Monday, May 15, 2006

drugs versus herbs

When I first started having panic attacks and anxiety an' shite, my doctor jumped for joy and asked "Now will you go on antidepressants?".

He always wanted to put me on them, and I was always all "You wot? Why? But I'm not depressed, fool".

I have no idea why I kept seeing that fucking idiot, but that's beside the point. Or another story, come to think of it. Hmm. Anyway, after that first panic attack scared me enough to do anything to avoid having another one, I started taking Cipramil.

Thing was, and my doctor knew this and it should have been okay, it had only been around a month since I stopped talking St John's Wort.

[cue ominous music]

The other thing was that my doctor didn't suggest I taper up, rather, he thought that I should start on a regular size dose and yeah, that was a good idea. Hell, his mad prescribing skilz were probably the real reason for this little anecdote, and I should probably think about changing the title from 'drugs v herbs' to 'my doctor needs to buy a clue'.

In any case, it may also have been that four or so weeks wasn't enough time to wash the herb out of my system because within the three days I was on the antiD, I'd experienced the shakes, the enormous migraine, the panic attack from fucking HELL where I couldn't even get off the sofa for something like four hours, and the ambulance ride to the hospital after the world went all ookie and drippy and began to undulate.

I was in Serotonin syndrome, but despite fitting virtually every diagnostic criteria apart from 'coma', the fuckers at the hospital thought I was feeling strange due to being off my face on some street drug. They checked me for track marks and when they found none, treated me like shit anyway because I may have injected into my eyeball or something. Then they left me in a room on my own for eight hours, and while those peckerheads in the ER twiddled their thumbs and cursed me for taking up 'real' space, I could have died.

I didn't, yo, but I did get me a leetle case of PTSD about the whole fucked up event. To whit: I still have a roaring medication phobia (which is kind of ironic considering the vast amounts of illegal crap I used to throw down my throat - and it was the legal shit that finally toasted me) and get kind of agitated when I think about those fools in the ER.




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