ChromeChinchilla: hey there - Prozac 60mg, time to get off

[ChromeChinchilla]

I'm sorry if this winds up being kind of nebulous or rambled, but that's kind of how things are/feel right now.

I might be in the minority here but i'm actually sort of thankful for Prozac. My OCD tendencies and anxiety were eating up a huge chunk of my life, and after starting Prozac, the tapping, counting and constant checking and rechecking stopped. I started out on 20 a little over two years ago, moved up to 30 after six or so months, then stayed at 40 until about two months ago.  I'd been taking .5 mg of Ativan every few days for some sudden, terrible anxiety following an extreme panic attack. I was on it every few days two months and stopped fairly abruptly not wanting to be on it for any long period of time.  Now, my Psych and I still aren't sure if it was some kind of prozac poopout or ativan withdrawal but i went through two weeks  of some pretty unpleasant symptoms.  Jittery to the point that i couldn't sit and do anything, no more than 4 hours of extremely uncomfortable sleep a night, zero appetite, anxiety and general lack of ability to enjoy much of anything. To elaborate a bit, i could only manage boost/ensure type meal replacements and paced *constantly* up until the point it was 2am or so, and time for my few hours of sleep.  By the time i got in to see my psych i had been dealing with it for a week and she said given the low and infrequent dosage of my ativan she didn't want to reinstate , so she upped my prozac to 60mg and we decided i'd bear with what we thought might be ativan withdrawal and see if it lessened in the coming weeks .   

Over the next two weeks after she upped my Prozac the symptoms went away gradually and i I found some semblance of feeling semi normal, if still kind of fatigued. Seeing as how it seemed that I had "gotten lucky" by getting off Ativan before i was on it for too long and the symptoms of withdrawal were hell level severe and super long lasting, i decided it was time to get off Prozac. I still had a bunch of 40mgs leftover and just switched to taking those. This was about two weeks ago and about 4 days after doing so i started to experience some pretty hefty fatigue, mild anxiety and decreased appetite. Unlike my last withdrawal (or whatever it was) i can sleep a full 8 hours, can sit and watch stuff, enjoy things to a degree and even force myself up to the gym.  I wake up after sleep feeling pretty exhausted, but i'm able to eat and don't feel the overwhelming urge to pace. 

My psych is one of the ones who said it would be fine for me to taper down over the course of a month or so, but at the same time she's very accommodating if I ask to go slower with stuff, so i wont have a problem getting liquid. I guess right now my plan is to bear with this 20mg drop since its already been almost two weeks, and then try liquid and dropping 10% a month. I guess i'm here for a bit of support and maybe reassurance that even if things are protracted it will eventually end, and i will have good windows throughout the experience. Another thing i guess i'm here for is to see if anyone thinks its wise for me to reinstate back to 60 and taper at 10% from that point.  The symptoms i have now aren't unbearable, but they for sure aren't  a good time.


Side note: I'm also on TRT because tests showed that my body wasn't making enough of it naturally. I get pretty frequent blood work for it and both my estrogen and testosterone levels are in the green as of yesterdays blood work. 

 

[Songbird]

Hi ChromeChinchilla, welcome to SA.  It's great that you've found us now, so you can get the information you need for your taper.

 

We ask all members to create a signature containing a summary of med history, including all drugs, doses and dates (starting and stopping).  Your signature appears below every post you make, and allows us see your situation easily without having to read your topic from the top every time.   You could look at my signature for an example. 

 

Instructions for creating your signature are here: Please put your withdrawal history in your signature. 

You can edit your signature here: edit your signature in Account Settings.

 

It does sound like you may have been experiencing Ativan withdrawal.  I'm not sure increasing the Prozac up to 60mg was a great idea - that's a really hefty dose.  If you're doing okay where you are on 40mg, it's probably all right to stay there, and hold for a good while until you get really stable before tapering again.  When you do restart your taper, bear in mind that 10% per month is a guideline and some people find they need to do smaller drops and/or wait longer between drops.  It's best to listen to your body and wait until stable after each drop.  Here are some topics you may find helpful:

 

Before you begin tapering - what you need to know

Why taper by 10% of my dosage?

The rule of 3KIS - keep it simple keep it slow keep it stable

The windows and waves pattern of stabilization

Stabilizing after a reduction -- what does that mean?

Non-drug techniques to cope with emotional symptoms

 

Please post all your updates and questions about your situation here in your introduction topic, and we will try to help you as best we can.

 

Edited May 16, 2021 by Karma
Name update

[ChromeChinchilla]

Thanks for the approval!

I'm not an expert by any means, but I'm actually wondering/thinking that my last bout of issues was due to some Prozac tolerance combined with coming off of the ativan. Since my first post things took a bit of a turn for the worse. I'm pretty fully miserable. Nothing is enjoyable and sitting still is extremely uncomfortable, so i'm back to pacing/walking despite feeling utterly and fully exhausted. It's like sitting down or closing my eyes to try and rest makes my body feel like it's humming or vibrating with energy.  

Because this got so bad and my only change has been going from 60 to 40 I took a 60 mg last night and am planning/hoping that by continuing to do so I will stabilize  so I can hold and then start brassmonkey sliding taper a month or two in the future. I'm not sure if this is/was wise, but i'm absolutely crawling up the wall right now.

[Songbird]

On 6/6/2019 at 6:02 AM, ChromeChinchilla said:

Because this got so bad and my only change has been going from 60 to 40 I took a 60 mg last night and am planning/hoping that by continuing to do so I will stabilize  so I can hold and then start brassmonkey sliding taper a month or two in the future. I'm not sure if this is/was wise, but i'm absolutely crawling up the wall right now.

