Some encouragement for you

I have posted my success story here before, years ago.  But I wanted to post it again for those of you who are here now and didn't get to read it. 

 

I am 8 years benzo free.  I had two run-ins with benzos, the first in 2008 with alprazolam and the second in 2012 with temazepam. 

 

In the summer of 2008, I was battling the increasingly severe symptoms of asthma. At the time, I thought I had a lung infection that would just not go away. I now realize that I was experiencing the symptoms of environmental illness. I had become highly sensitized to the chemicals I was coming in contact with on a daily basis.

 

I had bought a new detergent that was really too strong for me, and by the time I realized that there might be a connection between my symptoms and my detergent, it was too late. I had developed chemical pneumonia.

 

I called my Naturopath and asked for some supplements for pneumonia. The dose of the herb and vitamin combo she recommended was quite large, but I complied thinking it was the only way to kill the infection. I’m a very small person with a very sensitive system. The dose of vitamin A and Zinc that apparently cures the average person poisoned me. I began to feel extremely thirsty all the time. I could not get enough water, ever. I began to urinate enormous amounts of liquid every twenty minutes or less. I got myself in even deeper when I decided to treat the poisoning by trying to sweat it out, speeding up the process of dehydration already begun. After about three days, I felt like I was going to die, so it was off to the hospital. There it was found that I had sweated and peed away all of my electrolytes. I was basically peeing out exactly what I had put in, pure water. I received IV fluids and was sent home.

 

That is when the real mayhem began. I still had severe mineral deficiencies, and as a result, I began to have the first panic attacks I had ever experienced that were not related to some sort of emotional stress. I also stopped sleeping. I panicked and went back to the hospital, where they diagnosed me with anxiety and sent my home with my first benzodiazepine, Ativan. I had enough for about 5 days. I was so relieved to finally be able to sleep and to calm down that I decided to go to my doctor and get some more magic pills. She wanted to give me some Ambien, but I had heard scary things about Ambien, so strangely enough, I asked for Alprazolam (Xanax), not realizing that Ambien (a “non-benzodiazepine” or “z-drug”) and Xanax are both potentially very dangerous drugs. I was prescribed 1 milligram, much more than the paltry .25 mgs of Ativan I had been prescribed at first. One milligram; it seemed like such a small dose. I wouldn’t find out until much later that one mg of Xanax is roughly equivalent to 20 mgs of Valium.

 

Xanax hits you like a Mack truck. As soon as it kicked in, I felt very dizzy and could no longer walk. All I could do was get in the bed and pass out. The next morning I was very tired and weak, but happy; so happy! I couldn’t understand why I’d had any reservations at all about taking sleeping pills! Everything seemed good and calm and mellow. Nothing was wrong. The world suddenly seemed like a much safer and nicer place to be. Unfortunately, this state was not to last very long.

 

My memory here becomes a bit hazy (benzos are amnesic drugs). I believe it was between 3 and 5 days later when I had my first real panic attack, not like those wimpy ones I’d taken the pills for in the first place. This was white-hot terror. It began with a hot flash and ended with me rocking back and forth in utter horror, tears running down my face, finally deciding to take my “sleeping pill” at 5:00 PM because my “condition” had returned and I “needed it”. It follows, of course, that I would need more medication if I was going to have to use the pills for more than just going to sleep. My doctor prescribed two more milligrams to be taken “as needed”.

 

As it turned out, the more pills I took, the more I needed. Eventually I was cutting them in half and spreading my daily dose of 3 milligrams throughout the day to avoid inter-dose withdrawal and the dreaded panic attacks. Three weeks after my original dose of Xanax, I realized that the pills were making me very, very ill. For the first time in my life, I felt suicidal. I was terrified. I stopped taking my pills, expecting a few nights of insomnia and then a gradual return to health. That is not what happened. What followed cannot even be imagined by a person who has never experienced it.

 

My memory of the first few weeks after I stopped taking Xanax is very hazy, like the memory of a really bad nightmare. For the first couple of nights I stayed at a friend’s house because I knew things were likely to be difficult, and I did not want to subject my three boys to what I knew I had to go through. I threw up all night long. Every morsel of food that I managed to swallow came up within a few minutes of it going down. My skin felt like I had been dipped in a vat of boiling hot oil, like I was being cooked from the inside out. My heart rate was usually between 110 and 140 bpm. I had convulsions, seizures, visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions and severe depersonalization and de-realization (feeling as if I was a different person and that nothing was real). I went 2 weeks without any sleep at all and became very, very suicidal. I had to be watched 24/7. My perception of time and space was distorted. I was angry. I had no positive emotions whatsoever for many, many weeks.

