Today marks the 122nd day from my two shots of 234+156mg of invega sustenna 4 days apart, closing 4 months of recovery time. I took the shots voluntarily to go home early after possibly being misdiagnosed with schizoaffective disorder after having a bad reaction to Straterra, which I was on because of ADHD. I am 5'3 and 195lb. I'm genderqueer and hormonally intersex, assigned female at birth with no HRT. First off, I'll give more details that are influencing my recovery. I want to provide as much data as possible for others to look back on. I'll take on a clinical tone when I talk about stuff that might be uncomfortable.
Working for me:
- Guanfacine for ADHD. This medication improves frontal lobe function and attention. I'd say it's working, it helped my executive functioning a lot when I started taking it after Wellbutrin failed for me.
- Lion's mane. This is improving my REM cycles and I started dreaming and sleeping more deeply again. Sleep is really important to healing because it's when the brain "cleans" itself.
- Walks. Everyone knows about the benefits of exercise already, I see it every other page.
- History of mild psilocybin use. Studies show that psilocybin benefits the brain long after you take mushrooms. Just doing them a few times like I have helped my depression more permanently than taking Lexapro. It helps neurogenesis and the function of synapses. Connectivity between braincells seems to be enhanced for some time after use. I took them twice last year. Sadly I feel like invega undid any personal progress I made as I have become a bit suicidal and my intrusive thoughts are getting to me again.
- Tried Wellbutrin. It made me too anxious to continue past two weeks, but it improved my ADHD symptoms even on top of the invega still being active in my system
- Tried Prozac. SSRIs promote neurogenesis. I don't recommend this because it can mess up the sexual part of your recovery. I quit taking it because I had a bad reaction to it.
- I have always been an emotional person. My emotions are still severely blunted and this scares me, I feel like I've been replaced by a different person. But I was able to cry on invega and I don't really remember if I stopped laughing or not, but I laugh now.
- Childhood dance classes, college-level art classes. This gave me a high degree of physical coordination. I imagine mine would be harder to destroy than most peoples' because it was strong to begin with, but I have still lost the top 5% of my motor skills. Other people don't notice a difference from observing me, but I notice it. I hope that will be temporary, my motor skills were worse at one point.
- I don't drink alcohol. I have probably had alcohol under 100 times in my life.
- I drink a lot of water. Good hydration habits = good kidneys.
Working against me:
- OCD. This shit set back any progress I made on my OCD with mushrooms. I just hope it doesn't get unbearable again. If it does, I might try Viibryd, which is an SSRI that doesn't cause sexual dysfunction because it's a partial serotonin agonist. Lexapro worked on my OCD before, but it made me gain a lot of weight.
- Autoimmune disease. I have ulcerative colitis and I think invega is hurting my chances of going into remission.
- Stage 1 NAFLD. I think my liver enzymes got fucked up a little. I don't think they should have given me invega if I have these conditions. I think the psychiatrist just didn't give a shit and never looked at my chart.
- Depersonalization/derealization disorder. I'm a victim of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of my parents and peers. I feel disconnected from myself and my environment a lot and invega sustenna made it worse. The drug makes you dissociate. At least I already know how to cope with that, lots of people don't.
???:
- ADHD and Autism. There seems to be debate on weather or not people with autism or ADHD have more or less neuroplasticity than neurotypical people. I'm of the opinion that people with these developmental differences and no cognitive disability, such as myself, retain neuroplasticity longer and might have extra neurons later in life.
- Smoking THC and CBD cannabis. It's not recommended that you smoke weed on invega because it dramatically increases the risk for stroke and cardiac issues. I didn't know that and just kept smoking it because it helped me feel normal and I was desperate to feel normal. I think it may have counteracted some of the invega and kept it out of some of my receptors. I also have chronic pain and I'm somewhat addicted to it. I know I'm lucky to have been able to feel it at all throughout the first two half-lives and I currently have no problems getting high, my tolerance is just higher than it used to be. I've always been sensitive to the stuff. THC alters bloodflow to the brain, and I'm not sure if that has been bad for me. THC and CBD both have neuroprotective properties and promote neurogenesis. We don't know enough about how this drug impacts the brain, but new research shows it might not be as bad for you as DARE said it was.