 

I'm wondering whether maybe an in-between dose might be better - say 50mg - rather than going all the way back up to your full dose.

Edited May 16, 2021 by Karma
Name update

[ChromeChinchilla]

On 6/6/2019 at 7:32 PM, Songbird said:

 

I'm wondering whether maybe an in-between dose might be better - say 50mg - rather than going all the way back up to your full dose.

It might have been in all  honesty, but i'm pretty much ensconced back in 60mg(Unless you think 5 days back on is still short enough for me to do 50). I just got back from a 4 day stay in a mental healthy facility. On Thursday the bearable feelings sort of exploded into "I will never feel relaxed, rested or able to enjoy life again." . While there I saw a couple different psychs. One tried to get me on wellbutrin and buspar , both of which i said no thank you to, and the other agreed that it was probably from me lowering my prozac so much.   She suggested the first drop by 5mg at most, and after that to just pay close attention and go with what I can manage.  I'm still not 100%(she said i should feel loads better in the 7-14 days back on 60mg. I'm on 5), but I have a sense of hope and belief that things can get better, and already are a little from my breakdown. 

Plan is to hold on the 60mg for a while, until i'm sure i'm back to feeling normal, then begin Brassmonkey taper and pay really close attention to how i feel as I go. If it takes a couple years to get off of this totally, so be it. As long as i dont hurl myself back into Akathisia and extreme fatigue nightmare zone i should be able to manage. 

[ChromeChinchilla]

Feeling better in the sense that I can sit down and listen to music and semi-enjoy shows and the like, but holy mother of god am I exhausted. I can luckily fall asleep well enough and get 8 hours, but I wake up feeling completely fatigued, as if I didn't sleep at all.  If i try to close my eyes and get more sleep or just relax in bed i get an extremely restless, uncomfortable sensation that makes me want to get up even though I feel like I have no energy.  I put up blackout curtains a few days ago and have a 20lb "Cooling" bamboo weighted blanket on its way so i'm hoping that helps. My sleep hygene isn't the best, but I do what I can. I do watch things on my laptop before bed but I have a blue light filter that clicks on when the sun sets to help mitigate that a little.  

I'm worried that this is a precursor leading up to the Akathesia level where i'm pacing all day every day without being able to sit down for more than a few minutes or even remotely enjoy anything. Right now I think my biggest worry is that i've reached tolerance/Tachyphylaxis , because as far as i understand once that happens there's basically nothing to be done but suffer and feel like full WD even when going down by 10% or less per month.  

[ChromeChinchilla]

Sorry to post so many times in a row, but things are getting kind of progressively worse over here. I know I must sound like a wimp as it's only been a couple months since this started with a pretty big window already  while many of you have been dealing with this for months or years, but today is quite a bad day. As usual I actually managed to sleep for a solid 8 hours,  but I woke up feeling as if i got 0 sleep and began shaky, sobbing, trembling pacing almost at once. I understand the wave and window process, but i'm sort of in the dark as to whether this is related to my short benzo use a few months ago, the drop and re up that i did in my ssri a few weeks ago, or possibly just t he dose of 60mg being just too high for me, or possibly worst of all, tolerance.

Regardless of the situation the proper course of action is for me to keep at the current dose until i feel more stable than start a no more than 10% month reduction  and holding pattern right? I really do love my life and want badly to get it back, and have a strong support system in my husband and a Dr. that's supporting me tapering, but in moments like this i just feel so weak. If it is tolerance my Dr wants to switch me over to wellbutrin and then have me taper off of that, but i'm really gunshy about prescriptions and the like now.  Prozac is supposed to be the "easiest" to get off of.  The thought is "if this is what it's like BEFORE i've started tapering, how can I possibly manage what comes next.".    I know it's not healthy to think that way, and i'm trying some 4-7-8 breathing and the like, but I guess in this moment i just need to cry out. 

Daily Journal

[RichT]

On 6/21/2019 at 8:12 AM, ChromeChinchilla said:

I'm worried that this is a precursor leading up to the Akathesia level where i'm pacing all day every day without being able to sit down for more than a few minutes or even remotely enjoy anything. Right now I think my biggest worry is that i've reached tolerance/Tachyphylaxis , because as far as i understand once that happens there's basically nothing to be done but suffer and feel like full WD even when going down by 10% or less per month.  

 

On 6/23/2019 at 10:49 AM, ChromeChinchilla said:

  The thought is "if this is what it's like BEFORE i've started tapering, how can I possibly manage what comes next.".    I know it's not healthy to think that way, and i'm trying some 4-7-8 breathing and the like, but I guess in this moment i just need to cry out. 

Daily Journal

 

  I can see negative thinking here, and I can see that you recognise it too. Unfortunately it’s hard to avoid when you’re in WD, but from the outside what you’re saying seems quite pessimistic.  

 

When you say ‘before I’ve started tapering’, you’ve actually done a sudden stop of Ativan just a few months ago, and you’ve made two significant dose changes to your Prozac. These are bigger changes than you’d have if you were doing a slow taper. You’re still recovering from those changes.

 

warmest wishes

 

Rich

Edited May 16, 2021 by Karma
Name update

[ChromeChinchilla]

Thanks very much for your reply. I think part of the strain for me right now is trying to be realistic and gauge things, but it's amounting to trying to predict he future which is neither possible nor healthy to try. I've tried telling myself stuff like "You're recovering from your last abrupt up and down. Once that stabilizes you might even have an easy time tapering off."  But it feels kind of like wishful thinking so my mind over-corrects with "No, you've GOT to come to terms with the fact that the next few years will be hell.". 