 

Acute withdrawal lasted for about a month. After that, my symptoms were somewhat less severe, though still miserable. I was always in enormous amounts of pain. The pain in my chest was so bad that it felt like I’d broken some ribs. In fact, I became convinced I had done so somehow, so I insisted on getting X-rays, which showed nothing. Due to the fact that my immune system had basically collapsed, the pneumonia I had only partially treated came raging back much worse than it had been before.  I had to take antibiotics.  Killing the infection caused me to cough so hard that I dislocated my ribs repeatedly.

 

Sleep returned gradually, first 2 hours, then 4, then 6 and 7. I had to sleep propped up with many pillows because of chest and shoulder pain, and because my rapid heart rate made me more uncomfortable and anxious when I was flat on my back. Every night I had to tell myself these words “you’ve slept through worse, you can do it.” And most nights it helped.

 

One year after my Xanax cold turkey, I was feeling much better, though not completely back to myself. I was left with lingering breathing problems and severe muscular tension. My ability to handle stress was greatly diminished. But I had survived and I was functioning relatively normally. I was immensely proud of myself for enduring and healing from such a horrific experience, and I thought I was much wiser for it. If somebody had told me at that time that 4 years later I would put another benzodiazepine in my mouth, I would not have believed them.

 

Part 2

 

The little blue death pill is how I came to think of the Xanax that I had taken. Who in their right mind would twice take a death pill? Nobody in their right mind. But people in their wrong mind might.

 

2 years after my near-death experience with Xanax, in the fall of 2010, I began work as a letter carrier for the United States Postal Service. It was very hard work for someone like me, but I was determined. I pushed and pushed until I had well learned my route and my other duties, ignoring all the signs that the job might be too much for me. I pushed through a brutal case of bronchitis worsened by ink fumes, numerous sleepless nights, and despite my misgivings about the newspaper ink coating my hands black, pesticide drift blowing into the open windows of my delivery vehicle, and the extreme stress of working for a sociopathic postmaster.

 

By Summer, I had reached the end of my tether. Stress induced insomnia had caused me to go to work zombie-tired many times. One time in particular there were consequences. I made a mistake which is considered serious by the postal service. I failed to shake a mailbag to check for any packages that might have escaped my notice, and thus missed an important piece of mail, an express package. For this, I was to be disciplined. This was my wake-up call. It was time to quit and re-group, and fortunately for me, that was an option I had which would not cause my financial ruin.

 

I am fully convinced now that my time at the Postal Service contributed in large measure to a significant decline in my health. Although I have always been aware that I am highly sensitive to the smell of newspaper ink, I did not know until recently that it contains Bisphenal-A, or BPA, which is an endocrine disruptor. An endocrine disruptor is a chemical that can mimic our own hormones, and thus cause illness associated with hormonal imbalance.

By the fall of 2010, I was experiencing pronounced symptoms of hormonal imbalance, much more severe than I had ever experienced before. By winter, I was so concerned about my symptoms that I felt I must take action. Past experience had taught me that doctors often mean trouble, so I tried to treat myself, with disastrous consequences. My attempts at treating my symptoms drove me into a state of crisis, at which point I decided to once again risk putting my health into the hands of my Naturopath. Her treatments drove me still deeper into crisis. The combination of my already highly sensitized nervous system and the extra stress of almost selling our house sent me into a final tailspin from which I felt I would not be able to recover.

 

I was not sleeping again. For months I had existed on between 2 and 5 hours of sleep per night, when what I really required was nine. After the house selling debacle, I simply stopped sleeping and went into a state of extreme anguish. I hesitate to call it depression because it was way beyond that. It was agony, both mental and physical. I felt I’d been thrown right back into the jaws of the Xanax beast even though I hadn’t touched a pill in 4 years.

 

I have an idea about why this became so unbelievably severe. I once read the story of a man who had been through a very difficult benzodiazepine detox. Years later he decided to undergo intravenous vitamin C therapy, and during the therapy, the very same withdrawal symptoms he had experienced years before during his detox returned upon him. I surmise that the detoxification process that the vitamin C therapy initiated liberated drug residue stored in his tissues. This is simply a hypothesis of mine, but if true, it would certainly explain why I felt three years after taking Xanax that I had been thrown back into the deep pit of suffering I thought I had forever escaped. All of the treatments I had attempted in an effort to fix my hormonal imbalance were initiating a massive detoxification process which was simply too much for me to handle all at once.

