I’m banishing as many meds from my life as I can. From a lifetime high of 12 or 13 medications, I was down to taking “only” nine medications every day of my life. I hate taking meds. Every medication has side effects. Every medication can cause long-term harm. Medications are expensive. When it started looking like I was going to have to cancel my health insurance, I sat down and calculated the retail cost of my drugs. I only got through 5 of the 9 meds, because I started hyperventilating when I saw that five of my medications costs $622 a month. Those 5 drugs didn’t include the cost of the one medication that literally keeps me alive.
The current drug I’m eliminating is Cymbalta, an antidepressant used both in mood disorders and for treating pain in fibromyalgia. Stopping psychiatric drugs can be a nightmare. Those innocent antidepressants that doctors hand out to everyone aren’t so easy to discontinue. The withdrawal symptoms vary in type, intensity, and duration. Check out an excellent site if you want to look up potential side effects for psychiatric drugs.
I feel really crappy, and I’m concerned I won’t be able to quit Cymbalta. What if my mood crashes, or my muscles seize up? But I draw strength from the ineptness of my doctors. Before quitting any meds, I begged for help with my constant nausea (and sometime vomiting). The doctors concurred: any one of my medications could be causing the nausea, or it could be any one of my several health problems/conditions/illnesses. They just looked so helpless. So I decided to kick Cymbalta’s ass!
Saturday will be my first antidepressant-free day since sometime in 1998.
