Currently about 7 days into a 3600mg/day for 3 years withdrawal. Symptoms don't seem to be getting better. I truly hope I'm not one of the people that has a year protracted withdrawal from this fucking med
How's your withdrawal going? I'm trying to quit as well. I've been on Gaba 3.2g/day since 2014. I became dependent on it pretty quickly and when I would run out, I would be fine until 2 days later. For some weird reason, I feel okay the day after I run out, but then the day after that is when the hell begins.
I wake up and don't feel like myself. I get very depressed, restless, no appetite, my voice gets really quiet. People talk to me and I have to ask them to repeat what they said because my mind gets so distracted and wanders off to worry about implausible catastrophes. I literally feel retarded. I can't verbally articulate myself when I'm going through withdrawal. Also, my skin starts getting really sensitive and the slightest touch or even a fan blowing on me becomes painful.
Sometimes I fall into a panic attack because my mind is just being so negative and won't shut up. Especially when I'm trying to get to sleep. I can't smoke a cig or pace around to distract myself when I'm laying down and trying to get to sleep. It takes me about 2 or 3 hours to finally become unconscious, just to wake up often because of tears running down my cheeks from PTSD-induced nightmares. When I wake up from a nightmare that bad, the last thing I wanna do is go back to sleep. So, I've been getting 2-4 hours of sleep on average for years now.
I've had diarrhea for 5 months now. I've ruled many things out as the culprit, but when I have time to sit down on the toilet and think about it (which is quite often), I've noticed that my stool starts to normalize if I go for so many days without Gabapentin. Nevertheless, I'm in the process of getting my guts checked out. I have to send in some stool samples, do some blood work, and have a colonoscopy all by April 3rd.
The longest I've gone without Gabapentin since 2014 is about a week and the withdrawal wasn't showing signs of slowing down. The withdrawal is mostly mental, but I was shaking, losing a lot of weight, felt retarded, like a huge part of my brain had turned off, I couldn't enjoy anything. The day before I got my refill, I kept throwing up from panic attacks.
My psychiatrist ordered only 7-day supplies at a time after they finally found out that I was abusing it. I didn't like the 7-day thing in the beginning, but it has kept me from getting too far into the withdrawal.
I'm afraid that I won't feel like myself and I'll be retarded for the rest of my life if I quit, but that's probably just my addiction talking. I hope my withdrawal is just the acute version and I don't run into PAWS.
I hope you're feeling a little better by now. It would be nice to hear an update from you and maybe some advice for when it's my turn to walk the plank.