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!

This is me admitting defeat.
This is my body overruling my mind.
This is me giving in.

After months holding as firm as I can against my depression, it is the sickness that laid waste to my life last summer that comes back to destroy my ambitions.

I'm not going to pretend I was ready. Hours of running time taken away by the headaches, muscle knots, foot troubles. My body isn't made for running, with it's tight hips and tense shoulders. And now with its grumbling tummy.
I can barely walk at times the pain is so bad. Stopping to throw up, stopping to double over in pain, puts even walking out of the question.

This is me flying the white flag and surrendering.

This is me wasting no more tears over the missed opportunity and feeling like a failure, because as that race door closes, a door to learning opens. Learning to let go of the frustration. Learning to find a silver lining.

Knowing that there's an answer out there somewhere, Just got to find it.