 

I eventually came to the point where I was in so much mental and physical agony from my exhaustion that I was beginning to have those suicidal thoughts again. This time I’m sure I would not have acted upon them. But what I was feeling was so intolerable that I eventually allowed a family member to take me to the hospital where I was admitted to a locked psychiatric ward. This is very difficult for me to tell. As I sit here typing, the tears are welling up for so many reasons: Pride, shame, trauma. It is not okay in our culture to lose control. The psych ward….oh so many negative connotations. I don’t have to explain. You already know. “I’m not one of those people,” I want to say, “I’m different. I didn’t really belong in that hospital. I’m not crazy, I just had insomnia.” But I’m not going to say those things. Every person I met in that hospital was a person like me. They were people overwhelmed, bodies overwhelmed by our toxic world.

 

The only thing friendly about a psych ward are the other patients. The system itself is harsh and unbending, and you don’t get out unless you comply. I begged to be given anything other than benzodiazepines. In spite of that, on my first night I was handed a little green and white pill with a name that ended in “pam”. I knew what that meant. It was a benzo. I asked the med nurse if it was, indeed, a benzodiazepine, and she confirmed that, yes, it was. I told her that I had specifically asked the man who admitted me to relay to my doctor that I would not be taking any benzodiazepines. Was there anything else? Anything that would help me sleep without causing a brutal addiction? No? Why not? I can’t take that pill!

 

But take it I did. I was approaching sleep psychosis. I needed to sleep. I had a deadly fear of going one more night without. So down the hatch it went and I went out like a light on the nasty plastic mattress. And woke at two in the morning. Wide awake. So down to the front desk I went to ask for another pill, and down it went too. In the morning, I felt groggy and sick, but once that feeling wore off, I felt great! It was like the first time I took Xanax, everything was roses! I was in a locked psychiatric ward, but I was happy. I loved all my fellow patients, I loved the nice mental-wellness classes we had to attend. I was finally going to get better.

 

The only problem was that little green and white pill. That had to go. I was not going to fall for that again, no way! I was too smart for that. And thus began a harrowing journey through the nightmare-land of psychiatric drugging. I tried a different pill almost every day, and by the time I was released from the hospital, I felt like I had been through a meat grinder. And I was on Temazepam. Every medication given to me had made me incredibly ill, one of them dangerously so. Every one of them except for the big T.

 

Part 3

 

I knew I had to taper, that much I had learned from my experience with Xanax. I had taken Xanax for a measly 3 weeks, and quitting it cold turkey cost me over a year of illness. I perceived that it had almost cost me my life. Benzos have very few side effects when compared to other psychiatric drugs, but once one of them gets its hooks in you, you cannot just quit.

I was reeling from the chemical merry-go-round I had experienced in the hospital. I felt like a person with Autism. I had to protect myself from light, sound, smells and anything that might cause any kind of emotional stress. Some days I would regularly hide my head under a blanket to avoid stimulation. Even in the car.

 

I had a plan. Even in my brain-mashed state, I was capable of planning. I decided that I would allow myself to sleep on the 30 mgs of Temazepam for about a week, and then I was going to find a way to taper off of it. It did not even enter my mind that I should stay on, and my doctor agreed. Unbelievable! I had a doctor who understood how bad benzos are! There was only one problem: he did not understand how much damage a fast taper could do. He wanted me off, NOW. He gave me two months and a taper plan that would have nearly killed me. My first dosage cut on his plan caused a cascade of horrific symptoms from which it would take me months to recover.

 

Fortunately, I found a prescribing nurse at the mental health clinic I had been referred to by the hospital who did not want to see me descend into emotional chaos again and was willing to be my prescriber for a slower taper. And so began a very long process. My original plan involved a 6 to 8 month taper. It soon became abundantly clear that if I was going to taper at my body’s own pace, I would not be done in 8 months, or a year, or even 18 months. This taper has been like one of those bad dreams where you’re trying to run away from something dangerous, but you feel like you’re moving through a vat of pudding. Or having to stay very still and quiet to avoid danger when all you want to do is run like a mad woman.

 

The beginning of  my taper was horrific. The first few unwisely large cuts had made me incredibly ill. I always felt like I had swallowed battery acid. I was on fire from my mouth all the way to my stomach. I was not sleeping again. I was in all sorts of mental and physical agony. That began to change after I wisely took some advice I received on a withdrawal support forum and spread my dose out a little. I also slowed my pace, holding my dose whenever the cuts became too difficult to handle. I gradually began to become marginally functional.  As I got lower and lower in dose, I began to feel more and more stable.

 

Since April 14, 2014 I have been free of all medication.  I am, as I’ve always told myself, getting better and better.  The nightmare is over.

 

Moral of the story for you guys: it ends.  And: do NOT reinstate if you can possibly help it. 

 

 

Thank you for coming back and sharing your story again. I'm glad the nightmare is over for you.

