Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [104]
I hadn't had much luck with medication so far. I had been on nearly every antipsychotic medication and nearly every antide-pressant and nothing seemed to work.
I took pills for psychotic symptoms, pills for mood swings and pills for anxiety. Because nothing had ever really given me long-term relief, the doctors were constantly trying me on something new. I went from one antipsychotic medication to another. Na-vane. Stelazine. Mellaril. Moban. Haldol. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The same went for the antidepressants. When lithium didn't seem to be effective enough against my depression and my manic highs, the doctors tried attacking the depression alone. They tried MAO inhibitors. When the MAO inhibitors didn't work they tried tricyclic antidepressants. When the tricyclic antidepressants didn't work, they went back to lithium and tried increasing the doses.
Was the problem the dosage? Raise the dose. Lower the dose. Was it the combination of drugs? Try Prolixin with lithium. Try Thorazine with one of the MAO inhibitors. Maybe one combination or one dose would do the trick. Try Mellaril for psychosis and Xanax for anxiety.
And then there were the minor tranquilizers, dispensed as needed to blunt the anxiety attacks that caused my throat to close, my chest to cave in and my heart to pound so that I couldn't hear myself think. Valium, Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin … they all took the edge off, but they were addictive, and so had to be changed all the time.
I knew these medications mainly by their side effects. Some antipsychotic medications made me drowsy. Some blurred my vision. When I took Thorazine I felt like a zombie. My face looked like the frozen mask of someone who had been dead for weeks. I shuffled down the halls and my mind was a shadowy cloud. I was constipated and had terrible trouble with urinary retention. It gave me an appetite like a lumberjack and caused me to gain weight like crazy. My mouth was so dry that my lips would get stuck on my gums. Haldol didn't help the symptoms, and the side effects were horrible and scary. The intense, uncontrollable backward muscle tightening made me feel like my head was being screwed off—like Popeye when Bluto socked him.
Lithium, a mood stabilizer, mellowed out my highs and woke me up out of my depression. It also enlarged my thyroid gland, made me feel thirsty and nauseated and gave me diarrhea. Because lithium was potentially toxic, my blood was drawn as often as three times a week in the hospital to make sure I wasn't being given too much.
The horrible and frustrating thing was that each time my medication was changed, I did feel some relief. For a few days, sometimes even for weeks or months, the Voices would begin to abate. I would begin to feel calmer. My sessions with Dr. Doller and Dr. Fischer would be more productive, and my ability to relate to them would improve. My journal notations would change character too, and optimistic feelings would creep into my private screams of despair. For a short time I would believe Dr. Doller's messages of hope.
And then it would all come crashing down on me again. Had the drug worked briefly before my body got used to it? Had I simply wanted so badly for some medication to relieve my pain that I had willed it to be so?
I didn't know the answer. All I knew was that each time it happened my despair intensified. I felt I was getting worse and worse with each trial of new medication. I felt like a tree being cut down. The more the doctors and medications hacked away at me, the closer I was to falling.
This new medication sounded different. I heard talk that it was helping people that no other medicine had helped before. Some of the things I heard sounded scary too. Some people had died taking it. Here in New York Hospital, one patient had flipped out big-time while preparing to go on this new drug. As part of the preparation, he had had