Medicine

I've often been puzzled by my doctor's inability to prescribe pain medications. It seems that people abuse these medications and so we can't have them if we need them. This seems sad to me. On the other hand, I've become very anxious about my health wondering if I will get any worse. It is quite funny to me that my doctor will give me all sorts of powerful anti-anxiety medications that have all sorts of reactions. I have been addicted to one, Zyprexa, because my doctor gave me free samples and no prescription. I did not know I had one of the most addictive drugs that there is, I only knew that it relieved my symptoms of anxiety though it did make me hungry. One day after taking 3 of the free bottles I ran out of these capsules. I did not think it a big deal. Soon, my hands started shaking and I couldn't stop it. My head was spinning with all sorts of wild thoughts and my stomach was churning with nausea. Somehow I knew what I needed was my medicine.

I called my doctor of course but I was told that I could not have an appointment for 2 and a half weeks. I told her about my symptoms and that I believed that I needed this medicine and she told me that the doctor had other patients besides me. She became very cross with me. I started to cry. My husband also told me that if the doctor gave me this medicine without a prescription then all of my symptoms must be hormones or pms or some other female hystera. He told me that the doctor would not give me something so dangerous without a warning. But he did. When faced with everyone's disbelief, I just started repeating myself over and over again. I looked up the drug on the internet but no one would look at the articles, telling me that you "can read anything on the internet". Soon however, as I spent time walking back and forth so much that I got terrible shin splints in my legs and I kept crying and throwing up so much that even my husband began to think I might truly be ill.

Finally, in desperation, my husband and I waited outside the clinic for my doctor to come to work. We were going to grab him before he entered the clinic and explain to him I needed this medicine or something to help with withdrawal if I couldn't have it. It was unreasonable to expect me to wait for an appointment for a couple of weeks when I was in such a state. The doctor was very nice and understanding and I was so glad that finally someone seemed to feel I wasn't crazy or lying. He validated that what was happening to me was what did happen to people after they took this drug for this amount of time. At last! I was so glad that my terrible experience was going to be over. When we went inside, the lady who makes appointments had such a fit I was very embarrassed! If I could I would've left right then I was so mortified. "She can't do that." she kept saying. She was so angry that I had met the doctor outside and she gave me such horrible looks. The doctor had to calm her, she was yelling that his whole schedule was ruined! I hated to ruin anyone's schedule with my health problems!

What was funny about that was, unknown to me, my period of withdrawal was just about over. When I got a prescription for Zyprexa it no longer worked for me at all, it just makes me tremendously sleepy. Zyprexa is a drug that changes an entire area of the brain, they often give it to anorectics because a weight gain of 10 pounds or more is common. I read in Andrew Solomon's book how he tried unsuccessfully for years to stop taking Zyprexa and takes it even now today. He wanted to stop because he would suddenly become so hungry that he fled his apartment in the middle of the night to get more food. The area of the brain that this drug works on happens to be next door to the hunger mechanism of our brains. It made him carry all this extra weight and he didn't want to be fat, but the withdrawal symptoms were so terrible that he always started taking it again!

I don't blame my doctor, my husband loves free samples and is like a kid in a candy store sometimes asking the doctor constantly for them. He likes free! When this new drug Zyprexa came out the doctor had a lot of free samples and perhaps he didn't know very much about the drug himself. It was funny that he would not give me pain meds because they are so addictive and then he gave me Zyprexa!

My step daughter uses a great deal of sarcasm. She said that it is okay if they mess you up, as long as you don't enjoy it.

I think that if someone had believed me and I had gotten a prescription that Zyprexa would have kept on working. Somehow going through withdrawal made Zyprexa a drug that will never work for me. This is sad as my symptoms of anxiety have gotten so much worse and there is this medicine that will help that I cannot take! I find it a hard cross to bear that people do not believe me. I do believe in strange things like reincarnation and astrology and karma and people mark me off as a flake. I quite like to think that we will live again, what a horrible world it would be if this was the one chance we got! So many people who are forced by circumstances to only suffer and die, all those who die young, and all those people who've lived horrible lives and we are supposed to think they may go to heaven and then they may not but anyway one life is your one chance? I hardly think a loving God would do that. My version of reality might be different from most peoples, but that doesn't make it wrong. (I do keep a great deal of what I think to myself these days) My family came from little towns in Alabama, where poverty was so bad that my father often only had wild berries he had gathered for himself to eat. (His father spent every dime the family had on whiskey) My mother became very ill during the Great Depression and doctors were only seeing the wealthy and so she almost died! My father was brutally raped by another man when he was very young, and he felt as though the whole world hated him and wanted him to die. No one was taking care of my parents and they hardly knew how to take care of children when I and my brother came along. We grew wild, we hit the front door early in the morning and didn't return until nightfall. We played in the woods from dawn until dusk and spent as little time in our own home as possible. If there is one thing I know it is how to endure, I can take a great deal of pain and a great deal of people being mean to me. In fact, all that is just normal. Still I wonder why the world has to be this way for me, now I am an adult and I pay my doctor bills and I have health insurance and I am still no better off than before. When pain does get bad I use medications to sleep through those bad days, I really like Nyquil cold and flu medicine!

The point I am trying to make is that it is a good idea to educate yourself about the medicine you take. We can no longer depend on our doctors. I once read "I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can" about a woman who was told by her doctor to throw her pills in the toilet! She was going through withdrawal but had no idea that was what it was! She, like me, understood that the medicine she was taking had caused it, but she foolishly did what the doctor told her to do. We should understand withdrawal and the body's need for a drug that your body had grown accustomed to. Later she was told that if she had taken just one pill, it would have helped her awful symptoms a whole lot. She suffered needlessly, and she suffered even though she had wealth and a college education and paid a great deal of money for a doctor. She was addicted to Valium. Nowadays you cannot get valium except from a psychiatrist. When a new drug is introduced, sometimes it is a while before doctors know everything about it. I don't understand how this happens, I only know that it happened to me.

I went to the doctor and asked for something for pain just last week, and he told me that these drugs were much too addictive for him to prescribe for me! Is that funny or what??!!!!!!