Trying to strike a happy medium with husband's encouragement with a bit of a mantra of "Right now feels bad. I will stabilize and tapering slowly will likely be less intense than what i'm feeling right now.  IF it's bad, we will take it one day at a time and it will eventually end."
 

[RichT]

On 6/23/2019 at 1:08 PM, ChromeChinChilla said:

Thanks very much for your reply. I think part of the strain for me right now is trying to be realistic and gauge things, but it's amounting to trying to predict he future which is neither possible nor healthy to try. I've tried telling myself stuff like "You're recovering from your last abrupt up and down. Once that stabilizes you might even have an easy time tapering off."  But it feels kind of like wishful thinking so my mind over-corrects with "No, you've GOT to come to terms with the fact that the next few years will be hell.". 

Trying to strike a happy medium with husband's encouragement with a bit of a mantra of "Right now feels bad. I will stabilize and tapering slowly will likely be less intense than what i'm feeling right now.  IF it's bad, we will take it one day at a time and it will eventually end."
 

 

That’s Good!

Edited May 16, 2021 by Karma
Name update

[Songbird]

On 6/23/2019 at 1:08 PM, ChromeChinchilla said:

a mantra of "Right now feels bad. I will stabilize and tapering slowly will likely be less intense than what i'm feeling right now.  IF it's bad, we will take it one day at a time and it will eventually end."
 

 

How about "One day at a time" and one of my favourites: "Whatever happens, I'll handle it"!

 

I've found it really helps to have a tool kit of non-med coping techniques.  Relaxation exercises, breathing exercises, mindfulness techniques, positive affirmations, journaling, gentle exercise, and so on.   The goal is to calm the nervous system.  I've found mindfulness is very effective for ruminating thoughts.  I also recommend avoiding all alcohol, caffeine, dramatic/suspenseful TV programs/movies/books (even the news) - basically anything stimulating.  Also I recommend avoiding stress as much as possible, which may involve some rearranging of your life depending on what's going on for you.  

Edited May 16, 2021 by Karma
Name update

[ChromeChinchilla]

Hey all, long time no see.

Sorry this is going to be a novel.

As a bit of a preface: This is a wonderful website with so much helpful information, but for me it can also be a bit of a black hole.  Back when I first found it (And to a lesser degree, recently) I've found myself sort of focusing on other member's suffering more than healing. Even when i'm reading success stories.  Just in a "X person said they had akathisia for a year even after a slow taper!" then picturing my akathisia at its worst unrelenting for that long, thinking "Well i absolutely couldn't endure that." and whipping myself into a frenzy. So for me I think this site is best used sparingly outside of the pages about tapering/symptom management.  That said, i 100% owe a debt of gratitude to this place, so I will pop in for updates and eventually a success story. If it helps even one person, it'll be worth it.

So from my last entry, i stabilized around the seventh of July of that year and just kind of went about my life for a couple months, deciding to just hold before making any more reductions. I started out going down by 5mg mg per month for the first three months, since that was 10% or less and felt perfectly comfortable during it.    Because i had such an easy time going down by 5s I decided to try going from 45 to 40  even though it was more than 10% with a two month hold as a test. I felt totally fine through it and simply because it was easier than getting a new script for liquid during coivd (dumb me) i kept going down by 5s every few months.   It wasn't consistent, I paused quite a few times  for more than a month because covid and life stress.   

 

A little over four months ago I got my script changed over to liquid (20/5) and went down by two lines on my oral syringe (1.6mg) every twenty days (dumber me).  Now I will say, everything up until this point was nice and smooth. Going down by fives was totally tolerable to me. Through it all I can't even recall any symptoms other than just some small bouts of fatigue or feeling down, but those have been staples of my life both before and during Prozac.   Over all I was feeling good, even great most days. It was good enough that I let healthy habits slip and wound up staying up till 4am one night, playing a stressful, violent game (I love horror when i feel good). Helllloooo massive panic attack. Worst one that i'd had in two or more years.

 

As happens with all  my bad panic attacks it was awful, intense but didn't last through the hour. In the days after however I noticed my appetite was at zero, I was restless and most telling for me, music sounded like annoying noise(I cannot stress how much i *love* music and how deeply it touches me).  Recognizing these feelings from 2019 I realized that they were probably from going down too fast and fully triggered by the panic attack. The two weeks after the panic attack were rough, especially the second one. I started up my journal again  and had a handful of days with a discomfort of 4/5 (0-5, 0 is not uncomfortable but not my normal self, anything above 2.5 is very uncomfortable for me). Spent a couple days with hours of akathisia energy that caused me to pace and sob and feel extreme terror, but thankfully I could sit and "rest" for good chunks of time. Seven days ago I updosed by .8mg and feel much better since. The last five days especially have been much better. two days of 1-1.5, the rest have been 0s.

Biggest thing now that the moderate high Akathisia has abated  is very low appetite, and extreme fatigue despite 8 hour of sleep a night. I have no motivation to do much of anything, but i've been forcing myself to get up for short outside walks and have been using my old seasonal depression light. I am eating every day, but it's for sure forced. Since i'm not eating a lot i'm making sure what i do eat is good. It's been a lot of eggs, red bell peppers and kippers. Magnesium baths, 15-30 minutes of Bineural Beats 3.2hz before bed, and a *consistent* unplug from technology and rest have been really helpful for me this time around. Unrelated to WD i got a fitbit and it's been handy for tracking sleep, as well as my heart rate. A few times ive felt anxious, checked my heart rate, seen it above 95 and told myself "Your heart rate is up, breathe, calm down"  and it's really helped. 