Very nice 

 

Thank you 🙏

 

Thank you for sharing..What led to your previous setback?

Thanku for sharIng this story x I’m so sorry this happened to you and so glad u are on the other side x

I was healed for 14 months and took a steroid and back in it so devastating, how long did your second recovery take ?

I was healed for 14 months and took a steroid and back in it so devastating, how long did your second recovery take ?

 

My taper took 2 years and I'm pretty sure I was feeling pretty good about a year after my jump.

Dear Sage,

Thank you for re-posting this......you went through such hell, as so many of us have and came out the other side.  I have no doubt you will persevere and be stronger on the other side of this Covid situation.  I am sorry that it has brought you back to your knees, but I am so glad that you came back on to the boards....for lots of reasons.....to get the support you need as well as to healthfully distract yourself during this most difficult time.

 

I use BB the same way -- I can get Oovewerhelmed with the fear and I am in a terrible place right now with my own taper but I try to come on each day and look for ways to be encouraging and supportive of someone else.  the suffering can make me incredibly myopic and self absorbed....while I can't do much in the "real" world to help myself or others -- I can try to come on in here and reach out a hand or say "good job".

 

so, great job on your last two benzo encounters, good job for not jumping to a benzo again to manage this fresh hell you are experiencing and I wish you the best of luck! 

Dear Sage,

Thank you for re-posting this......you went through such hell, as so many of us have and came out the other side.  I have no doubt you will persevere and be stronger on the other side of this Covid situation.  I am sorry that it has brought you back to your knees, but I am so glad that you came back on to the boards....for lots of reasons.....to get the support you need as well as to healthfully distract yourself during this most difficult time.

 

I use BB the same way -- I can get Oovewerhelmed with the fear and I am in a terrible place right now with my own taper but I try to come on each day and look for ways to be encouraging and supportive of someone else.  the suffering can make me incredibly myopic and self absorbed....while I can't do much in the "real" world to help myself or others -- I can try to come on in here and reach out a hand or say "good job".

 

so, great job on your last two benzo encounters, good job for not jumping to a benzo again to manage this fresh hell you are experiencing and I wish you the best of luck!

 

Thank you!  And yes, what you said about being able to help others on BBs even if we can't do much for anyone IRL, I think that's why I need to be here when I'm really sick.  It gets my mind off myself. 

 

I wish you peace and healing!

Thank you for sharing..What led to your previous setback?

 

Sorry it took me so long to notice your question, Bexlan. 

 

I just got very run down from the stress of work and starting developing scary health problems.  I just pushed myself way too hard.  As you can imagine, being only 3 years out from a CT I was still very sensitive.  The way I tried and my doctor tried to treat my health problems sent me back into WD hell and I became suicidal.  So even after you start to feel good, take good care of yourself and don't overdo it!  Especially in the first few years.

Sage Hill!

 

What a story! I'm sorry you went through SO MUCH trauma.  it's just a nightmare no one else could comprehend.  Thank you so much for posting your story today.  A lot of us really need the encouragement right now.  I have a plan to never, ever take any pill of any sort again that I don't absolutely have to take. I took more than my share for a long time.  I have to believe relief is coming. I'm  3 1/2 months off of everything and pretty uncomfortable. Not quite in agony but pretty miserable.  After what YOU went through, that tells me anyone can heal. Thank you again.

 

Helen

 

Sage Hill!

 

What a story! I'm sorry you went through SO MUCH trauma.  it's just a nightmare no one else could comprehend.  Thank you so much for posting your story today.  A lot of us really need the encouragement right now.  I have a plan to never, ever take any pill of any sort again that I don't absolutely have to take. I took more than my share for a long time.  I have to believe relief is coming. I'm  3 1/2 months off of everything and pretty uncomfortable. Not quite in agony but pretty miserable.  After what YOU went through, that tells me anyone can heal. Thank you again.

 

Helen

 

You're welcome Helen!  I'm not doing well now because I have Covid.  But it does help me to look back at my old journals to remind myself what I've come through and that I can heal.

Thanks so much for taking them time to write a detailed account of your story. So much of it resonated with me.... The sensitivity to supplements, the stressful job throwing you into a tailspin, the shame of being in a psych ward. I've learned a lot about my body and tolerance after all this. I am not like others. My threshold for things (supplements I even tolerated previously), especially when in a stressed-filled state, is very low. I've also been knocked on my a$$ a few times due to sleep deprivation and it was not pretty so I definitely do not judge you for taking the "pill" again out of desperation. This is also what for me hooked to Klonopin.  I learned the hard way as well.

 

So glad you are doing better. Blessings to you for coming back and giving others hope.

