I wrote last week about how I was stopping the new medication that I was on for my eating disorder. I was a little disappointed to be stopping it because I wanted to see if it was going to work, but I was just not happy with the side effects that I was having and they were starting to affect my life more than I was ok with. At first, they didn’t seem that bad. But they started to get worse and the benefits I was seeing weren’t worth the issues I was having.
I’ve been slowly decreasing my dosage and it will still be another week before I’m off it completely. And technically the medication can be in my system for another 6 weeks so there is a chance I will still experience some of the side effects for a while once I am done. The thing that bothered me the most and got me to want to stop was the vertigo. And fortunately, that has pretty much stopped. I still have a few moments of vertigo, but they are mild and brief. It’s nothing like what I experienced a week ago when I wasn’t able to sit without falling over. I have a feeling the pins and needles feeling in my hands and feet will take a long time to go away. But that is more of an annoyance to me than an issue so I’m ok with that taking longer.
I did do a lot of research before starting this medication and I was aware of a lot of the side effects. Of course, there are hundreds of potential side effects with any medications so I try to just look at the big ones that people have and not the little random ones. But I guess I should know better than that because I have a history of being the person who gets the one in a million side effects. But I also know that reading all of the random things can be scary and I don’t want to freak myself out before starting something.
I mentioned in my workout recap post that my workouts were not that great last week because I was dealing with horrible nausea again. I also mentioned that I expected that it was going to be an easier week for me because it was supposed to be the week that I got my period so things would be getting better. But I didn’t have my period that week. I knew I wasn’t pregnant and I knew I was under a ton of stress so I didn’t worry too much about it. But when my stress level went down and I still didn’t have my period, I started to worry a little bit since I usually am not late. For some reason, I was looking at the side effects of this medication and happened to see that one of the random and rare things can be irregular or changes with menstrual cycles. And I knew that there was a good chance that the medication was the cause of this.
Irregular cycles could be a good thing if I could guarantee that I would have fewer cycles a year, but it could also make PMS or periods longer (like what I dealt with recently with two weeks of PMS). I don’t want to risk having longer PMS or periods for the off-chance that I will have fewer cycles a year. I want to keep my cycles regular so I know when to expect things and to be able to plan things out. I can’t do anything now since I’m working at coming off the medication now, but I’m so glad I’m doing that because I don’t want to have to deal with this any longer. It’s a side effect I wish I knew about because I might not have taken the risk with taking it knowing how bad things already are for me.
I know that this isn’t my therapist’s fault. She warned me about the major side effects and gave me information on the other side effects. I probably should have been a better advocate for myself and looked into the side effects before taking it, even if that meant going down the rabbit hole and looking at the one in a million ones. I was just so excited to see if this medication was going to work and I didn’t want to look into the problems. But now I’m dealing with the issues with it and I’m just hoping that it’s out of my system soon.
I guess I just have to be grateful that I did decide to stop the medication last week so I already started working on decreasing the dosage so that I am almost done. I didn’t let the idea of success cloud my head and make me ignore the pain I was in. And now I just have to work through this and hopefully, I’ll be back to my normal self again soon.
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