Over all the plan is to hold and heal for a couple of months (or more if my body tells me i need to) and being fully adherent to 10% or less, journaling and being mindful of my condition. No obsessing over what could happen or what's happened to other people. Daily affirmations of "Healing is always happening" and "Go Low, go slow. This isn't a race"

Wishing every single person on here relaxation and healing. 

[Toast]

Thank you for the update!! It is really helpful to hear that you did stabilize and things got better enough for you to continue to taper. Going too fast was a bump in the road -- you will continue to heal and be able to continue to taper, and it isn't a race, like you mentioned. It's good to see you are still able to maintain some positivity despite your horrible symptoms -- those are really good affirmations. 

 

Sending love and support ❤️  hope you will stop by again sometime for another update!

[ChromeChinchilla]

Thanks for the kind words, it really does help to have encouragement from people who are going through a similar situation. Especially since some people just flat out don't believe that getting off these drugs can cause symptoms like this.

Up until the first of this month I've been doing really great.  My schedule was pretty consistent and my discomfort ratings in my journal were almost entirely 0s with one or two 1s thrown in since my last entry. It wasn't my normal self, but it was totally manageable and at times even enjoyable. I could smile and listen to music and spend time with friends and really feel their presence. Then I hit a bump though and I'm not fully sure what caused it. I need to fully accept that I do not react the same way to things as I did in the past, and that even small changes need to happen one. at. a. time.  I took a quarter of a 25mg diphenhydramine one night for a relentless stuffy nose that was keeping me awake. This happened right after I got my second covid shot, and took my hormone blocker for TRT for the first time in several weeks.  Then the next day my husband got the results of his yearly echo back and they were  for the first time in our relationship of ten years, not "all clear." He might need another artificial heart valve. We don't know for sure and wont know until his follow up echo in 6 months. It's a monitor it more closely and see situation. 

I'm not sure if it's the small amount of antihistamine, my trt or the news about my husband but the last six days have suddenly been rough.  Luckily it's not been all day at 4s and 3s, but for sure hours, with 2 being the norm throughout. Trouble falling asleep, and when I do get sleep, it doesn't feel restful again. Waking up feeling weepy and anxious and unpleasantly charged.   My plan was to stabilize and then to  taper as consistently as possible going forward. With my husband's health concerns however I'm thinking I'll stabilize and if that goes well see if i can get down to 10mg before his next echo then hold there until he's all sorted out. He's been there for me and I need to be there for him. Plus i know it would be a *terrible* idea to be tapering while I'm worrying about him having surgery. 

"One change at a time, no matter how small." Is for sure part of my daily mantras now. 

[ChromeChinchilla]

I know there's nothing to really be done other than just wait it out, but I've been struggling a bit. Part of me just feels so inadequate and weak when it comes to dealing with this stuff as compared to other people on here I'm not going through all that much.  I'm able to sleep pretty regularly, but it never feels remotely restful. When I wake up I'm buzzing with restless, anxious energy in my arms and chest.  After that I spend some time pacing and weeping, feeling like I'm losing my mind.  Eventually I'm able to calm down and get some sense of control and do some deep breathing and I calm down enough to do very basic things or sit down and watch something on Netflix. I don't really enjoy it, and time seems to pass very slowly, but it's better than the pacing and weeping. I also have virtually no apatite and have been really struggling to break 1000 calories a day.

 

That said, I do get better as the day goes on, usually past 4 pm or so but I still feel very numb, tired, and restless. Worryingly although my bedtime and falling asleep has been pretty consistent: Bath at 9, Magnesium pills, in bed and eyes closed by 10, i've been waking up roughly an hour earlier every day for the past 5 days. Really worried that it's going to keep going until I'm waking up right after falling asleep.  It's hard to not buy into that fear when each morning has been following the pattern.  Giving Lactium a try in a few days when it gets here and crossing my fingers that it will help. I know there's no magic pill, but hopefully it'll do something at least slightly positive. 

Reminding myself I'll get better and stabilize and that I'm not as bad as I have been in the past. I got through that and I can get through this. This is likely the result of tapering too fast or pushing my estradiol too low, which are both things i can control.  I will get stable again, I've done it before. Healing is always happening.  

[ChromeChinchilla]

Just wanted to give a cheerful little update so my thread isn't just me coming around in moments of feeling bad. Because my situation isn't all bad.  June thirteenth was the last day I've had anything rank 2 or above on my discomfort scale. Appetite has been getting better day by day since then to the point where it just feels like a normal apatite after over a month of hardly having one.  Yesterday was my birthday which I'm usually pretty neutral about, but I actually charted the first Discomfort: N/A I've had since i started tracking back at the start of May.  While I'm not about to get caught up and declare myself all better or anything, the past week has for sure felt like a nice improvement. Feels very much like I'm moving towards stable so I can hopefully get back to a nice 10% taper in the next month or so. Am going to hold off on trying Lactium until i feel this way for at least a couple weeks. 

Just thought I'd share a little note from my journal yesterday
 

Quote

Discomfort: N/A!  I feel good and like myself!  
Be sure to remember this Chrome. If things get bad again, they WILL get better. You’ve just had 3 pretty good days, followed by today which so far feels pretty great! You’re smiling, enjoying the sun and feeling hopeful and happy but not wired.  Music is nice, and the future seems bright. 