Thanks so much for taking them time to write a detailed account of your story. So much of it resonated with me.... The sensitivity to supplements, the stressful job throwing you into a tailspin, the shame of being in a psych ward. I've learned a lot about my body and tolerance after all this. I am not like others. My threshold for things (supplements I even tolerated previously), especially when in a stressed-filled state, is very low. I've also been knocked on my a$$ a few times due to sleep deprivation and it was not pretty so I definitely do not judge you for taking the "pill" again out of desperation. This is also what for me hooked to Klonopin.  I learned the hard way as well.

 

So glad you are doing better. Blessings to you for coming back and giving others hope.

 

This one of the only places we can come to find others as sensitive as ourselves!  Glad you enjoyed reading my story.

Sage Hill,

 

I'm so very sorry you have Covid.  NO FAIR!  You've been through enough.  I hope you get well very soon.

 

Take care,

Helen

Sage Hill,

 

I'm so very sorry you have Covid.  NO FAIR!  You've been through enough.  I hope you get well very soon.

 

Take care,

Helen

 

Thank you Helen! 

Hi sagehill

 

I decided to stop using alprazolam after seeing your post. Your story motivated me to stop, because you went through many things and showed that it is possible to heal. I got to know the forum through your post.

 

One thing caught my attention in your account. When you said that you were feeling very thirsty and that you drank a lot of water and the thirst did not go away, and that you urinated every 20 minutes, did you discover the cause of that?

 

Because I'm going through a very similar situation and I want to find out what's happening to me - if there's something benzo related or something else. I did some blood tests and found nothing.

 

I hope you recover fast from covid

 

xxx

 

Hi thomasthecat!  I'm glad my story helped you.  I just hope you did not decide to CT the way I did, though!  I could have died from that. 

 

The thirst has to do with the massive amount of stress hormones released during benzo WD.  Adrenaline makes you very thirsty.  It also stimulates your kidneys to lose water faster.  You have to be very careful about this because it can cause dehydration and electrolyte depletion.  Make sure you're getting lots of minerals.  I make my own electrolyte solution for situations like that.  Here's the recipe if you think you might need it:

 

1 T black strap molasses or honey

1 tsp potassium

1 tsp salt

6 c water

 

I drink that in place of water while the symptoms last. Sometimes I will supplement with some pure water.  But what you really want to avoid is becoming severely depleted of potassium and magnesium.

I have posted my success story here before, years ago.  But I wanted to post it again for those of you who are here now and didn't get to read it. 

 

I am 8 years benzo free.  I had two run-ins with benzos, the first in 2008 with alprazolam and the second in 2012 with temazepam. 

 

In the summer of 2008, I was battling the increasingly severe symptoms of asthma. At the time, I thought I had a lung infection that would just not go away. I now realize that I was experiencing the symptoms of environmental illness. I had become highly sensitized to the chemicals I was coming in contact with on a daily basis.

 

I had bought a new detergent that was really too strong for me, and by the time I realized that there might be a connection between my symptoms and my detergent, it was too late. I had developed chemical pneumonia.

 

I called my Naturopath and asked for some supplements for pneumonia. The dose of the herb and vitamin combo she recommended was quite large, but I complied thinking it was the only way to kill the infection. I’m a very small person with a very sensitive system. The dose of vitamin A and Zinc that apparently cures the average person poisoned me. I began to feel extremely thirsty all the time. I could not get enough water, ever. I began to urinate enormous amounts of liquid every twenty minutes or less. I got myself in even deeper when I decided to treat the poisoning by trying to sweat it out, speeding up the process of dehydration already begun. After about three days, I felt like I was going to die, so it was off to the hospital. There it was found that I had sweated and peed away all of my electrolytes. I was basically peeing out exactly what I had put in, pure water. I received IV fluids and was sent home.

 

That is when the real mayhem began. I still had severe mineral deficiencies, and as a result, I began to have the first panic attacks I had ever experienced that were not related to some sort of emotional stress. I also stopped sleeping. I panicked and went back to the hospital, where they diagnosed me with anxiety and sent my home with my first benzodiazepine, Ativan. I had enough for about 5 days. I was so relieved to finally be able to sleep and to calm down that I decided to go to my doctor and get some more magic pills. She wanted to give me some Ambien, but I had heard scary things about Ambien, so strangely enough, I asked for Alprazolam (Xanax), not realizing that Ambien (a “non-benzodiazepine” or “z-drug”) and Xanax are both potentially very dangerous drugs. I was prescribed 1 milligram, much more than the paltry .25 mgs of Ativan I had been prescribed at first. One milligram; it seemed like such a small dose. I wouldn’t find out until much later that one mg of Xanax is roughly equivalent to 20 mgs of Valium.

