This last week was one of the roughest that I have had in a while, and not because I had a flare, but rather because I reacted poorly to a treatment for it. This post will contain triggering topics related to depression and suicide, so you might want to skip this one if those topics bother you.
Med Changes
To talk about the week, let’s roll back to the week before. If you skipped my last post, the highlight was that my psychiatrist made a couple of adjustments to my meds, which included adding a new one. At first, the new change didn’t seem to do much. At the start of this week, I was feeling even more down than I was the week before, but I kept pushing on. It was strange to me because I wasn’t feeling my normal nerve pain that I get in a flare, but I was feeling my mood plummet. By Tuesday, I was back to not being able to sleep much at all. I was having constant nightmares during the night and kept waking up with my heart pounding. This caused me to go into a bit of a downward spiral as my lack of sleep built up.
Things Get Scary
This part is hard to talk about, but I think it will help me if I write it out anyway. By Tuesday night, I was feeling strange. It felt like I had a big weight pushing me down and I felt like I was moving in slow motion. At that point, I was starting to get pretty worried about the sudden change in my mood and the way it seemed to still be getting worse. That night, my dreams turned very dark. Every time I would fall asleep, my mind would go straight to showing me lots of ways that I could die. Some were accidental, but others were self-inflicted. The thing that was consistent between all of them was that they were gruesome. I have never had dreams like that ever before, and I found them extremely disturbing.
Wednesday morning, after a horrible night, I woke to strange thoughts filling my head. When I say filling my head, I mean that anytime I paused for even a moment, my thoughts would turn to “I am worthless”, “I am a failure”, and “I would be better off dead”. I quickly told my wife that I needed help and started calling all of the doctors/therapists on my care team. The confusing part is that things have been going really well lately. My pain levels have been low, and my wife just got the all-clear from her surgery recovery, so she is back to not having any restrictions again. Even so, the pressure in my head got stronger, so I had my wife hide all of the meds and anything dangerous she could find in the house. She also stayed nearby to keep an eye on me. We also started getting prepared in case I needed to go in-patient to help keep me safe.
After talking with my therapist and psychiatrist, we decided to take me off the new med that was specifically to fight depression since it was one of the few things we could easily change. I stopped taking it Thursday morning, but I ended up having to take off work Thursday and Friday. I spent the time off trying to keep my mind busy, but it was very hard. The intrusive thoughts kept filling my mind, and I was also getting really tired at that point. I got so tired, in fact, that I was able to take a nap on Friday.
The Clouds Begin To Part
After the nap on Friday, I woke up feeling a bit better. I still felt pretty empty, but at least some of the urges had finally calmed down a bit. That night, I was still totally exhausted and ended up going to bed very early. To my surprise, I only had one nightmare and was otherwise able to sleep. I actually was able to sleep for 10 hours even! After the bad week, being able to finally get some extra sleep felt amazing. I woke up Saturday morning with my head starting to feel clearer. The intrusive thoughts were also completely gone at that point.
It was such a scary week, but I made it through it. I am writing this on Sunday, where I would say my mood is pretty much back to normal. It seems that it was the new med and I just reacted really poorly to it. I will have to learn more about what happened when I have a few follow-up appointments this week. I also had a pharmacogenomic test done, so I will have to make a post about that next week once I figure out what it means. Anyway, that’s all for now. Come back next week if you want to learn about the test results.