March 14

Vacation – Not Exactly What I Wanted

It’s been a long nine months, so long that I forgot my blog’s username and password, and returned to find 287 spam comments waiting for approval.  But it’s good to be back.

My vacation started, well,  with a vacation.  I took my family to New Hampshire to visit my family of origin.  And I got bronchitis.  (Ain’t nobody got time for that!)

After weeks of it not getting better, my doctor put me on Singulair.  But Singulair interacts with a triglyceride medication I was taking.  I didn’t know that.  Neither did my doctor or pharmacist.  The interaction is listed on the FDA website, but apparently not in any of the databases used by health care professionals.  Within two weeks, I had sunk into a suicidal depression and had to be hospitalized.

The hospital prescribed Zoloft, an anti-depressant.  I let them know I’d had a bad reaction to antidepressants once before, many years ago.  The shrink insisted that this one was different.

It wasn’t that different.  Soon, I was having a full-blown psychotic reaction to the Zoloft.  Eventually, I went back to a different hospital.  There, they gave me other medications that had me not only psychotic, but also aggressive.  Psych meds and I do not get along.

From there, I was able to spend 30 days medication-free in a rehab in Culver City, CA.  My brain finally started to heal.  I am forever grateful for that opportunity, because I think psychiatrists would have either killed me, or left me in a straight jacket in a dark room for the rest of my life.  For whatever reason, they don’t have an answer for me.

I am prone to depression, and I’ve learned that I have to manage it with lifestyle changes.  To be honest, I hadn’t been doing that.  So perhaps the medication interaction only accelerated changes that I would have had to make anyway.  In any case, it’s been a rough road, and I’m glad to be back.



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Posted March 14, 2015 by mitchmaitree in category "Background", "Mental Health", "mental health

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