 

Xanax hits you like a Mack truck. As soon as it kicked in, I felt very dizzy and could no longer walk. All I could do was get in the bed and pass out. The next morning I was very tired and weak, but happy; so happy! I couldn’t understand why I’d had any reservations at all about taking sleeping pills! Everything seemed good and calm and mellow. Nothing was wrong. The world suddenly seemed like a much safer and nicer place to be. Unfortunately, this state was not to last very long.

 

My memory here becomes a bit hazy (benzos are amnesic drugs). I believe it was between 3 and 5 days later when I had my first real panic attack, not like those wimpy ones I’d taken the pills for in the first place. This was white-hot terror. It began with a hot flash and ended with me rocking back and forth in utter horror, tears running down my face, finally deciding to take my “sleeping pill” at 5:00 PM because my “condition” had returned and I “needed it”. It follows, of course, that I would need more medication if I was going to have to use the pills for more than just going to sleep. My doctor prescribed two more milligrams to be taken “as needed”.

 

As it turned out, the more pills I took, the more I needed. Eventually I was cutting them in half and spreading my daily dose of 3 milligrams throughout the day to avoid inter-dose withdrawal and the dreaded panic attacks. Three weeks after my original dose of Xanax, I realized that the pills were making me very, very ill. For the first time in my life, I felt suicidal. I was terrified. I stopped taking my pills, expecting a few nights of insomnia and then a gradual return to health. That is not what happened. What followed cannot even be imagined by a person who has never experienced it.

 

My memory of the first few weeks after I stopped taking Xanax is very hazy, like the memory of a really bad nightmare. For the first couple of nights I stayed at a friend’s house because I knew things were likely to be difficult, and I did not want to subject my three boys to what I knew I had to go through. I threw up all night long. Every morsel of food that I managed to swallow came up within a few minutes of it going down. My skin felt like I had been dipped in a vat of boiling hot oil, like I was being cooked from the inside out. My heart rate was usually between 110 and 140 bpm. I had convulsions, seizures, visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions and severe depersonalization and de-realization (feeling as if I was a different person and that nothing was real). I went 2 weeks without any sleep at all and became very, very suicidal. I had to be watched 24/7. My perception of time and space was distorted. I was angry. I had no positive emotions whatsoever for many, many weeks.

 

Acute withdrawal lasted for about a month. After that, my symptoms were somewhat less severe, though still miserable. I was always in enormous amounts of pain. The pain in my chest was so bad that it felt like I’d broken some ribs. In fact, I became convinced I had done so somehow, so I insisted on getting X-rays, which showed nothing. Due to the fact that my immune system had basically collapsed, the pneumonia I had only partially treated came raging back much worse than it had been before.  I had to take antibiotics.  Killing the infection caused me to cough so hard that I dislocated my ribs repeatedly.

 

Sleep returned gradually, first 2 hours, then 4, then 6 and 7. I had to sleep propped up with many pillows because of chest and shoulder pain, and because my rapid heart rate made me more uncomfortable and anxious when I was flat on my back. Every night I had to tell myself these words “you’ve slept through worse, you can do it.” And most nights it helped.

 

One year after my Xanax cold turkey, I was feeling much better, though not completely back to myself. I was left with lingering breathing problems and severe muscular tension. My ability to handle stress was greatly diminished. But I had survived and I was functioning relatively normally. I was immensely proud of myself for enduring and healing from such a horrific experience, and I thought I was much wiser for it. If somebody had told me at that time that 4 years later I would put another benzodiazepine in my mouth, I would not have believed them.

 

Part 2

 

The little blue death pill is how I came to think of the Xanax that I had taken. Who in their right mind would twice take a death pill? Nobody in their right mind. But people in their wrong mind might.

 

2 years after my near-death experience with Xanax, in the fall of 2010, I began work as a letter carrier for the United States Postal Service. It was very hard work for someone like me, but I was determined. I pushed and pushed until I had well learned my route and my other duties, ignoring all the signs that the job might be too much for me. I pushed through a brutal case of bronchitis worsened by ink fumes, numerous sleepless nights, and despite my misgivings about the newspaper ink coating my hands black, pesticide drift blowing into the open windows of my delivery vehicle, and the extreme stress of working for a sociopathic postmaster.

 

By Summer, I had reached the end of my tether. Stress induced insomnia had caused me to go to work zombie-tired many times. One time in particular there were consequences. I made a mistake which is considered serious by the postal service. I failed to shake a mailbag to check for any packages that might have escaped my notice, and thus missed an important piece of mail, an express package. For this, I was to be disciplined. This was my wake-up call. It was time to quit and re-group, and fortunately for me, that was an option I had which would not cause my financial ruin.

