 Re: Drug Question......
Well, it's 5:30 in the morning of my second day in this cycle [nope, I haven't convinced myself do go back on the lithium; though that last valley was not pleasent. I know the longer I wait the harder & worse things will be. But....]
Anyhow, I am at a point where telling [and thus living through] the events of that evening won't bring me down. On the other hand, I'm also at the point where I'm going to end up with a short story, I'm afraid.
I did tell this, and in a decent amount of space, in a thread sometime ago. I tried to look for it but this forum only goes back to the start of the year [just a month or two too short]. So I'm afraid you'll just have to get the unabridged version [on the bright side, in this version, you'll know everything.
Ok, here goes:
"Why I Hate Zoloft and how I almost died because of it�:
The initial situation/setting:
It�s the last 6 �12 months of my marriage. A few months back I was forced to leave work on disability [due mostly to the deterioration of the bone disease in my back. But also due in large part to disruptive mood swings]. My wife & I were fighting quite often. [The only time things had ever got physical was when my wife would get so frustrated that I could find and push her buttons yet she couldn�t do the same to me. At such times she would take a swing or two at me. I would always respond (always, and this is important to keep in mind later) by punching her in the arm as a reminder that we weren�t supposed to get physical in our arguments. Sometimes it was kinda of a hard punch; leaving a bruise on her arm. But it was always only the arm. However, being [mostly] non-physical, didn�t mean they weren�t some bad & violent fights � they could be and were; and they got progressively more so as that last year wore on].
Now granted a part of the reason that we were fighting more often and more intensely was the fact that I was out of work and we were going to lose our house. More of a cause though was that we were both doing speed quite often, which made her a lot more snappy. The biggest cause, however was my depression/mood swings [a couple of years after she left I came across a journal that she had been keeping that year. Reading it really made me think and review the way I had viewed it all � and I realized just what kind of hell I had put her through. I�m glad our daughter wasn�t old enough for it to be much of a memory]. One minute I would be ecstatic the next I was in tears [yes the speed didn�t help in this, but it wasn�t the cause. I had been doing speed, on and off, for years and that had never happened]. Of course I couldn�t see the mood swings; I just knew I was depressed � as I had been to some extent for years.
Seeing how bad things were getting my wife pushed, prodded & nagged until I agreed to see a marriage counselor with her. At the first session the counselor, based upon what was said, gave us both a test for clinical depression. A score of 8 or so was considered normal, while anything over 12 [if I remember right] was considered depression. My wife scored a 5 [or so]. I scored around 33. Thus being diagnosed as depressed, this counselor had me see a shrink. So I go see the shrink [mind you, this was all through Kaiser, that should go a long way in explaining the actions of the 'Mental Health Care Workers']. The guy read the report of the counselor and then he listened to me [for less than 10 minutes; more time was spent reading the report]. His conclusion: I was depressed � not manic-depressed, just plain old vanilla depressed. He gives me a prescription for Zoloft and says to see him in a month [I think it was a month � I never made it to whatever date it was].
So I started taking the Zoloft. Keep in mind, too, my bone disease. This was a cause [and still is] of a great deal of constant pain [which, even then, I knew added to the depression]. Since Drs., even back then, wouldn�t give me more than Motrin, I used whatever pain killers I could get my hands on; mostly Vics and such. I did tell the shrink I took Vics; I didn't want a bad reaction from mixed drugs. So they couldn�t have reacted with the Zoloft � he would have said something. Or so I would've hoped. I don�t know how much � if any at all � the speed did.
Ok, so that�s the background. I know it�s a lot, but I warned you that I get wordy [more so than usual] when I�m in a manic state�I tried to find an older thread in which I had told this story � in a much more compact form. No luck, though. Obviously.
The Event:
I was told to expect it to take a few weeks for the Zoloft to have any effect. But before two weeks had ended it could be felt. I wasn�t breaking down into tears anymore. Nor was I staying up days at a time [before, when I had used speed, I had only stayed up a day or two at a time. Those past several months it was more like 4 to 6, with a good 20 hours or more in between. That was the bi-polar, I know now. I stayed up 3 to 5 sometimes if I go off the lithium, no speed involved]. It seemed that my moods were just becoming one. And that one, more and more, was anger. I got mad and snapped at everything. My wife just started to stay out of my way [we had separate rooms by that point and I would just lock myself up in mine for long periods of time]. Neither of us had really seen that I was becoming this real angry guy � it kinda snuck up on us. One day, though, it all came to a head.
I don�t remember what it was that triggered it, I just remember that on this particular evening my wife decided that she wasn�t going to avoid me and/or let something I did/said go. We got into an argument. It got worse and worse. It got so loud that a couple of our friends, who lived a couple of houses down, heard us and came by just in case [it was nothing new to them; especially of late]. Damn good thing they did.
