Living for Disco

During my first wrestling match with depression about ten years ago, my doctor put me on Prozac. Prozac didn’t do much for me except make my hands sweat, and turn me into an emotional zombie. I stopped taking it. Nothing happened. It was as straightforward as that.

During my second wrestling match with depression last year, my doctor put me on Effexor. I wrote about the debilitating initial effects on this blog some time ago, as well as the cavalier attitude of my doctor, who said “I knew I shouldn’t have given you that information leaflet. Just take the bloody pills”.

Effexor has really been a miracle drug for me. It lifted me out of a hole, and made me feel normal. I was able to make rational decisions, and approach daily tasks like food shopping, and washing up, without weeping with stress and confusion. I stopped having fruitless, angry conversations with people in my head. Life improved.

Unfortunately, now that I’m ready to stop taking it, I’m discovering that I am physically dependent on it. I didn’t know when I started that Effexor withdrawal can be a very long, painful and traumatic process, but boy, am I learning now.

It goes like this (and this isn’t from a sudden stop – it’s from a slow tapering of the dose as recommended by the doctor):

Stage 1: Brain Shivers.

I have discovered that someone has given a name to this unsettling sensation. To be honest, though, I don’t think ‘brain shiver’ really describes it. It is more as if you’re going along happily as normal, and you suddenly decide to turn your head to the left. Your brain is not ready for this, goes “Whoah there, cowboy!” and refuses to move. Your eyes feel a bit squiggly, and you are momentarily disoriented. The sensation, which is amusingly ticklish at first, worsens the longer you go without the drug. It usually results in

Stage 2: Nausea

Intense, although never actually followed through by the stomach, so not even throwing up will relieve it. Tends to happen suddenly, in shops or meetings. Inconvenient. Followed quite quickly by

Stage 3: The Shits.

There’s no delicate way of putting it. Suddenly, the contents of your intestinal tract have turned to liquid, and begun to boil. Understandably, your intestinal tract no longer wishes to accommodate this bubbling, toxic mass. On no account should you mistake this feeling for trapped wind, unless you have a change of underwear handy.

And as if these physical manifestations of withdrawal weren’t distressing enough, you also have hideous emotional symptoms.

Imagine, for example, that your perspective shifts suddenly, and you come face to face with your worthlessness. It becomes a logical deduction that anyone who says they love you must be lying, because frankly, why would they when you’re like this? Ergo, they are certain to abandon you unless you start behaving like a rational human being. Unfortunately you no longer have any idea how to behave in a normal fashion. It feels like being trapped in an invisible box.

Fortunately, I have a very understanding fiancé, who listens to me ramble on in tearful lunatic fashion, and when I ask him anxiously what he is thinking, he says things like “I was thinking that I’d like to go base jumping off El Capitan”*, which is just so irrelevant to my personal internal crisis that it is like being offered a firm piece of ground to stand on.

This phenomenon can last between anywhere from ten minutes to (in my case) four hours.

Also, I like to rant, but I’m now occasionally afflicted by brief, but irrational bouts of absolute fury. I can now empathise with screaming, purple faced toddlers in Sainsburys. We are as one. It’s almost zen.

Other, more minor side effects include uncontrollable teeth grinding, sudden bouts of intense apathy, memory loss, time-slips, loss of concentration… the list goes on. At this rate, I’m going to be toothless and temporally confused by the time I’m 35.

This has now become a personal challenge. I simply can’t stomach the idea that this one small pill is causing me so much trouble, even though once it made life so much easier. I’m not belittling the wonderful transformation to my life that Effexor effected, but why does it insist on hanging on in there where it’s not wanted? It’s like the one remaining drunk guest at the end of a really great party, and it’s really objecting to being evicted.

So here I am, stepping into the ring for a battle of wills against my own brain. It doesn’t get better than this.

*I am assuming that this is not necessarily translatable as “I wish to die, now, please”.

Despite a certain over-fondness for commas, I’m not a fan of bad punctuation. Grocer’s who add apostrophe’s to their potato’s deserve to be hauled into the street and pelted with copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves (hardback, naturally). In my opinion. However, I am a coward and will generally not pick people up on their punctuation, because I don’t want people to make faces at me behind my smug, gramatically correct back.

