onwardsupwards
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2016
- Messages
- 8
Iv'e been wanting to do this for a long time but Iv'e only really now got to a stage where I can talk and write about this without freaking out too much, if anything just to write this down and/ or hear people's opinions. (This might also be a long one so I hope you are patient and stay to read the full story.)
Before I start to go into where things went wrong, I want to include that I was diagnosed with severe OCD and was prescribed Fluoxetine and Risperidone back in 2010 or so. I was on them for about 5-6 years until I came off them just before Christmas of 2015 (but I'll come to that later), the doses varied over the years but I was always on them in some way or another. Since the incident with the OCD subsided I've lived a fairly normal and happy life with the few problems here and there, for example bullying in school, but nothing too out of control. When I finally broke out of school and went to college in 2014 I couldn't have been happier as I had gained number of friends and a great amount of confidence . In mid 2015 before my second year of college started, I decided to start attending a much higher equipped college than the last one, hoping that I'd make friends again and have another wonderful year.
Which brings me to the real beginning of the story. In around September of 2015, I was at a friends party, we were just having fun with some drinks, and I was offered some powdered Ecstacy or MD, which I regrettably made the decision to snort a line and a half (I know, baaad idea) and problems started that same night I came home. I couldn't help but feel unbearably hot and the next morning, couldn't piece together a sentence properly, I was dizzy, I was sweating nearly every night, my heartbeat was unusually heavy, and my usually long 8-10 hours sleep was cut down to about 3-4, I just felt "wrong". This lasted weeks and I thought I might have had the flu at first and was told to just take it easy until I recovered, but it never went away. As I started reading up online about what could be causing these symptoms I came across a few things such as seratonin syndrome and more sinister things like MD causing permanent brain damage and so I started panicking when nobody was around. Eventually I decided to seek some kind of guidance so I called a helpline. I explained what I had done with the MD on top of my medication and what I felt like but it was pretty useless. The guy told me not to worry and that I would be fine but something was telling me otherwise. Even when I took my temperature with the thermometer, it would always come out as normal which rang alarm bells as something abnormal for me.
On the first day of my new college I had a panic attack in class and had to ask to leave to go to the nurses office. My Mum was then called and I was taken home. That evening I was an absolute wreck, tensing my muscles, tapping my feet and crying knowing that I had seriously fucked up so my Dad came over to take me over to his for the night. When I got to his I initially couldn't sleep because I was filled with panic and anxiety (It felt so "chemical" as if I wasn't in control of my thoughts or body), but I did eventually sleep for about half an hour before I woke up shaking uncontrollably, my only instinct was to be taken to Accident and Emergency. My Dad agreed and we went, only for them to tell me that I was physically fine and I needed to be referred onto the Phych ward.
When I met the phych nurse she suggested to me that I get CBT treatment, but the waiting period would be weeks and weeks. I thought I could handle that and went home to try and rest but I still couldnt rest without waking up with a jolt.
As the weeks went on, the child psychiatrist who was prescribing my meds said that the best option was to up my dose of Risperidone. Things gradually took an even steeper decline and I was now having to deal with uncontrollable pacing (Which I later found out to be Akathisia, a form of parkinsonism from the Risperidone) and an underlying level of anxiety which led me to another couple of trips to A&E with little to no helping my situtation. To make things worse, when my first CBT assessment came through my psychiatrist stopped putting me under his care under the impression that the CBT office was infact an adult Phychiatry team. I then had to scramble to quickly find an adult phychiatry team to assess me and with the help of my GP, I got to see a wonderful doctor who finally took me off of Risperidone and put me on Quetiapine.
The first night I took the Quetiapine I slept like a baby but after a few night my stomach was now a problem as I was waking up with diarrhea every morning. I asked the doc if I could come off all of my medication in order for my body to somehow go back to normal at least somewhat. She advised me to stay on the drugs until my shortly upcoming CBT treatment was done but I decided to come off them slowly anyway.
In November or December of 2015 I started attending college again now I was finally free of medication and stable to a degree, but because I had missed so much of the course I hadn't made any friends and so I was going in lonely and overwhelmingly depressed. I decided to get myself an appointment with a new GP to get a second oppinion on my still ongoing symptoms of occasional night sweats, dizziness, heavy heartbeats, hot flushes and general "wrongness", and after she did a blood test for a large number of things, she reffered me onto an clinic that specialise in things like M.E. and Infectious Diseases.
Now I'm still kind of forcing myself into college with heavy depression. I had my first appointment with the clinic a few days ago and they took a some more bloods and now I'm awaiting on a CT scan and a follow up appointment in the hope that they can find whats wrong. Atm my biggest hope is that my brain will somehow be able to recover or repair itself, even if it is a little bit.
My best guess is that this has all had something to do with the risperidone and MD combination and at the moment i'm going through some kind of withdrawal of the Risperidone. It might even be possible that me being on Risperidone so long has caused these problems anyway as I have been reading on how being on the drug after a long time can cause sometimes irreversible "brain-shrinkage", but like it's always been since day one, it's just a guess.