- Busiprone. This stuff has helped people with PSSD from SSRIs, it might help me. I'm not taking it daily because it can permanently alter how you react to cannabis and since that's the only pain medicine I can have I don't want to do that! I take it as needed for anxiety attacks, but I don't know if it helps anything related to invega other than the PTSD I have now.
My recovery so far:
When I received my first injection, I felt a cold wave pass through my whole nervous system. Stress released from me, or rather, I was chemically placated. I felt very bored and restless. The second one is what made me scared, I felt my brain shutting off and I immediately lost some coordination. I had genital pain. I had the worst dissociative episode of my life upon coming home. I felt like I was playing a video game in my own body. Dissociation is weird and that's the only way I can describe it. I was shuffling and drooling like the rest of you were, but only for about two weeks. I was cognizant enough to cry and be angry about what happened to me, but not enough to get into learning about invega sustenna.
Yeah, interesting thing. I was able to cry on invega and I cried a lot. I was scared of what it was doing to me, but I also thought I would go back to normal in a few days. I wasn't told how long invega would last, I was under the impression it was 4 days because I started to feel more normal after 4 days after the first shot.
During this time I felt like I was made of plastic or something. I couldn't feel warmth on my skin, my genitals were completely numb and inactive. I lost acuity in all senses. My inner dialogue shut down a lot, but was never completely absent. The scary thing is, I didn't really notice it had been quelled until two months in and I have a brain that never shuts up. I lost some of my sense of language, but that has come back and I can hold a conversation just fine. I'm not as quick as I used to be, but I've never been all that verbally sharp, especially after moderate daily cannabis use.
I'm struggling a lot with anhedonia, apathy, loss of interest, and a really impaired ability to pay attention. All of these are improving, but I've never dealt with anhedonia, even through depression. I was always able to find pleasure in things.
I weirdly find it difficult to care about political things when that had all of my attention before invega. Before my injections I was really concerned with anti-transgender legislation and trying to connect some dots about the white nationalist and dominionist groups funding it. But now, I barely care even though it's something that effects me and many of my friends. I care about the human condition a lot, and it's disturbing that a chemical took the ability to act on that care away from me. No wonder some of the fringiest anti-psychiatry people think antipsychotics are part of a mind control project. It would be an effective one. This apathy, even in the face of danger, is completely alien to me.
I lost my sense of taste and my tongue felt weird, but my sense of taste is almost normal now. My mouth was also very dry, and that has improved. I had lost the ability to salivate when I wanted to, and now that's mostly back.
I've always had dry skin on my hands in the winter and it didn't go away this year until now. I guess that means whatever issue invega caused there is fixing itself.
I stimmed less, but I'm stimming again. It's like this stuff took away the good and neutral parts of my autism, which is weird. But I'm hand flapping and making noises with my mouth like I used to, trying to be present and pay attention more.
A friend of mine died in July and I couldn't feel her loss as much as I would have. I didn't even get a lump in my throat when I heard she died, I just thought "I hope that's a rumor" because weird rumors happened around her before and she got herself into trouble a lot when she was alive, like she went missing once. Consciously, I knew how sad I should be and how sad everyone else was at the funeral, but I just... didn't feel it in my body and I didn't feel as connected to her other friends and family in their grief. I'm feeling her loss more now, there are tears in my eyes as I'm writing this.
I have trouble coming up with new ideas, but I just got a new idea for an art print yesterday. I started working on a painting around mid-late June, but I didn't use my mind's eye to make it like I used to. My mind's eye was blinded and it was hard to visualize things in my head, but that ability is coming back. As an artist, that was really sad and frightening. I tried to work on stuff, but I got debilitating anxiety in July and I'm only just now coming out of that anxiety. I think that was from invega and me reacting poorly to Prozac.
