over a month to see how your heart rate is doing" he says. So I walked out of the office pretty frustrated. Another anti-depressant, more side effects. I'm overjoyed >.>
...... This is where my new journey begins.....
No comments:
Post a Comment