Posted by d0pamine on July 27, 2007, at 22:19:28
Just in case any one is contemplating trying the admittedly very useful EMSAM patch. Here is a little detail that the Dr likely will not tell you.
I've stopped numerous meds in the past, but nothing even begins to compare to stopping EMSAM after 1.5 years on the 12mg patch. I initially tried cold turkey. Big Mistake! I've had the flu twice in my life and this was identical. The first 2 days were fine, then I began to freeze. Nothing warmed me up, the chills were terrible and I couldn't stop my teeth from chattering. When I laid down I was just sort of writhing. I tried this for an entire night and didn't sleep a wink. The next morning I was still miserable so I cut a patch in half and stuck it on. Within 45 minutes I was almost as good as before, except now I was very sleepy and the words on a computer screen crawl around like a bunch of ants. I'm now down to about 1/8th of a patch, but I'm exhausted and sleeping for about an hour for every half hour that I'm awake, and that's after sleeping over 12 hours last night. Many other strange things have happened as well. One night I woke up with the worst headache that I've ever had, and being concerned that perhaps I was having some sort of hypertensive crisis I took my BP. it was 75/70!!!!!!! And my pulse was probably around 160. I thought maybe I was dieing or something then it occurred to me that an hour earlier I had gotten up and urinated for longer than I ever remember doing it before and I suddenly realized that my symptoms were consistent with dehydration so I drank about 1/4 gallon of water and my headache went away almost instantly and my BP returned to 122/83. Crazy stuff. When I was taking it, EMSAM was helpful enough to me to make this worth it, but only barely. For the record, I am stopping it because I had begun to get very sleepy in the evenings, so I thought I'd give it a break for a bit.
poster:d0pamine
thread:772454
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070719/msgs/772454.html