Before I start to go into where things went wrong, I want to include that I was diagnosed with severe OCD and was prescribed Fluoxetine and Risperidone back in 2010 or so. I was on them for about 5-6 years until I came off them just before Christmas of 2015 (but I'll come to that later), the doses varied over the years but I was always on them in some way or another. Since the incident with the OCD subsided I've lived a fairly normal and happy life with the few problems here and there, for example bullying in school, but nothing too out of control. When I finally broke out of school and went to college in 2014 I couldn't have been happier as I had gained number of friends and a great amount of confidence . In mid 2015 before my second year of college started, I decided to start attending a much higher equipped college than the last one, hoping that I'd make friends again and have another wonderful year.
Which brings me to the real beginning of the story. In around September of 2015, I was at a friends party, we were just having fun with some drinks, and I was offered some powdered Ecstacy or MD, which I regrettably made the decision to snort a line and a half (I know, baaad idea) and problems started that same night I came home. I couldn't help but feel unbearably hot and the next morning, couldn't piece together a sentence properly, I was dizzy, I was sweating nearly every night, my heartbeat was unusually heavy, and my usually long 8-10 hours sleep was cut down to about 3-4, I just felt "wrong". This lasted weeks and I thought I might have had the flu at first and was told to just take it easy until I recovered, but it never went away. As I started reading up online about what could be causing these symptoms I came across a few things such as seratonin syndrome and more sinister things like MD causing permanent brain damage and so I started panicking when nobody was around. Eventually I decided to seek some kind of guidance so I called a helpline. I explained what I had done with the MD on top of my medication and what I felt like but it was pretty useless. The guy told me not to worry and that I would be fine but something was telling me otherwise. Even when I took my temperature with the thermometer, it would always come out as normal which rang alarm bells as something abnormal for me.
On the first day of my new college I had a panic attack in class and had to ask to leave to go to the nurses office. My Mum was then called and I was taken home. That evening I was an absolute wreck, tensing my muscles, tapping my feet and crying knowing that I had seriously fucked up so my Dad came over to take me over to his for the night. When I got to his I initially couldn't sleep because I was filled with panic and anxiety (It felt so "chemical" as if I wasn't in control of my thoughts or body), but I did eventually sleep for about half an hour before I woke up shaking uncontrollably, my only instinct was to be taken to Accident and Emergency. My Dad agreed and we went, only for them to tell me that I was physically fine and I needed to be referred onto the Phych ward.
When I met the phych nurse she suggested to me that I get CBT treatment, but the waiting period would be weeks and weeks. I thought I could handle that and went home to try and rest but I still couldnt rest without waking up with a jolt.
As the weeks went on, the child psychiatrist who was prescribing my meds said that the best option was to up my dose of Risperidone. Things gradually took an even steeper decline and I was now having to deal with uncontrollable pacing (Which I later found out to be Akathisia, a form of parkinsonism from the Risperidone) and an underlying level of anxiety which led me to another couple of trips to A&E with little to no helping my situtation. To make things worse, when my first CBT assessment came through my psychiatrist stopped putting me under his care under the impression that the CBT office was infact an adult Phychiatry team. I then had to scramble to quickly find an adult phychiatry team to assess me and with the help of my GP, I got to see a wonderful doctor who finally took me off of Risperidone and put me on Quetiapine.
The first night I took the Quetiapine I slept like a baby but after a few night my stomach was now a problem as I was waking up with diarrhea every morning. I asked the doc if I could come off all of my medication in order for my body to somehow go back to normal at least somewhat. She advised me to stay on the drugs until my shortly upcoming CBT treatment was done but I decided to come off them slowly anyway.
In November or December of 2015 I started attending college again now I was finally free of medication and stable to a degree, but because I had missed so much of the course I hadn't made any friends and so I was going in lonely and overwhelmingly depressed. I decided to get myself an appointment with a new GP to get a second oppinion on my still ongoing symptoms of occasional night sweats, dizziness, heavy heartbeats, hot flushes and general "wrongness", and after she did a blood test for a large number of things, she reffered me onto an clinic that specialise in things like M.E. and Infectious Diseases.
Now I'm still kind of forcing myself into college with heavy depression. I had my first appointment with the clinic a few days ago and they took a some more bloods and now I'm awaiting on a CT scan and a follow up appointment in the hope that they can find whats wrong. Atm my biggest hope is that my brain will somehow be able to recover or repair itself, even if it is a little bit.
My best guess is that this has all had something to do with the risperidone and MD combination and at the moment i'm going through some kind of withdrawal of the Risperidone. It might even be possible that me being on Risperidone so long has caused these problems anyway as I have been reading on how being on the drug after a long time can cause sometimes irreversible "brain-shrinkage", but like it's always been since day one, it's just a guess.