 

I am fully convinced now that my time at the Postal Service contributed in large measure to a significant decline in my health. Although I have always been aware that I am highly sensitive to the smell of newspaper ink, I did not know until recently that it contains Bisphenal-A, or BPA, which is an endocrine disruptor. An endocrine disruptor is a chemical that can mimic our own hormones, and thus cause illness associated with hormonal imbalance.

By the fall of 2010, I was experiencing pronounced symptoms of hormonal imbalance, much more severe than I had ever experienced before. By winter, I was so concerned about my symptoms that I felt I must take action. Past experience had taught me that doctors often mean trouble, so I tried to treat myself, with disastrous consequences. My attempts at treating my symptoms drove me into a state of crisis, at which point I decided to once again risk putting my health into the hands of my Naturopath. Her treatments drove me still deeper into crisis. The combination of my already highly sensitized nervous system and the extra stress of almost selling our house sent me into a final tailspin from which I felt I would not be able to recover.

 

I was not sleeping again. For months I had existed on between 2 and 5 hours of sleep per night, when what I really required was nine. After the house selling debacle, I simply stopped sleeping and went into a state of extreme anguish. I hesitate to call it depression because it was way beyond that. It was agony, both mental and physical. I felt I’d been thrown right back into the jaws of the Xanax beast even though I hadn’t touched a pill in 4 years.

 

I have an idea about why this became so unbelievably severe. I once read the story of a man who had been through a very difficult benzodiazepine detox. Years later he decided to undergo intravenous vitamin C therapy, and during the therapy, the very same withdrawal symptoms he had experienced years before during his detox returned upon him. I surmise that the detoxification process that the vitamin C therapy initiated liberated drug residue stored in his tissues. This is simply a hypothesis of mine, but if true, it would certainly explain why I felt three years after taking Xanax that I had been thrown back into the deep pit of suffering I thought I had forever escaped. All of the treatments I had attempted in an effort to fix my hormonal imbalance were initiating a massive detoxification process which was simply too much for me to handle all at once.

 

I eventually came to the point where I was in so much mental and physical agony from my exhaustion that I was beginning to have those suicidal thoughts again. This time I’m sure I would not have acted upon them. But what I was feeling was so intolerable that I eventually allowed a family member to take me to the hospital where I was admitted to a locked psychiatric ward. This is very difficult for me to tell. As I sit here typing, the tears are welling up for so many reasons: Pride, shame, trauma. It is not okay in our culture to lose control. The psych ward….oh so many negative connotations. I don’t have to explain. You already know. “I’m not one of those people,” I want to say, “I’m different. I didn’t really belong in that hospital. I’m not crazy, I just had insomnia.” But I’m not going to say those things. Every person I met in that hospital was a person like me. They were people overwhelmed, bodies overwhelmed by our toxic world.

 

The only thing friendly about a psych ward are the other patients. The system itself is harsh and unbending, and you don’t get out unless you comply. I begged to be given anything other than benzodiazepines. In spite of that, on my first night I was handed a little green and white pill with a name that ended in “pam”. I knew what that meant. It was a benzo. I asked the med nurse if it was, indeed, a benzodiazepine, and she confirmed that, yes, it was. I told her that I had specifically asked the man who admitted me to relay to my doctor that I would not be taking any benzodiazepines. Was there anything else? Anything that would help me sleep without causing a brutal addiction? No? Why not? I can’t take that pill!

 

But take it I did. I was approaching sleep psychosis. I needed to sleep. I had a deadly fear of going one more night without. So down the hatch it went and I went out like a light on the nasty plastic mattress. And woke at two in the morning. Wide awake. So down to the front desk I went to ask for another pill, and down it went too. In the morning, I felt groggy and sick, but once that feeling wore off, I felt great! It was like the first time I took Xanax, everything was roses! I was in a locked psychiatric ward, but I was happy. I loved all my fellow patients, I loved the nice mental-wellness classes we had to attend. I was finally going to get better.

 

The only problem was that little green and white pill. That had to go. I was not going to fall for that again, no way! I was too smart for that. And thus began a harrowing journey through the nightmare-land of psychiatric drugging. I tried a different pill almost every day, and by the time I was released from the hospital, I felt like I had been through a meat grinder. And I was on Temazepam. Every medication given to me had made me incredibly ill, one of them dangerously so. Every one of them except for the big T.

 

Part 3

 

I knew I had to taper, that much I had learned from my experience with Xanax. I had taken Xanax for a measly 3 weeks, and quitting it cold turkey cost me over a year of illness. I perceived that it had almost cost me my life. Benzos have very few side effects when compared to other psychiatric drugs, but once one of them gets its hooks in you, you cannot just quit.