I also like, stopped getting songs stuck in my head, but I can play music in my head again. Speaking of music, I also finally started trying to make a more complex song in No Man's Sky. That game has a feature where you can make music for your bases using devices you craft. It's a very basic little sound mixer. I'm trying to make something that sounds sort of like a string quartet. I built a really cool music studio a few months ago, I'm happy to be using it.
I tried building in No Man's Sky a few weeks ago and I had difficulty visualizing what I wanted to do. I have a hard time recalling building parts and where they are stored in the build menu. But I bet if I messed around some more and kept working on my WIPs from before invega, I'll be building new stuff in no time. I love space Minecraft and I was active in No Man's Sky communities before and earning respect for being an artistic and thoughtful builder. I hope I can get back into it.
I used to be a very enthusiastic and energetic person and I feel like that was taken away from me. It's like all the good stuff about being me was snuffed out. It is coming back. I want to be genuinely excited about things again. I've been excited about things, but only because I felt like normal me would be. Like, the last season of Strange New Worlds has been great, but I felt flat about it and it depressed me. I got sad when I watched a video where someone gushed about an episode, I was like "I should be feeling that!"
The thing that I'm struggling the most with is sexual recovery. It doesn't matter if you don't have a penis, invega sustenna will give you massive sexual dysfunction! People who have vaginas don't have it better than people with penises here. Clitorises get erections too, and mine isn't working that well, but I have recovered clitoral erections, vaginal bloodflow, and some lubrication. It's hard to get aroused. I was never a big porn watcher, but now watching other people get off helps me get off. I'm not sure if I want to rewire my brain in this way. I think I will try a vibrator if I manage to make money from selling art prints.
I identify as asexual, but I figured out I was demisexual recently and it just sucks that my sexuality has been taken away from me just when I decided I could do partnered sex with a specific friend. I feel like I threw away and dismissed my sexuality on this drug, I thought I wouldn't miss it. But I didn't know I wouldn't even be able to feel my clitoris. I'm regaining sensation in it now, but most of the time it just feels like touching a finger tip, not much pleasure. My vagina also changed texture and tightness, but it's going back to the way it was before. Before I tried Prozac, I was getting flashes of arousal back, especially when I smoked weed. I ended up having another manic episode from Prozac+weed and I was given Abilify, and then two doses of zyprexia, which also knocked back my sex drive. The Abilify is still in my system until next week, so I don't know how my recovery is really going on this front. It's really fucking stupid that medicine could figure out boner pills, but there isn't much help for people with vaginas.
I have recovered orgasms, but penetration doesn't feel good. Every orgasm I have is better than the last one, however. I lost some pelvic muscle and a little bladder control a month after the injections and it is returning to normal. I was peeing every time I tried masturbating, but that has stopped. If you received the first two injections, you will also probably get bladder control back if you lost it. I know that's kind of scary to lose something that feels automatic.
I had my hormones tested, and everything came back normal, if a little low, except for prolactin, which was at 27. My doctor isn't concerned. My periods have been absent and I don't mind that, but I'm still concerned because I might want to have a baby if I get my life together.
Another thing that really bothers me is some loss of coordination. It's coming back, but I still worry.
"It's coming back but I still worry" sums up my thoughts and feelings on where I'm at right now. I feel like I'm past the worst of this and just trying to rebuild myself now. I made a quick watercolor painting, I'll finish it up and post it later.
I'm lucky that invega didn't increase my appetite. It actually decreased it, even though eating was the only thing I looked forward to for a while. I haven't gained weight, but since invega is becoming less active in my system, I'm snacking a lot because it gives me dopamine. I didn't gain any weight so, nothing to report on that front.
I think I've only just started to heal. I think I'm gonna bounce back hard, there are some good signs.
I'm a big fan of the Mountain Goats, a prolific indie rock band that comes out with an album every year like clockwork. Looking forward to hearing the new one, Jenny from Thebes, is keeping me going, regardless if I'll react to it the way I used to react to music. I'll close up this post with a song that resonates with me right now, I hope it resonates with you too. They have a lot of songs about surviving hard things, this one is about a person who was poisoned and trying to find the antidote.
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