Читать книгу Blazing My Trail: Living and Thriving With Autism - Rachel B. Cohen-Rottenberg - Страница 6

From early 2005 until early 2009, I took one 0.5 mg tablet of Lorazepam upon awakening in the morning and another before going to sleep at night. After I had been on the medication for four years, another doctor increased the dosage to 0.5 mg in the morning and 1.0 mg at night. By early 2010, I was taking 2.0 mg per day. A third doctor also put me on Zoloft (an SSRI) and Topamax (for migraine prevention), in addition to Lorazepam and Amitriptyline (a tricyclic antidepressant).

By the spring of 2010, I had begun to realize that the medications, far from helping me, were making it increasingly difficult to manage my life. I was crying almost every day and I was nearly housebound. So I began the process of weaning off all of them—without medical supervision. My primary care doctor had fired me from her practice after I asked for accommodations for my disability, and it took me over a month to find another doctor who would accommodate me and guide me through the weaning process.

Meanwhile, I was on my own.

Tapering off Zoloft, Topamax, and Amitriptyline posed no problem whatsoever. Quitting Lorazepam, however, was another story.

After attempting to withdraw from Lorazepam by decreasing my dosage by 0.5 mg per week, I suffered an acute reaction. I began to have a tremendous amount of anxiety, and my sleep worsened. After I stopped taking the medication altogether, I hardly slept for two nights. I was sweating through my clothes. I was crying and frightened. I was in so much physical pain that it was almost unbearable. I felt as though my body and mind were coming apart. I found myself pacing up and down the floors of our house saying, “Misery, misery, misery.”

Without a physician to consult, I couldn’t understand why the withdrawal was having this impact.

With nowhere else to turn, I went online and looked up information on how to taper off Lorazepam without pushing myself to the edge of sanity. When I did, I found out that it’s a benzodiazepine and a tranquilizer. In other words, it’s in the same category as Valium and Librium, and it’s highly addictive. In fact, in 1975, the U.S. Department of Justice demanded that benzodiazepines be classified as schedule IV drugs under the Controlled Substances Act.

And yet, this medication had been prescribed for me by three different doctors—even after I had told them, in no uncertain terms, that I absolutely did not want to take anything narcotic or addictive. What part of that statement did they not understand? Or did they just not know what Lorazepam does?

As I soon found out, I was not alone in suffering acute withdrawal symptoms. According to Professor Malcolm Lader, member of the UK Committee on the Review of Medicines, Lorazepam is a particularly difficult drug to withdraw from. “When somebody comes into my office and says that they’ve been trying to stop their Lorazepam,” he said, “my heart sinks, because I know I shall have twice as much of a problem as getting them off, say, Valium. The symptoms are more severe, they’re more persistent, more bizarre, and people are much more distressed by them.” (Ashton, “A Problem”)

In my online travels, I found a support site for people seeking to withdraw safely from benzodiazepines—and I learned that, when done properly, the process takes six to 12 months. So, in early May, I put myself on a stabilization dose of 1.5 mg per day, and I found myself able to sleep and to tolerate being in my body again. After three weeks, I began tapering very slowly, cutting my dosage by very small decrements, until I finally finished my taper, under the care of a new primary care doctor, eight months later.

Suffice it to say that, even over the course of a slow taper, the withdrawal process was brutal. Every time I made a cut in my dosage, I experienced extreme amounts of muscle pain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, and exhaustion. I was determined to rid Lorazepam from my body, though, and by the grace of God, I have.

But the havoc this medication wrought over the years I took it is, unfortunately, an all-too-common effect of benzodiazepines.