Posted by Pete Anderson on October 12, 2006, at 6:22:36
Is it possible to get withdrawal symptoms before you stop taking the drug? I took Lorazepam for about 4 weeks. My doctor started me on 0.25 mg for the first few days or a week. Then, he upped it to 0.5 mg. I took it only at night to help me sleep. Along with this, he also prescribed blood pressure medication.
The first three weeks, it was bliss. My blood pressure came down, I felt great, and I got great sleep. A few days into the fourth week, it crashed. I started getting extremely jittery. My heart would race most of the time. After taking the Lorazepam, it was now taking longer than it had taken for me to get sleepy. The second to last and third to last nights that I took it, I woke up very jittery, but got several hours of sleep. The last night that I took it, I only slept for about two hours and woke up very jittery again.
I finally started connecting this to the Lorazepam. The following night, I did not take it. It was the worst night of all. I had the shakes, and my heart raced. During these last several days, my blood pressure went back up. Is it possible that as my body was getting addicted to this drug, thus needing more of it, that by not increasing the dosage I was withdrawing from it?
After staying up all night on the first night that I took it, I finally went to bed at about 9AM. By breathing slowly, I started feeling calmer after a while. It took me a long time to get to sleep--an hour or two--and I woke up feeling much better. I thought my problem were over, but that night, I got the jitters again.
Since then, I've had one or two nights with several hours of sleep. The other nights, I sleep next to nothing after well into the morning hours, when I'm finally tired. I've now not taken it for about 5 nights, and though my last two days I've felt much better--almost back to normal during the day, at night (at around the time I used to take the Lorazepam), I start getting the jitters again. The night before last, I slept pretty well, but this night, I'm getting jittery while trying to sleep, so I woke up and wrote this. Sorry for the extremely long post, but I'm getting desperate. TIA
poster:Pete Anderson
thread:694055
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/wdrawl/20061010/msgs/694055.html