Medication

This medication makes me feel weird. It makes me feel spacey and distant when I take it in the morning with food but in the evening when I am meant to sleep it makes me feel alert and have great concentration for the smallest of tasks.

On Friday, when I took it before travelling up to London for therapy, I felt like a zombie. The whole train journey zonked out and numb. Flat and despite being conscious, feeling unconscious and not with it. When I arrived at therapy, the meds were still in full force. Talking but not knowing it was my voice, feeling like I was 10 thousand miles away, stumbling and stuttering over words. Jumbled sentences and bouncing from one topic to the next, never quite connecting the dots. I am unable to remember what was talked about, was it a hard topic? Did I make any connections? My eyes felt unfocosed – darting around the room. Feeling strange. I remember saying that. Feeling as though I coukd fall asleep at any moment, but knowing my voice just wanted to carry on. I didn’t wanna waste another session, another 30 squid, on saying nothing. Nothing meaningful.

And then after, a meds review. But first, a weird kind of handover between my therapist and the consultant psychiatrist. Hearing her speak to him, but not remembering or feeling what she said. Knowing that she was speaking words about the therapy session just past but not knowing where to look. Whether to look at my therapist or look at the consultant. Slouched in a chair. Eyes diverted. Words speaking slow. Questions being repeated not once but twice, thrice, four, Instructions to take a smaller amount, told to me SIX times to make sure I get it. The first 5 times felt like muffled speeches, never quite making it into my ears and to my ear drums. Telling the consultant that since I upped the dose like the other consultant told me too from 25mg to 300mg in 4 days that I have been suffering. My arms and legs currently shake, I have weakness in my legs, my joints ache. I find it hard to grasp objects and my breathing is shallow and non existant. I can’t remember and I am absent most of the time. I do not feel, yet I know I am alive. I am sleeping 9, 10 , 11 hours but I am exhausted when I awake. And then I am told,

” You need to cut your dose down to 200mg, you have been over medicated.We are sorry for this. You may need to have an ECG and blood tests done. You may have to stop this medication if the benefits do not begin to outweigh the side effects. We need you to feel.”

I am surviving this, just. And I can’t be of the medication again. I don’t want to break down and time is running out for me to speak about this stuff. I am scared. So very fucking scare of being left alone with my own brain and my own soul. And if the side effects are as bad as they are now, I would still take that any day over a day with my brain and my mind on full kilt.