Category: Weight gain

Bipolar, Quetiapine & side effects

Published on by Nour Loutfy2 Comments

Like many days, I was thinking today long and hard about mental illness. How it infiltrates the body and gets deep into it before you even know what hits you.

You wake up one day and you don’t feel fine. You probably ignore it. How long does it take to develop a mental illness? A few months? A few years? Extenuating circumstances? What do you think?

I was obsessed, trying hard to search in my memory looking for the one moment where I became bipolar. Was it a moment to start with?

I recall anxiety, difficulty coping with everyday demands, depression, but I don’t recall mood swings. I also don’t recall a moment or an incident.

Mental illness is not a common cold. It creeped on me a little by little until I was totally submerged and couldn’t breathe. Only then did I know I was ill. I did not have the tools to detect it earlier. How about you?

This is why recovery is difficult. The longer the illness before detection and treatment (whatever the sort- especially if they screw you up) the longer the road to wellness.

Now am better. At least I know what is wrong with me. I am taking meds that work, albeit the fact that they do have side effects. There is no drug in this world that has no side effect.

My thyroid is inactive. So I take a lot and I mean A LOT of levothyroxine without much trouble. My main problem is Quetiapine of which I take 700 mg. I have gained so much weight on it and can’t lose it. It makes me lethargic, slow, drowsy, and I could sleep on it 14 hours plus naps minimum.

Yes I don’t have mood swings. Yes I am not anxious. Yes I am not depressed. Yes I am not hypomanic. But I have no initiative, my IQ is probably half what it was before, I am just plain yoghurt.

Yes I know all them drugs alienate you. But this one is so subtle. Or maybe it is the high dose that is making me unaware of how different I have become.

You know I just want to be me. I haven’t been me since 2016 when I was 36 and now am 39 and am still this other person I don’t know.

Do you feel the same? Are you on Quetiapine? Are you suffering from its side effects like me? Are you thinking of tapering off? Are you scared? Did you do it? Is the grass greener on the other side? Your experience is highly appreciated here from a fellow survivor to another

TBC

Choosing to live with the side effects of psychotropics – a life changing decision…

Published on by Nour LoutfyLeave a comment

I saw my psychiatrist yesterday.

I told her about my “attacks” and she explained.

She told me that hormonal changes in female bipolar patients tend to send them over the moon sometimes. So what I am going through is not surprising. It is not a hormonal problem per se, it is just a confirmation that I have a mood disorder.

I asked if there is any biomarker that would tell us if I need a hormonal treatment to fix my mood. She said that there is currently no information on this. Surprise? Not really. So the only marker hormones wise is that of the thyroid gland functions. My numbers are not perfect, but not alarmingly different to cause such an imbalance.

My session was important despite the “negative” results. I now know that I need to make a big decision.

My doctor asked me about whether stopping lithium was due to hypomania and I said it was not. I would do this over and over again. The changes, the personality changes that most psychotropics cause me are just unbearable- to me. Again, this is such a personal matter that it would be straight stupid to advise anyone to quit or not. I am not preaching anything. I am just sharing my own journey, which might or might not be similar to yours. What is sure though, you might have gone through similarly difficult choices to make.

We agreed that my life as it is now is not fulfilling. The unpredictability of my attacks renders my illness a disability to me and to those around me. We are unable to plan anything. I struggle to be an adult, an independent person who requires little or no maintenance. I struggle to be there for my children as a full time mother. Career? What is that sir! Sometimes having a shower is already a challenge to me.

Having said that, my worst fear is hurting those around me. Till when can they deal with my unpredictability.

Till when will my husband take days off work, or leave the house with a feeling of apprehension not knowing if he will find me home when he gets back.

Till when will I have my father leave everything and stick around to be here just in case I cannot deal with the children. Till when will he hop on and off plans to come to an emergency situation beyond his or my comprehension? Till when?

So fact one; we know this cannot go on.

Fact two; there is no clear solution.

My dear doctor whom I respect so much suggested that I add a new psychotropic to my daily dose of Prozac.