 

[ChromeChinchilla]

Hey again,

So since my last post things have been pretty good over all. The 20th was actually the start of a short but fairly unpleasant wave, peaking around the 25th and ebbing back to WD normal by the 30th.  After that I was actually able to go to my husband's parents for the long weekend and had several back to back "Discomfort N/A" days. I felt good, but not manic, had enough energy to help reside his grandma's house and felt generally good and hopeful about the future.  Since then its been pretty rosy, with mostly 0's, only a couple 1.5s and even a few N/As.  It got me thinking, this feel like stabilization or at least very close to it, so i'm considering tapering again in a couple weeks if this holds up, but I want to make sure I do it as by the book as possible.

I'm currently taking 11.6mg a day at 5pm. 10mg comes from capsule, 1.6 comes from liquid. I've decided on doing the Brassmonkey sliding taper out of a desire to give myself the best possible chance of not crashing again. Every time I've had a really rough time of it has corresponded to my getting careless with my taper rate. I do want to clarify some things though before I proceed.  I know the mods are on the site are very busy, but some conformation on my plans would be great if possible. @brassmonkey @Altostrata 
 

1.  I've been drawing water into my oral syringe after taking the dose and shooting that into my mouth as well to make sure I get all the medication drawn. I only recently read that doing so is not recommended. I was thinking a safe way of remedying that would be when I start tapering, stop doing that and count that change as week 1 of the sliding taper? The tip holds a very small amount of liquid. 
2. As I approach < 10mg I'm obviously going to have to be taking full liquid doses.  Is it recommended that everyone making the switch taper/bridge from pill to liquid? I don't currently have a scale that can do small amounts, but I could easily get one. Then I would want to empty out part of my pill onto a square of freezer paper and make my own 7.5mg pills and take the remaining 2.5 liquid for a week.? Then 5mg pills 5mg liquid, and so on until i'm at full liquid followed by a hold for a week or two before starting my taper up again? 
   
    

[Altostrata]

3 hours ago, ChromeChinchilla said:

 I've been drawing water into my oral syringe after taking the dose and shooting that into my mouth as well to make sure I get all the medication drawn. I only recently read that doing so is not recommended.

 

Sure, you could do that. If you do it routinely, might be slightly more accurate than doing it sometimes.

 

3 hours ago, ChromeChinchilla said:

As I approach < 10mg I'm obviously going to have to be taking full liquid doses. 

 

Fluoxetine comes in a prescription liquid, can you get it? Otherwise, for the transition, you might alternate days where you take 10mg in capsule form and 10mg in liquid form, gradually taking more days in liquid form. (Do not skip any doses.)

[ChromeChinchilla]

23 minutes ago, Altostrata said:

Fluoxetine comes in a prescription liquid, can you get it? Otherwise, for the transition, you might alternate days where you take 10mg in capsule form and 10mg in liquid form, gradually taking more days in liquid form. (Do not skip any doses.)

I actually have both 10mg pills and 20mg/5ml liquid on hand at the moment. My doctor was totally unaware of people having such trouble getting off SSRIs, but has been fully open to prescribing what is needed to taper safely off of it.  I never thought about alternating  days with capsule and liquid, that sounds much easier than what I was planning, thank you! 

[Altostrata]

Please let us know how you're doing.

[ChromeChinchilla]

30 minutes ago, Altostrata said:

Please let us know how you're doing.

I'm doing ok over all, even though I'm in what appears to a bit of a wave that started on the 10th.  So far though its the mildest so far since my problems resurfaced in May from getting carried away with my taper.  Symptoms have been: Low appetite, Low enjoyment, Difficulty focusing, General Fatigue, Feeling suddenly cold even when dressed warmly and Restless energy in my chest/arms.  They haven't risen above 1.5 on my 0/5 discomfort scale and dip down as the day progresses.  Going off my pattern of windows and waves in general I don't see it lasting through to the end of the week. 

Since my last dose adjustment was a little over two months ago I'm feeling like I want to start/start getting ready to start my sliding taper in the next few weeks provided this wave stays mild. As a tentative game plan I'm thinking once this wave ends I'll see how switching over to full prescription liquid goes using the method you suggested. If that goes smoothly I'll make my first reduction shortly after that.  

[Altostrata]

Be patient, don't push your taper!

[ChromeChinchilla]

Just popping in to leave a little update/realization, partly for anyone who's following my thread, partly for myself.

This wave is lasting a bit longer than the previous few. Just yesterday i thought "Hey i feel a bit better" and even had a few minutes of window-like clarity where I actually smiled and enjoyed the world around me.  Today however I've had bouts of pacing and weeping and feeling hopeless and like this is how i've always felt/will always feel.  In this exact moment i'm feeling a bit better and came to a kind of a realization.  Many times at the height of waves I've had the thought of "Maybe i'll just stay on 10mg or so or Prozac indefinitely" and the thought has been tempting.  Then, when I feel a bit better, or am in a full window I think "Jeeze, I want off this stuff." and remember how long it will take to taper off it, lamenting a bit when the answer is 3 years or so if there aren't any major road blocks. 

