Posted by Damos on February 20, 2005, at 23:44:12
In reply to Damos please share your withdrawal journey..., posted by SamIAm on February 20, 2005, at 22:09:28
Effexor-XR which came after a truly horrible experience with Zoloft.
Was on it for just over 2 years max 225mg, went down in 75mg intervals i.e 150 - 75- 0. Didn't have too many problems making the initial drops other than the zapps for a few days and occassional dizziness. The problems started when I went to 75mg every other day. My system just ended up so confused and I began to have what I thought at the time were a bunch of unrelated symptoms (until I Googled Effexor Withdrawal) and found this place. After a week or so of this chaos I decided after speaking with my doc just to stop and get it over with. It's been 15 days now and things seem now to have settled down. Days 3-5 were the worst in terms of physical symptoms: itchy, dizzy, dyslexic, nightmares, inability to sleep, nausea, joint pain, headaches, flashing lights and seeing things. Pretty much all the usual suspects. Then Day 10 I think it was I rolled out of bed and into an emotional abyss. Days 10-12 were like emotional big wave surfing and I swung from feeling like a pane of glass in a hailstorm to a live hand grenade. The inability to sleep more than about 2 hours up to about day 12 didn't help but that has settled down too. I'm still feeling a little aggressive at times which is really abnormal for me, but I'm hoping that will settle in time. I took 2mg antihistamine (max 4x /day) for the itching etc and 1000mg of paracetamol (max 4x /day) for the headaches and pains etc. Just didn't want to add anything else into the mix. Still just taking each day as it comes and trying not to get too ahead of myself. The people in this wonderful place helped so much and a few of them have appeared on the previous thread.
There's plenty of people here who've had a harder journey from darker places than me and I can only thank them for shining a light for me to follow.
Let me know if that's not enough info.
poster:Damos
thread:461072
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/wdrawl/20050214/msgs/461112.html