They came in, observed and waited [they didn�t try to intervene right off; they knew better with us and were just waiting for a good place to jump in and calm things down � as had been done many a time]. Sometime after they came in my wife had � once again � reach a point of frustration. She didn�t take a swing at me though. She knocked whatever it was I was working on off of my work table. Well, that did it; that set me off. I shoved her away from my table and hit her several times on the arm; over and over. For some reason, I�m still ever grateful for, even then I couldn�t bring myself to hit her in the stomach or face [not much of a consolation considering what came next, still though]. She backed away from me into the living room where our friends were. I followed, still taking punches. One friend started to say something. I rounded on her, my face totally flushed and red [I was later told]. She, too, backed away. I went to my wife again. This time she did swing at me [not to get a reaction this time, but in defense. Obviously]. This made me even madder. I remember that right then I was literally seeing black: everything had a black haze to it.
I charged my wife; pushing/throwing her to the couch. I then jumped on her and proceeded to put my hands around her neck and started to choke her. At this both of the friends jumped on me and dragged me off, forcing me into my room [to this day I couldn�t say what would have happened if they weren�t there. I�d like to think that I would have stopped on my own � I just can�t say. A thought that still give me chills; I�m not like that]. The other friend took my wife back to their place [thankfully, our daughter had slept through it all].
Not soon after the police came [other neighbors had called on us]. Nobody mentioned the choking [or any of the violence] but the police did insist that we both couldn�t stay at the house that night. So arrangements were made for my wife [and daughter] to stay at another friend�s house in Alameda. Once the cops were assured that my wife would be going, that she would stay next door until she was picked up, and that I was calm, they left.
The other friend had stayed with me. He ran up the street and got a bottle of Vodka [I used to drink quite heavily, but had stopped a few years back. It still took a good deal of hard stuff to have any effect on me]. He wanted me to mellow out more. To that end, he also gave me a couple of Valiums; and I took 4 or 5 Vics.
I did mellow out, and went right from mellow straight to depression. I realized what I had done � I couldn�t believe it actually � and went totally nuts over how I had screwed things up; naturally the tears began flowing freely again. My friend tried to help, but I would have no part of it. In my head things just got blacker and blacker [though I did not let that on to him]. I finally decided that what was needed was for me to kill myself. That would solve everything, I figured [at this point we had barely made a dent in the vodka bottle; so it wasn't the booze causing that thought]. I also knew that any move I might have made towards that end would be actively prevented by my friend. So I made plans around him; plans in which he could actually assist me without knowing it. As we [I should say �I�, he wasn�t really drinking] continued to drink I started to complain about pain in my back; more and more. I also started to act as if I was getting over things, while also acting the mellow tipsy part. After a bit I told him that the pain was getting too bad, and that I had no more pain killers. I talked him into calling another friend of ours [who sniffed heroin] to bring by some for me for my back [I had done it on occasion. only when the pain got real bad: it was bad enough being hooked to Vics and such, I didn�t want the full package deal]. He finally agreed.
When he went off to make the call I got into his Valium bottle and took another 10 or so [I didn�t want him to notice any missing or I would have taken more]. I also took the rest of the Vics I had [contrary to what I had told my friend, I still had 15 or so]. Then I saw the bottle of Zoloft, which was still mostly full. I took the whole bottle.
Finally the other friend came over and I sniffed [I think it was] � to a whole gram of heroin [that is, � to 1 gram of tar melted down and mixed with flour until it made a dough, which was then baked in an oven set at 100F and then turned to powder; it was a way my friend came up with to do tar. He didn�t want to use a needle and hadn�t yet figured out that it could be smoked]. I continued drinking, too.
At this point my memory starts to get fuzzy. I do remember that I lost control of my composure again and started crying my eyes out about what I had done, and how I had ruined everything, etc. I don�t remember if I actually came out and told them I what I had did, or what. I just remember being confronted with the empty Zoloft bottle and spilling the beans.
Needless to say they rushed me to the hospital. They told the ER people what I had done [not mentioning the heroin � just upping the amount of Vics (they thought)I had taken...
I remember being helped onto a table, given a shot of something and made to drink charcoal [nasty sh*t, let me tell you]. That was it for me for the next 30 hours or so.
I eventually woke up [which, I was told, was something they weren�t sure I would do or not] with several varieties of hangovers. I stayed there for most of another day, in and out of it. Finally I was coherent enough to go home. Before I could go home, though, I had to go through this crap about how I didn�t want to kill myself, and that it was all just an over reaction from the nights events, blah, blah, blah.
Things were never the same after that. If there was any saving of my marriage, that had put the last nail in the lid; even though she didn�t leave for 6 more months. Then,6 months after [u]she[/u] left I lost the house and became homeless. This was two months after I had had my neck broken and was in a halo and body cast [after all that had happened I still let a Dr. from Kaiser talk me into having this grand operation that was to straighten my back and get rid of a large fraction of the pain. What was I thinking? It was Kaiser! Naturally it didn't go as planned: Not only did it not straighten me and ease the pain, it left me partially paralized and it more than doubled the pain! - But that's another story].
I was also finally diagnosed as being bi-polar. I was prescribed lithium and, once the dosage was figured out, was finally set to [almost] normalcy..
So you can see why I hate Zoloft, and how it almost killed me. I am 100% certain that it was responsible for the state of mind I was in that led up to the events of that evening.
Sorry that this is so long. Like I said, I had told this story in an earlier post in much less [much much less] space, but I couldn't locate it.
Quite a wordy person, ain't I?
[This message has been edited by Metaphysicist (edited 04-13-2002).]
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2002-04-02, 03:02