But...if i'm willing to entertain the idea of being on Prozac forever, I should just apply that to tapering super, super slowly. I guess at some point it just got in my head that "as long as you're tapering you're going to be in pain." but in most cases, mine included, it's only been true with too fast tapers.  I also realize I've also been putting some pressure on myself to get to 10mg by the end of the year. At some point it popped into my head as a goal post, because it was a nice, rounded number, "Easier to deal with" i thought to myself. But drawing 11.6mg worth of Prozac isn't any harder than drawing 10.  So, my goal is still going to be to taper, but I'm going to try to stop assigning goals and dates and just take things as they come.  If i'm able to Brassmonkey down consistently, along the lines of the three years to 0 plan, great. If i have to go even slower or have to take a full on break from tapering for a few months or more, that's fine too. 

I know this is nothing new or revolutionary, its the 3KIS that serve as the foundation of this website, but it's like it's sunk in differently somehow.  I tapered comfortably from 60-11.6 since I first came here,  to the point i mostly forgot what my first bouts of withdrawal felt like. There's no reason that going from 11.6-0 can't be the same. It will just have to be slower, but that's not a bad thing. Slower will, in all likelihood, save me from misery, not cause it.

[ChromeChinchilla]

Well here I am , just shy of two months since my last post. Things have been going pretty ok since then. I actually just realized by looking over my notes today, it's been nearly two months since I had a day where I felt like I was in crisis. Along with my daily notes I've started adding "Today was:" at the end of each day, and I'm actually shocked looking back at how many I rank as "Good/Ok" and have even had a fair amount of "Greats".   I still don't feel fully like my "true" self, but I do have hours, or entire parts of days where I do, and when I fall back from that, it's not so hard that I feel like I'm going crazy.  On good days I cook and clean and mostly enjoy things I normally enjoy, I can even work out at the gym as long as i go easy. On not so good days I mostly just hang out in bed or at my computer, not really enjoying anything, but not feeling like I cant take it anymore.

I haven't gone down in dose at all, but I have been transitioning from pill to liquid since the 26th of July, and have as of two days ago, made it to every day being full liquid dose.  The only real negative change I can think of is the past week when I go to bed I've felt like I've ben walking up to the edge of a really bad panic attack, but I have always been able to breathe and count my way through it. In the past I would have leapt out of bed panting and triggered the whole thing, so that's some really good personal growth I think. 

My plan going forward is to spend a couple weeks at the same dose just to make sure I'm fully used to being on full liquid, then start supplementing with 400UI vitamin D when I wake up in the morning.  I had a test two years ago that showed I was right on the cusp of low but not deficient, and just got one back a few weeks ago that shows i've fallen another couple points down.  After a few weeks of that, if all is well, I'm going to make my fist  reduction using the 10% brassmonkey slide.  
 

[PsychologicalSafe15]

its witdhrawal symptoms appear after 2 months - 6 months of stopping it due to its long  half life.

[ChromeChinchilla]

I don't know if this will ever do anyone any good, but on the off chance it might I figured I'd drop another update.

I've been on a trend of slowly feeling better since I got carried away with my taper in May and feel pretty confident in saying I'm reaching a pretty stable place. When it first started the window and wave back and forth was intense. When I felt bad I was sobbing, pacing, zero apatite, feeling like my skin was crawling, intrusive thoughts, SI and waking up multiple times a night in a fairly panicked state. When I felt better it was mostly defined as just not feeling horrible/in crisis. I didn't enjoy anything and i still felt profoundly trapped in SSRI fallout, but it was somewhat easier to sit with/manage.   I did have a few spurts of good here in there, but it was mostly a flip flop between crisis and hanging in there, but not really living.

I took me a while to realize it, but for the past nearly two months my feeling bad has been just feeling tired/low energy, hit or miss apatite that almost always comes back later in the day, and background anxiety.  There are times, mostly as I'm falling asleep, where I'll have pangs of higher level anxiety or bad feelings, but deep breathing and "changing the channel" is almost always enough to get through them.  Feeling good now features bursts of time where I feel almost completely like myself (sometimes several long beautiful hours strung together, sometimes bit and pieces through the day). Feeling bad or in a wave is just less intense in basically every way, and lasts less long over all. I still have days where I feel very low or extremely flat, but those days aren't dominated with "I'll always feel this way" type thoughts. I haven't sobbed/wept and paced in two months!  

I've been feeling so good recently that I actually booked myself a massage today. I'm not going to lie, the first twenty or so minutes I was fairly high anxiety, thinking "Ok but what happens if i panic or freak out in front of this stranger." But I breathed through it and eventually relaxed enough to just "be" and enjoy the massage. I've been a couple hours and i feel presently relaxed and lightly energized in a good way. Both sitting still for 90 minutes and feeling good about it afterwards would have been 100% off the table for me back in May/June.

I guess my point of my rambling is just to underline, as many others have, that healing happens all the time, even when there's set backs. I know I look at other threads sometimes, see people who have been tapering for a long time and clam up, thinking "How is this person dealing with suffering that much for that long.".  I've been tapering since 2019 and yes, there have been truly awful times, but they've been almost exclusively from me tapering too fast. Going slow and steady is the way to go and helps to avoid a bunch of needless suffering.   I'm for sure not a success story, or ready for my "Here comes the sun" yet, but just wanted to share, partly for me to look back on, partly for others, there 100% can be good times in the taper. 

[ChromeChinchilla]

Welp I feel stupid.  I went to take my dose today and measured it out as usual, then when i squirted it into my mouth I somehow partly miss-aimed and an undetermined amount of it hit my lips and dribbled down my chin and on my shirt. You can do something right a hundred times....  This might be TMI but I got what i could off my chin with my thumb, sucked where it landed on my shirt then took an extra .1ml to make up at least some of what was lost(i take 2.9ml atm).   I know it sounds overly paranoid, but i've been doing well for a while now and was planning on making my first 2.5% reduction on monday.   