I was reeling from the chemical merry-go-round I had experienced in the hospital. I felt like a person with Autism. I had to protect myself from light, sound, smells and anything that might cause any kind of emotional stress. Some days I would regularly hide my head under a blanket to avoid stimulation. Even in the car.

 

I had a plan. Even in my brain-mashed state, I was capable of planning. I decided that I would allow myself to sleep on the 30 mgs of Temazepam for about a week, and then I was going to find a way to taper off of it. It did not even enter my mind that I should stay on, and my doctor agreed. Unbelievable! I had a doctor who understood how bad benzos are! There was only one problem: he did not understand how much damage a fast taper could do. He wanted me off, NOW. He gave me two months and a taper plan that would have nearly killed me. My first dosage cut on his plan caused a cascade of horrific symptoms from which it would take me months to recover.

 

Fortunately, I found a prescribing nurse at the mental health clinic I had been referred to by the hospital who did not want to see me descend into emotional chaos again and was willing to be my prescriber for a slower taper. And so began a very long process. My original plan involved a 6 to 8 month taper. It soon became abundantly clear that if I was going to taper at my body’s own pace, I would not be done in 8 months, or a year, or even 18 months. This taper has been like one of those bad dreams where you’re trying to run away from something dangerous, but you feel like you’re moving through a vat of pudding. Or having to stay very still and quiet to avoid danger when all you want to do is run like a mad woman.

 

The beginning of  my taper was horrific. The first few unwisely large cuts had made me incredibly ill. I always felt like I had swallowed battery acid. I was on fire from my mouth all the way to my stomach. I was not sleeping again. I was in all sorts of mental and physical agony. That began to change after I wisely took some advice I received on a withdrawal support forum and spread my dose out a little. I also slowed my pace, holding my dose whenever the cuts became too difficult to handle. I gradually began to become marginally functional.  As I got lower and lower in dose, I began to feel more and more stable.

 

Since April 14, 2014 I have been free of all medication.  I am, as I’ve always told myself, getting better and better.  The nightmare is over.

 

Moral of the story for you guys: it ends.  And: do NOT reinstate if you can possibly help it.

 

Thank you so much for sharing your story. You have true perseverance to endure everything you have gone through and it is very inspiring. I am like you very sensitive and very sick bed bound in my long slow taper. I am having mineral electrolyte issues like you describe of being constantly thirsty and water not helping. I am so worried that I will have to resolve this in order to heal but I am not sure how to. I have been sipping on electrolyte drinks then i just get thirstier for water. Is any thing you had to do tincture this or was it just withdrawal stress on the body and took time? I am so worried I don’t have enough minerals to heal but don’t know what else I can be doing. I eat potassium food and salt to taste. And sip on things like pedialtye I can’t drink to much of it or it makes me very sick.

Fruitypop:

 

You may need to supplement salt and potassium beyond just the pedialyte.  I make something called sole.  All it is is a strong solution of pink Himalayan salt in water, 4 parts water to 1 part salt.  Then you put a tsp of that solution into every glass of water you drink until you feel better.  You might also need to add a little potassium chloride if you're having trouble getting enough from food.  Foods highest in potassium: white potatoes, white beans, green beans, leafy greens, and juices made from vegetables.  V8 juice is very high in potassium if you can tolerate the acid. 

 

Another thing that can help is blackstrap molasses - it's high in electrolytes. 

 

 

Thank you! I do the best I can but will I still heal with out getting it perfect? Everything seems to throw me off balance. If I have sole water then I am needing potassium bad and the sugar in coco water is to much for me so then I eat potatoes and react to the carbs with blood sugar issues. I am in a very bad way and not sure how to balance things to make it better. Salt really seems to increase my heart rate so it’s the potassium that I need I think but almost all potassium is carbs and they are giving me a several problem. Maybe I need more vegetables.

Thank you! I do the best I can but will I still heal with out getting it perfect? Everything seems to throw me off balance. If I have sole water then I am needing potassium bad and the sugar in coco water is to much for me so then I eat potatoes and react to the carbs with blood sugar issues. I am in a very bad way and not sure how to balance things to make it better. Salt really seems to increase my heart rate so it’s the potassium that I need I think but almost all potassium is carbs and they are giving me a several problem. Maybe I need more vegetables.

 

I'm sorry it's so hard!  These drugs are like little demons with the mischief they do in our bodies.  I have had a similar dilemma.  Yes, you need more vegetables.  Do you think you could tolerate green juices?  I know those will raise blood sugar too, but it's a quick way to get the potassium in.  I guess other than that, I would suggest eating piles of veggies with each meal if you can handle that.  Greens especially.