Withdrawal

This weekend was a little rough for me. Starting Friday afternoon, I was feeling bad. I have this dizzy thing that happens to me every now and then and it started again on Friday. Normally, I will have it starting late afternoon and then its gone in the morning. This time it lasted until Sunday night (when I figured out what it was). I would love to explain it to you, but...I'll do my best. It is kindof a dizziness, but not like a normal dizziness. And, nothing I did or didn't do made it worse or better. Didn't matter if I was sitting, laying, standing...these waves of dizziness rush around my eyes. Well, we were trying to figure it out all day yesterday. We came up with several options - low blood pressure (we took mine several times and it was like 95/65 or 105/67 each time, which is low for me. I normally average 120/80 when I'm at the doctor.), hormonal imbalance, vertigo, inner or middle ear infection, or even sinus congestion. But, I had taken claritin d and tylenol and didn't feel any congestion, so I didn't think it was that. When I still felt the dizziness Saturday morning, I was irritated - it was usually gone by morning. Then I laid around all day Saturday, and it never went away. I went out with friends for a birthday and still felt it all night. Then it was still there on Sunday, and I was really pissed. I was crying on Saturday, cause I didn't know how to stop it. Its not like a normal sick feeling, where if you lay down, you feel ok. No, all I had to do was move my eyes and I would feel it...and sometimes I didn't have to move at all. Well...my mom and I had come to the conclusion it must be low blood pressure, when my dad asked if that was a side effect of the effexor. I thought, no, actually high blood pressure is a side effect. And then I remembered, damn, I forgot to take my effexor last night, and I had already forgotten it the last couple of nights. So, that got me thinking - I went online and googled something about effexor withdrawal and one of the first pages was talking about "brain shivers." The more I read, it was spot on to what I was feeling. For those of you that don't know, effexor is a medication for anxiety/depression and I've been on it for several years. There are horror stories out there about coming off of it. I promise, just google it and you will find plenty. I was reading these stories and I started crying, not sure why, it just started. I realized I was going through withdrawal from effexor. I was emotional, crying at the drop of a hat, those damn "brain shivers," my stomach was upset, I felt fluish - all cold and sweaty at the same time. It took several hours after I took an effexor, but it started going away. The dizziness went away, but I still felt weird. Its finally gone - thank God. Its really scary to think I have to come off of it eventually. People talk about having to take weeks off of work when they go off of it, because of how bad it is. SCARY! Not looking forward to going off of it for real...and I won't be missing any doses again!!