Think i should just relax, assume i got close to the right dose today and wait a few extra days before starting my taper provided i feel ok? @brassmonkey @Altostrata. Sorry to bother you with something so silly, but I dont want to make any missteps again. 

[Altostrata]

55 minutes ago, ChromeChinchilla said:

Think i should just relax, assume i got close to the right dose today and wait a few extra days before starting my taper provided i feel ok?

 

Good idea. Don't expect the worst.

[ChromeChinchilla]

Thought I'd drop in for a little update.

Since my last post I have made my first three reductions using the Brassmonkey method.  First reduction was just me not rinsing the syringe and squirting the water into my mouth anymore , then the next two were standard 2.5% drops. It was just going from 11.6 to 11, but i'm still semi proud of doing it. Don't think I've felt much one way or the other as far as symptoms go. My lower GI track has been upset for about a month and a half, and my resting heart rate has gone up by about 1 every day the past five days, but those could be due to life stuff as much as tapering. 

I decided to pause after 3 reductions because my husband's echo got moved up due to him having a bit of tightness in his chest. If he does need another valve replaced, I want to be as stable as possible while that happens, for both our sakes.  I'm pretty worried about it, but trying to not stress or focus on it until we know definitively if he'll need the surgery or not, but still, pausing sounds smart to me. 

[Ktven48]

On 9/20/2021 at 6:00 PM, ChromeChinchilla said:

I don't know if this will ever do anyone any good, but on the off chance it might I figured I'd drop another update.

I've been on a trend of slowly feeling better since I got carried away with my taper in May and feel pretty confident in saying I'm reaching a pretty stable place. When it first started the window and wave back and forth was intense. When I felt bad I was sobbing, pacing, zero apatite, feeling like my skin was crawling, intrusive thoughts, SI and waking up multiple times a night in a fairly panicked state. When I felt better it was mostly defined as just not feeling horrible/in crisis. I didn't enjoy anything and i still felt profoundly trapped in SSRI fallout, but it was somewhat easier to sit with/manage.   I did have a few spurts of good here in there, but it was mostly a flip flop between crisis and hanging in there, but not really living.

I took me a while to realize it, but for the past nearly two months my feeling bad has been just feeling tired/low energy, hit or miss apatite that almost always comes back later in the day, and background anxiety.  There are times, mostly as I'm falling asleep, where I'll have pangs of higher level anxiety or bad feelings, but deep breathing and "changing the channel" is almost always enough to get through them.  Feeling good now features bursts of time where I feel almost completely like myself (sometimes several long beautiful hours strung together, sometimes bit and pieces through the day). Feeling bad or in a wave is just less intense in basically every way, and lasts less long over all. I still have days where I feel very low or extremely flat, but those days aren't dominated with "I'll always feel this way" type thoughts. I haven't sobbed/wept and paced in two months!  

I've been feeling so good recently that I actually booked myself a massage today. I'm not going to lie, the first twenty or so minutes I was fairly high anxiety, thinking "Ok but what happens if i panic or freak out in front of this stranger." But I breathed through it and eventually relaxed enough to just "be" and enjoy the massage. I've been a couple hours and i feel presently relaxed and lightly energized in a good way. Both sitting still for 90 minutes and feeling good about it afterwards would have been 100% off the table for me back in May/June.

I guess my point of my rambling is just to underline, as many others have, that healing happens all the time, even when there's set backs. I know I look at other threads sometimes, see people who have been tapering for a long time and clam up, thinking "How is this person dealing with suffering that much for that long.".  I've been tapering since 2019 and yes, there have been truly awful times, but they've been almost exclusively from me tapering too fast. Going slow and steady is the way to go and helps to avoid a bunch of needless suffering.   I'm for sure not a success story, or ready for my "Here comes the sun" yet, but just wanted to share, partly for me to look back on, partly for others, there 100% can be good times in the taper. 

just letting you know Chrome,

 

This really helped me. Thank you. I am 7 weeks from a bad taper but this gives me hope. 

[ChromeChinchilla]

21 hours ago, Ktven48 said:

just letting you know Chrome,

 

This really helped me. Thank you. I am 7 weeks from a bad taper but this gives me hope. 

I'm really glad my ramblings helped you out a little bit! It's a long and scary process that we've found ourselves in the middle of given that the only way out is through, but we're all a lot stronger than we know/feel at our worst.  Sometimes going "through" means holding still and letting our bodies heal and acclimate at their own pace. It took me a while to realize it, but pausing a taper or going extra extra slow doesn't mean we've failed, quite the opposite, it just means were listening to our bodies and doing what's best for them and they will eventually become stable again.  I know how hard it is to believe this when we're full of that horrible inner restlessness that so many of us get, but it's proven itself to be true over and over on this site. 

I gave your thread a quick read through and saw you had some trouble after your second jab.  My symptoms ramped up a fair bit after my second jab too, but as with every time things have gotten bad, they slowly started to get better again. What I think really helped me was getting as regular as possible with my schedule, getting out every day for  sun walks, even if it was only for five minutes, and keeping myself from doom scrolling this website/googling my symptoms.  It was easier said than done a lot of days, but it all got easier to do as time went on.   

Wishing you nothing but  restful days and lots of healing. 