“Psychotropic drugs are medications that affect your central nervous system, changing how your brain processes information, such as altering your mood, thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. Most psychotropic drugs are prescribed by your therapist or health care provider to treat a diagnosed mental illness, such as bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.”

https://www.verywellmind.com/psychotropic-drugs-425321

You see I don’t have a conscientious objection against drugs. No, I don’t. The thing is with most drugs I feel alienated, weird… I twitch, I get nightmares, I get lethargy, restlessness, anxiety, and sometimes I even have suicidal thoughts that unfortunately led me to the emergency room more than once.

She said the new drug- Abilify– could help regulate my mood. The idea is to take it at 5mg – a super low dose – to keep my curves from skyrocketing or dropping at the speed of light. Sounds good yes. I would have to wait a few months to monitor the effect of Abilify on my mood and on my menstrual cycle.

Will it work? We have a fifty percent chance it does. Ok, side effects? For starters, it is prescribed to children. How bad could it be?

Then Surprise surprise, they said when they put it in the market that it does not make you gain weight. Oups! Mistake, she said it does in many patients and my readings confirmed a nice 10 to 20 kilograms of extra weight per year. Maybe at different dosages, but still. I won’t be able to tie my own shoelaces by 2020.

Ok. What else? Oh it varies greatly she said from one person to another. Reading suggests that the worst is in the beginning; like vomiting and the like. That does not scare me. What really scared me is that patients on this drug would complain of very low energy and of restlessness or need to move.

According to the official site of the drug,

“ABILIFY may cause movements that you cannot control in your face, tongue, or other body parts. Tardive dyskinesia may not go away, even if you stop receiving ABILIFY. Tardive dyskinesia may also start after you stop receiving ABILIFY.”

https://www.abilify.com/important-safety-information.aspx

They might get also compulsive behaviors such as gambling and binge eating, cholesterol and anxiety.

How are you supposed to fight depression with all this extra weight and without any energy, with twitches and compulsive behavior? Don’t tell me stop searching the Internet. I did differ from a wide spectrum of side effects before. They are as real as it gets.

Her idea is that my Prozac would have a counter the side effects of Abilify and things would balance out. Perhaps…

So my dilemma is simply the following:

Should I risk living with these unpredictable cycles and watch myself and my family losing our minds slowly; or should I take the drugs and lose myself little by little and become a deaf note floating around in a soundless world?

Can you relate? Did you go through the same? Can you throw me a bone here? What did you do? What would you do?

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

TBC

The monster and I

Published on by Nour Loutfy2 Comments

Anger is a monster whose main duty is to scare you…

It comes at night, when everything and everyone is quite…

It has big claws and red eyes, it wants you to look at it, so that you tremble and fall…

At this point you would expect that the story would turn around, and the monster will be chased far far away…

No, my monster, my anger eats me up and makes me eat up and we struggle every night. No one wins, well it mostly wins with me taking my sleeping pill that sometimes only works for a few hours. I wake up, and it is still there with red eyes staring into mine challenging me to go into battle. I know I will lose sooner or later.

So far I have kept my promise of not harming myself. But the struggle with the anger monster keeps me alive but am dead really. Nothing matters anymore. I want to eternally sleep and I have to keep my eyes opened – reminds me of a scene where Donald Duck sticks up matches in his eyes not to fall asleep.

So till when will this battle go on, and what will happen when I have no more hunger to eat to keep my eyes opened? What kind of anger will I come up with? Will it be against me? I sorely hope so. And how strong will it be, crescendo or a volcano? Will I harm myself? Will I feel this tearing up between my promise and the fantasy of death? What is this spectrum of mood disorders and where do I stand? Am I evolving forward towards a more developed syndrome? I cannot honestly answer the latest question with anything but yes.

I passed through a hell of a night, but I kept alive. The fridge and I talked together like good old best friends. You see it helps me fight the monster. I looked at myself in the mirror while passing from one room to another. I saw my reflection: I was the monster. My eyes were shot red, my hair all over the place, my skin grey…

Yet I was alive. But this is a small fake victory – for am not alive no more than the monster is real.

I am an insane mother and this monster cannot hurt my little ones. I will not allow it, alive or dead….

