Cold Turkey

This is not a blog about Christmas leftovers.
About sandwiches with cranberry sauce.
Or about dead poultry.

This is a blog about withdrawal.

I have been off my anti depressants for 7 days. 
I was on them for 18 months and in less than 18 minutes I had made the decision to stop them. Dead.

It is not advisable to come off anti depressants suddenly, to go cold turkey with them.

I am learning why.

I itch.
My legs, at 1am.
My shoulders and armpits at 3am
My palms, at 5am.
My feet, right now. My head, all the damn time.

I am dizzy. I could look down at the ground and then up at the sky and lose my balance.
I am light-headed. I feel like my legs are jelly and I am going to topple over at any minute.
I put this down to the lack of food. Because I can count the number of full meals I have had in the last 10 days on two hands. Most of them were this past weekend. 

I can count the days I haven't thrown up this month on one hand.

I cannot sleep. I did not understand why I am so, so tired all the time and yet now I get into bed at night and sleep does not come. And when it comes, it does not stay. When it comes the dreams are just...weird.

I did not expect to itch, to not sleep or have even weirder dreams than usual when I do sleep (seriously: Ice cream. Crow people. Packing. Crime. My weird dreams just got weirder).

I did not research or ask about withdrawal before I stopped my Citalopram. Google says all of the above are expected withdrawal symptoms.
That the half-life of Citalopram is 36 hours, so the speed of it took me by surprise but if I'd done some research it wouldn't have surprised me at all. 

I am an itching, dizzy insomniac. All within a week.
And I am crying. This is the only symptom I expected. Naively, I thought that the only side effect of coming off anti depressants would be the depression making a comeback. Because that's what they're for, keeping the depression (or the worst of it) at bay.
I expected the suicidal thoughts, the tears.
I cry at adverts, at the news. I cried about the snap general election. I cried at Guardians of the Galaxy last night.
I'm crying now!
I am a crier; I sobbed down the phone to Oxfam once. But this is kind of ridiculous.

Except One Directioners, who cries at Harry Styles music?! Me, the wet-faced dizzy insomniac who can't stop scratching, that's who.

I should also expect headaches (got that down, 11 years in the making), anxiety (wait, why was I on this drug again? oh yes...) and nausea. Wait, nausea? You mean, the very thing I'm trying to eliminate by coming off the Citalopram?

I am desperate to stop throwing up. I am desperate to be well again, to stop feeling nauseous, to stop getting stomach pains. And that is why I have gone cold turkey from my Citalopram because if it is the cause behind my mysterious sickness, then I will work to find other ways of managing my depression. Another anti depressant, CBT, Mindfulness; the list of possibilities is endless. 

There is also the possibility that it is not the Citalopram causing my sickness.
But by the time my body has worked that out, I will probably be withdrawn from it anyway. 

NOW I'M CRYING AT GREEN DAY!