Did I Say Getting Better? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Oh, how misguided you are, poor past-self.  Thinking that you've already been through the worst and it's going to get better.  Oh, how wrong you were. How very, very wrong.

Two days of shitting out nothing but water.  Couldn't feel my goddamn legs because I was on the toilet for the better part of two days.  even drinking plain water made me feel like puking.  by the end there, my lips were starting to dry out and peel.  as ucky as that was to have to remember, it seems to be over.

the brain zaps are back, though, and the dizziness, and the mood swings are worse than ever.  plus the nausea stuck around, and my ass feels like someone took sandpaper to it.  what fun!  yeah, guys. take effexor.  great stuff.  miss a dose by a couple hours, and you get the brain zaps and mental confusion.  stop taking it for any reason, and even with a gradual step-down program of decreasing the dose over many months can still net you these fantastic side effects!

I was on effexor both times I discovered I was pregnant, and we had to ramp up the weaning-off process so they wouldn't be negatively affected by it.  of course, the withdrawal was covered up by the usual hideousness of the first trimester.  or maybe that was just me who had crippling nausea? something to think about when i can pull the fragments of my mind back together.

whenever my own misery gets too big, i put myself in someone else's shoes. Revan is my favorite one to do this with.  Oh, i still feel so much shame that i love kotor that much.  all the games i'd played before kotor were games my parents bought, and crash bandicoot doesn't have a whole lot of surprises in it to blindside you.  I bought kotor myself (and i'm sure there are plenty of people who completely expected it, but i was too damn excited to think about what was going on in the game. I just devoured it), started playing it, and when the big reveal came, I was utterly flabbergasted.  That, of course, was before I had kids, and could play games for hours and hours on end.  Now, it's harder to slip things by me, because I only play after the kids are in bed, which gives me maybe three hours to play as many games as I can before I get too tired and have to stop.  So I have all of the next day to think about everything I played the night before.

Oh, hello mental confusion, are you back again?  I see you clouded over everything while I was typing.  Glad to know I'll have you to keep me company while I'm going insane.

NEVER TAKE EFFEXOR.

Cold Turkey

What kind of moron quits anything cold turkey?

Oh, that's right. The kind of moron I am.  I don't remember my reasoning at this point.  I'm sure there was a good one.  It's long gone in the fog by now.  I was taking effexor for my anxiety and depression, and now I'm not.  Nausea.  Shakes.  My nerves feel like they've all been rubbed raw with sandpaper.  OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP NOW PLEASE okay next breath not so bad.  If people even fight through a little bit of this with -oh boy, here come the crazy sweats- quitting smoking I can totally understand why they would stick with the cancer sticks.  Given my druthers I'd go back to those shitty little pills.  They're fucking awful for you, but wow, they're better than this.  I'm really loving the electric-shock thing.  That's really the perfect way to describe it. 

It's like someone is shoving your finger in an electrical socket. Every ten five or thirty seconds.  Bzzt.  Nauseous, trying not to puke and there it goes again, bzzt.  THIS IS FUCKING AWFUL okay sorry, it's so hard to keep myself focused. 

But even that isn't too awful for me.  My worst enemy is the nausea.  I hate nausea. I don't like feeling pukey (which is why my pregnancies [bzzt] were nightmares),  I hate vomiting, I will avoid them at all costs.  Hard to avoid when being alive seems to be the cause.  Okay, I know it is my stupid body's stupid dependency on this stupid [bzzt] drug (and holy shit why are we even still letting it be used? I have a one year old and a three year old.  I do my best to keep us on a schedule, but life gets in the way.  Getting nauseous and feeling this brain-[bzzt]shock because I didn't have time to take my medicine and had to wait a few hours is just freaking crazy.  Three hours shouldn't be a big deal!)  but I tend to exaggerate when I'm upset and OH MY GOD I'M SO UPSET RIGHT NOW.  You try feeling like this and not being upset.

Upside?  I have better [bzzt] control of my emotions OFF EFFEXOR than I ever did on it.  Feeling ragey because of withdrawal?  Feeling like screaming obscenities because someone blinked at you wrong?  Completely under control.  I always felt like I was toeing the line with my emotional control.  Like I was one frayed thread away from bursting into tears [bzzt] or going off on a rage-fueled murder spree or whatever.  Without it, and deep in withdrawal, my first impulse may be to be angry and scream obscenities at Husband because he has ugly feet (and boy, does he), but compared to the way I felt when I was on the [bzzt] medication, it's almost ridiculously easy to just pull those words back from the ledge and stuff them somewhere in the electrified recesses of my deranged mind. 

I was going to lay out what exactly is wrong with me that I might need medicine, and explain my reasoning (ha, I tried to type seasoning, that's apparently only funny because I'm [bzzt] yeah okay never mind) for quitting, but coherent thought is too far out of reach today.