[Ktven48]

This brought me to tears honestly. I’m trying to practice more patience and being still as you said - letting things heal. I told myself if I didn’t have a panic attack this past week - I was making progress. Low and behold - no panic attack, huge amounts of anxiety and not functioning normally yet but I havent feel too much “crisis mode” for 4/5 days now. Today I even went to my nieces birthday party - a struggle and lots of depressive thoughts about being around “normal” people and how broken I am. But I am trying to be kinder to myself. It can be so hard to do that. I pray for longer windows soon - but I know it will not come on my timeline. 

[ChromeChinchilla]

On 10/23/2021 at 4:38 PM, Ktven48 said:

This brought me to tears honestly. I’m trying to practice more patience and being still as you said - letting things heal. I told myself if I didn’t have a panic attack this past week - I was making progress. Low and behold - no panic attack, huge amounts of anxiety and not functioning normally yet but I havent feel too much “crisis mode” for 4/5 days now. 

That's such good progress! But just remember, even if you do have some panic attacks or bad days, it doesn't discount the good days you've had.  This process is frustratingly back and forth a lot of the time. I'm no guru or anything, but have recently found *some* kind of peace/clarity by at least trying to not get too hung up/frustrated/down on my situation when I have a wave/new symptom crop up. 
 

[ChromeChinchilla]

I logged on today to give a little update that's pretty positive as far as withdrawal stuff goes.

As I mentioned my husband has a heart valve that's showed some issues on his last echo. He has another echo on the 8th, and until then the doctor just said if he had any trouble breathing or sudden fatigue to go to the ER.  For the last week ish he's had a *little* bit of pressure on his chest when he takes full breaths and has been slightly logy, but not enough that he felt like he wanted to go to the ER. Two nights ago he was having actual pain when he was breathing in, and his heart was racing a bit. So we hurried to the ER at 11pm and didn't get home till 6:30. He's alight, his heart is the same, and it looks like he just has a mild chase of bronchitis which he's taking a steroid for, and feeling fine since. 

When we were on the way to the ER/as he was first being seen I didn't even think of W.D, I was worried but not panic attack panic or anything, I was in taking care of husband mode. After we were seen and it looked like he wasn't in any immediate danger though I started to worry about myself quite a bit. I felt really selfish, but i kept worrying that being up so late would cause me to have a panic attack and the panic attack would set me back into pacing sobbing awful mode. It's the biggest trigger of them. I tend to now have them in crisis situations, but rather if i've been up all night and go to sleep in early morning while stimulated, feelings just surge up and BAM, im in terror mode.  

Thing is, when we got home and in bed some time around 7am I fell right asleep, no problem. I woke up a few times and dozed back to sleep on and off till 3pm, then got up, had some food and did some things around the house, then went back to sleep for the night at my usual 11pm.  Today i'm a bit more tired , but feeling pretty WD bassline normal. I even have the desire/energy to re do my aquarium which ive been putting off since my last fish died a couple weeks ago.  

We're stronger than we know, and the old rule of not fortune telling repeated on here so often seems to hold true.  We should be careful to keep to our schedules and avoid extra stress when we can, but life is going to throw wrenches, and worrying about how bad they might impact us the next day can only add to the bad. Even if i do have some fall out from the super late, stressful night down the road, worrying about it happening wont stop it from happening, and might even help *make* it happen.  Still struggling with that myself, but getting through the last few days with no major setbacks has given me some faith in that regard and somewhat relaxed.

[ChromeChinchilla]

Promise this one will be shorter. 

 

Husband had his appointment yesterday and everything looked good. So good in fact his next appointment is in six months instead of three so that's a relief.

 

I'm doing ok. I had a pretty crummy day a few days ago for no describable reason as far as I can tell but it was just one day and I've settled back into my daily normal. It's not a fantastic normal but it's better than I was a few months ago. It feels like there's a veil that's separating me from the world/my regular emotions most of the time. Muted or just going through the motions. Hopefully it will improve 

 

Last month I added a daily rating to my symptom journal. Red being crisis, yellow significant but manageable discomfort, green stable but not myself and blue , feeling good/like myself/window.   I do double up depending on the day, like "today was yellow-green". 

 

In October I had 0 red, 11 yellow, 30green and 4 blue. 

 

I'll probably only do a couple 2.5% drops in November and December because of holidays,then if all goes well hopefully taper more steadily come January. 

 

 

[ChromeChinchilla]

Will probably try for monthly updates now just to touch base and have another place to look to when I'm in waves.  Speaking of, i'm kind of in a wave right now. Yesterday I was anxious and weepy and couldn't really relax or distract very well, but I got through it, today is better but not great.  One of the most concerning symptoms I have on the physical side is GI trouble, inconsistent apatite and weight loss. I'm down 40 lbs from 210 to 170 over the past 5 or so months. Elimination diet didn't really yield any definitive results when cutting out then reintroducing gluten, nuts and dairy one by one. I've got an appointment with a GI specialist later this month with an endoscopy/coloscopy on the table.  Looking around here and on the internet in general, it seems like doing them with no sedation isn't the worst thing in the world, so i'll see if that's an option for me.  

Over all I feel like i'm doing ok, for sure  better than a few months ago, but the last few day have for sure remined me that i'm living kind of a half-life. But it wont last forever, one day I will be fully myself again. 

Red: 0
Yellow: 7
Green: 26
Blue: 11

More blue and less yellow than last month. Green days aren't great, very much 'half-life' but they're much better than being in active crisis mode, so i'm thankful for what seems to be some consistent, albeit slow, healing. Holding my taper until January when all the holiday stuff is out of the way.