So when walking along a London street last weekend, and spotting a sign on a door that said “No! Junk mail please!”, I simply had to stop.

“What earthly sense does that sign make?” I said to Gordon in disgust, gesticulating wildly at the offending door. “I’m surprised they’re not inundated with pizza leaflets and free ads papers. They’re just asking for junk mail. Why can’t people get it right?”

At that very minute a man with a bag of shopping walks through the gate of the house. I had seen him, but what are the chances that the only other man on a long London street should live in the house at which I am staring as if it is a piece of dog poo on my shoe?

He turned out to be Chinese. And to speak English as most definitely his second language. I discovered this when he explained to me that “We put this sign, no junk, we don’t like - too much paper.”

I think I’ll go back to being a pedant in private.

Well, I’ve been brimming with updates recently, but unfortunately Wordpress decided it didn’t like me any more, and for several days now I’ve been unable to get access to the blog. But it’s back now, thankfully (although looking a little odd), so….

My sister announced mid-last year that she was hitching herself to a tall Australian who likes to take her fishing at silly o’clock in the morning, and does stuff like buy her flowers, and tell her she is wonderful. This is excellent, as my sister is lovely and historically has had a tendency to go out with guys that are a bit shit.

So, now that I have a job I can afford (for ‘afford’, read ‘get further into debt by being able to say I can pay off a loan’) to go to Australia to be present, wear a dress, get drunk, fall off things and embarass the family - although by the sounds of things, I may yet be outdone by some of the groom’s more interesting relatives.

Anyway, on the way, Gordon and I are stopping off in Singapore. This is mainly so that he can do the second leg of the journey in the Airbus A380. The larger that passenger planes are, the more they alarm me, so I naturally think this is a marvellous idea, and can’t wait for the experience. ‘A flying metal coffin with three times as many people in it as normal! Woo!’, I will say, as I down my diazepam and bloody mary combo, and try not to imagine the headlines.

We are extremely excited about this three day jaunt, and have made extensive plans, which we have annotated and marked on corresponding maps. Not an hour is unaccounted for. And it was this process that made me appreciate once again that I’ve found someone who is perfect for me; the process for selecting our activities went thus:

1. Work out exactly how many meals we had to eat between landing and taking off again.
2. Go through the ‘food’ section of the guidebook, marking off restaurants that we like the sound of.
3. Repeat, eliminating surplus eateries with the equation “priority = cost x distance from sites of interest - hawker centre interest rating”.
4. Work out list of bars in which to drink after dinner drinks with views of the harbour.
5. Mark on map.
6. Write list, with favoured dishes annotated (e.g. curried soft-shell crab; hainan chicken rice; banana leaf curry)
7. Salivate until forced to over indulge on cheese.

And I wonder why I’m not losing any weight.

I departed from Birmingham early on Sunday, after having decided to skip the morning sessions, and turned on Radio 4. A serious sounding man was interviewing two members of the Zimbabwean diaspora about the current Mugabe shenanigans - a black doctor and a white farmer. So far, so interesting. He starts off by saying in a ‘I’m being very serious and political, hmmm, yes indeed’ voice “So, tell me about farming in Africa. It sounds so mysterious - almost impossible…”

I can only imagine the look on the farmer’s face. It must have resembled the look on mine - incredulity shaken up with contempt, and a splash of disgust. Do people actually do any research before they interview people? Do they actually know anything about Africa?

It was really the cherry on the cake of a most annoying weekend. The volunteers were all great, apart from the guy who insisted on telling me in minute detail about the trials faced by the Papua New Guinean people, when all I wanted to do was drink my wine and gossip about stuff unrelated to third world development issues. It was the VSO employees running the gig that really annoyed me. I just don’t understand why they would organise a weekend designed to address the complex issues faced by returning volunteers and staff it with non-volunteers with a collection of caring faces, and a tendency to say “I can’t imagine what it must be like”.

Bits of it were good, like the feedback to the Chief Executive, who actually listened and responded. Generally, however, I felt I really could have done with a bit more of the sessions about coming home, and less of the ones about how to use a photograph to tell a story.

It was a relief to get home, and do normal things for the afternoon, really. Being at the weekend was alternately unsettling, confusing, upsetting and encouraging, with rather too little of the latter. Could do better, VSO.