If you’re back reading this, you must be:
- Bored and have nothing better to do.
- Curious as to how this story ends.
- or….Feeling my pain and glad to know it’s not just you.
I’m sure there’s more reasons to list but my mind is mush and I’m supposed to be getting ready for a meeting with a client and I’m here instead, and ready to talk if you’re ready to listen.
I decided I had to sleep last night so I went out to my car where I keep my coveted Xanax stash so I could make sure sleep was a possibility. I keep my Xanax in my purse, which stays in my car, so I’ll have to really think I need one of the little pink pills to make the effort to go outside to retrieve one. I thought it would be harder for me to get to my stash if I couldn’t stumble into the kitchen at 2 a.m. and pop a pill. So much for that kind of thinking because it didn’t work. I’d end up trudging out to my car at 2 a.m. and wondering if I was disturbing my neighbors when my car door would slam shut after I’d retrieved that little pink jewel.
Getting back to the story, I took one of the little jewels about 11 p.m. and read for a few minutes then closed my red swollen eyes and fell asleep. I enjoyed a blissful sleep until the pounding of my heart woke me at 2 a.m. and I realized I was experiencing a full blown panic attack. Either that, or I was having a heart attack to which, at the point, I didn’t care which it was. I wanted to go back to sleep and ignore whatever was happening, but…..
I was awake and trying to figure out what to do now. Take another pill? Pray? (which I did) Call someone? Call 911? Go watch some television? Call my husband who was 300 miles away and could do nothing except worry and tell me to “think positive”? Then I would have hung up the phone and then screamed, or maybe screamed and THEN hung up the phone, so I chose none of the above options and rolled over to try to go back to sleep, which I did eventually but fitfully. I had a dream that wouldn’t be hard to analyze, if I were so inclinded to share the details…..but I’m not.
After waking up several times during this fitful sleep, morning finally broke and that hellish night was over. It wasn’t just this one night…..it’s been this way for weeks now. Remember we talked about the Lexapro? ByJane asked why I’d stopped taking the Lexapro and here is why.
I was feeling cheap and ordered Lexapro from a Canadian pharmacy because the price was so much better. I got it but it wasn’t shipped from Canada, it was shipped from Switzerland and it was the generic form which isn’t available in the United States. I was almost out of my regular stuff so I started taking the generic and it seemed that after only a few days I started having these heart palpitations or I’d feel like my heart was pounding out of my chest and something funky was going on inside my head. It’s hard to explain but I kept telling HBL I could hear my heart skip a beat. He assured me I couldn’t hear my heart skipping a beat, which made me even madder everything all better and that’s the end of the story. Ugh….I wish. I hauled my butt up to the doctor’s office and told them the same thing I’d told HBL, so they hooked me up to the EKG machine and promply took a 5 second reading. Hell, it took longer to hook me up than it did to take the reading and of course, “everything looked normal” and I was sent home because now I was fine. How could they tell everything was normal with a 5 second reading?
ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! The hell I was okay!! I got on the damned internet and started reading more about Lexapro and discovered that maybe where I thought I was hearing my heart stop beating was actually little brain zaps that can be caused by going cold turkey off meds such as Lexapro. Brain zaps!! Yes, that’s exactly what I was having but I couldn’t describe them so now I’m wondering if my cheap generic Lexapro was in fact even Lexapro at all. Maybe I was experiencing the “cold turkey withdrawal” effects. Maybe I wasn’t crazy afterall.
Since this had been going on for two weeks, I decided to stop taking the medication and see if my brain zaps got better, and yes they have, but…………………….
Now I want to cry all day and can’t sleep at night and I’m having hot flashes because I’ve gone too long between times for getting hormone pellet implants and I’ve got 6 more days to go before I get the new ones. My husband is telling me to “think positive”……my daughter is telling me to “go see a doctor and get new meds”………my youngest son is avoiding me as if I have leprosy……..and I just want to sleep.
Unfortunately there’s more to this story so hang with me and I’ll eventually tell you the whole sordid truth.
Until then…….I say again…..MidLife is kicking my ass!!!!
