Neuro-withdrawal

About three weeks or so have passed since I was forcibly detoxed of my anti-convulsive meds, and while I don't miss powerful drugs that failed to stop or control my seizures, there is a withdrawal effect that is subtle, but noticable. Prior to going into the hospital I felt slow, groggy, and mentally confused too much of the time. This is partialy, at least, attributable to the secondary, simple (partial) seizures that I experience, which, in and of themselves, are a fairly new phenomena for me. Beyond the failings of my brain, both Dilantin and Zonegran have a damping effect on the firing of synapses, the workings of neurotransmitters, and thus, even after acclimation, tend to slow the thought processes of the person taking them.

Within 48 hours of having the meds removed I began to feel strangely. Numbness in my extremities was the first thing I noticed, and it returns once in a while still. My vision seemed to undergo changes as well, with things becoming indistinct, focus hard to find or enforce on what I was looking at. That has largely passed. My sleep, never a dependable thing, is off the rails. I get tired suddenly and wih\thout warning, but once in bed, barely sleep, and wind up crawling from beneath the blankets before I am anywhere close to rested.

Then there is the elevator. Or rollercoaster. Whatever. I've been climbing and falling emotionally in a most irregular way, swinging across the spectrum in seconds at the slightest provocation, or none at all. While it is true that I have become generally more irritable in recent years, this is a little much, and while I am not bipolar, I equate the intensity and fluidity of these feelings with that disorder. Basically I feel weird all of the time, not "myself," whatever the fuck that is. As I took these drugs for years, it may take many months to find a steady state independent of the effects of medication that can be identified and reckoned with on its own.

We return now to your regularly scheduled programming.