I know how to fake it with my children. I only do not know how much longer I will be able to do this…

But I will do it till there is nothing left of me – or in this state (a lot) if you get what I mean.

I make no sense at all, even those around me find me nonsensical. I am one day seeking hospitalization, the second minute am cracking my head against the wall to get out.

I am scared from the monster, for that monster is nothing but my own mind….

TBC

When you are denied suicide

Published on by Nour Loutfy2 Comments

As the droplets of rain fall onto my swollen feet, I wonder about the meaning of existence…

What does existence mean I ask in t his suffering? I gained 5 kilos in 2 days. That is a reflection of the anger and irritation inside of me.

When the grey sky looks down upon me, I wish I did not make promises of any kind to anyone.

Existence is so painful. That is the phrase that keeps repeating itself in my mind. With my swollen feet, I walk with shame around the house.

I want to shut the curtains and cover the mirrors. Yet, I can still see myself with my eyes closed, I suffer in silence.

If I am to scream, I would be voiceless. I am drained. I am a mass of depression roaming the house with clothes that ache from holding on to my ever growing body. I wonder how they manage to do it!

My body, my mind, my bipolarity are insanity. Insanity is a state of mind where nothing is logical or meaningful anymore.

A promise kept at the dark alley of a mental hospital to stay alive is the only thing to which I am holding. I do not even think I am helpable (new word)

I feel like red ridding hood, in a dark ugly forest with someone showing me the way to avoid being hurt by the wolf. I am now alone with my fears with no medical help to avoid this wolf of suicide and depression. Maybe the sounds of the ambulances I rode were not so bad. Maybe the million questions asked by the paramedics before being reanimated are not too difficult to answer. Maybe just the fact of voiding myself and putting the responsibility of being alive on someone else’s skills is not that stupid after all.

Just a vow to stay alive. My only wish is for this vow to be kept. No, I am lying, my only wish is that something not of my doing happens to me to alleviate this pain by ending the source of it: my mind. Maybe falling into a coma would be achieving both goals: staying alive and shutting off my mind if I am lucky.

The only hope is that when I end, all this suffering will end with me. Otherwise, it will be the biggest farce humanity has ever faced.

Unfortunately TBC

Gaining weight being Bipolar II due to Effexor

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So honestly I have no aim here but telling the truth, which sometimes hurts. I hate this topic, but here I go.

My height is 165 cm. I Weighed at the start of my antidepressant treatment – my wrong antidepressant treatment Effexor (Venlafaxine) – 58 kilograms. Now, this was the era of sleeping 18 hour straight and walking like a zombie for the rest of the day.

Fast forward a few months and weight gain started, slowly but surely. I reached 61, then 62, and then summer holidays were here. Regiment was honestly pizzas and limoncello, pina colada and so on. I reached 64. Still I was ok.

Now my dear dear doctor who wrongly prescribed Effexor was telling me: “Come on, control yourself”. I told him, there is nothing else I am trying to do but this. He didn’t really care, or maybe he wasn’t able to believe me. Anyway, last time I had seen him, I had reached 68, he had inevitably increased my dose to 225 mg per day – said to be the highest dosage for outpatients.

I completely and solely relate my binge eating and my bulimic tendencies to bloody Effexor. According to Mentalhalthdaily Effexor can not only increase your appetite to eating more carbs, it also plays with your fat storage, does hormonal and metabolic changes and guess what ? Bloody Effexor improves your taste buds also plays a major role in shooting up your eating in social situations.

Of course individual differences play a role and so does the interaction with other drugs, your dosage and time span and so forth. They need to get their back covered if you know what I mean.

But this brings we to weaning off this horribly addictive drug. It takes forever. When I used to read accounts of people suffering months after quitting and saying that their metabolic rate got screwed up, I thought they were exaggerating. Bit by bit I found myself in this dilemma.

Now I am taking other drugs (of course) to remedy this metamorphosis. I take Revia and Baclofene but with so far very little if no result.

Apparently I have to resort to psychotherapy to overcome my newly acquired eating disorder.

I will keep on writing to give tips and tricks about how to get out of this situation when you cannot take Prozac and co, quite known to induce mania and mixed episodes in bipolarity.

TBC