There’s a Pill for That

I learned young that if I was sick, there was probably a medicine that would fix me.

I woke up one morning, feeling groggy, way more groggy than usual. Almost like what I imagined a hangover would feel like if I’d ever had one. I was never much of a drinker; I’ve never been drunk. I made my morning coffee and looked at my phone. It seemed I’d texted myself the night before. I do that sometimes, if I want to remember something the next day. I didn’t remember sending the text, so I opened it and found the list I dictated into my phone before I went to sleep:

Meds!!! In bold, with 3 exclamation marks.

September 5, 2023 pm

• 1 propranolol (For sleep and anxiety. Almost impossible to pronounce correctly)

• 1 Ambien (for sleep)

• 3 Trazodone (one more than I was prescribed. Used for sleep, I’d been taking increasing doses over the course of more than 30 years.)

• 1 Vistaril (for sleep)

• 1 trileptal (for seizure protection)

• 2 hydrocodone (as needed, for pain. No more than 1 a day. I wasn’t in physical pain.)

• 1 rosuvastatin (to protect me from potential heart attacks or strokes)

• 1 pot gummy (for sleep)

It seems I’d been playing doctor. Not the first time, but this was the scariest. Reading the list brought back a fuzzy recollection. A moment when I thought to myself “this is a lot. I wonder if it’s too much. Well, I guess I’ll find out.” I actually thought that.

Alarm bells went off and I reached out to my therapist. I was embarrassed to tell her what happened. I’d been having trouble with Ambien, the sleeping pill I’d been taking for years. I would sometimes wake with food in my bed, apparently from nighttime eating that I didn’t recall. Of the meds and gummies on the list, I’d taken 6 sedating drugs. And more than my standard dose of a couple of them. I have sleep apnea and wasn’t using my CPAP machine. I found it too claustrophobic. It didn’t matter enough to me that it might save my life.

What chilled me the most was that my actions felt like a suicide attempt. I’d never done that before, though suicidal ideation was a theme I knew too well. It may have been a little half-assed, but I was walking a very fine line. My therapist assessed me on the spot, we brought my nurse practitioner on to the call, and came up with a plan that thankfully didn’t include hospitalization, but did include a lockbox for the meds. They were both satisfied that I wasn’t going to hurt myself further.

I came clean with my girlfriend who was loving and supportive though extremely dismayed. I gathered up all the meds in my house, everything, all the alcohol, all the over-the-counter meds, the aspirin, the Tylenol, the Advil. The Nyquil that I sometimes used to tweak the sleep meds. I drove it all to her house, except for the dosage I needed that night and the following morning. She was in the dark about my flirtations with prescription drugs but often wondered at my casual attitude when it came to medication. Until the lockbox was delivered, she’d hold onto all of it. I tearfully confessed my tendency to self-prescribe.

When the lockbox arrived, all the meds went into the box, and I hid the keys in the trunk of my car in the garage, in case I wandered in the night. It would give me time to wake up and realize what I was doing. We put those obstacles in place to make it harder to harm myself.

I went through a lightning-fast wean off the Ambien that was way faster than it should have been. I’ll never touch that drug again. I had to look at what was underneath the attempt that would cause me to risk my life. I was depressed again, but now I had tools I never had before. I was newly in program and had a therapist whom I could tell everything. It was time to deal with this demon that grew inside me over the course of my life.

It started with baby aspirin when I was a child. I loved those tiny tablets. They were sweet, orange-flavored, a little crunchy, and kind of chalky. I didn’t mind the chalk taste. It was a reminder that this wasn’t candy, it was medicine that would hopefully make me feel better. It was magical. If I had a headache or a fever, voila! I’d recover. It tasted good, too.

Sometimes I’d feel like I needed a little extra attention, and I’d say I had a headache or didn’t feel well. I’d get an aspirin. I realized later that what I really wanted was the love and affection I began to equate with illness, with receiving tenderness from my caregivers, my parents.

I remember the Contac cold capsules my dad used. I wanted to take them, too. The clear capsules held at least 600 multi-colored “tiny time pills” that worked to keep him clear for 12 whole hours. That’s what the commercial promised. But it was only for grown-ups. Those capsules looked like candy to me; the tiny red, orange, and white pills filling each gel cap reminded me of the rainbow-colored non-pareil sprinkles I loved to eat on ice cream.

When I was 8, I was diagnosed with epilepsy and a drug was prescribed to control and hopefully stop the seizures. Dilantin. And with it, I found out something new. Sometimes medicine can make you sicker. I had an allergic reaction that was so intense that the medication was quickly changed to something more benign. Well, that’s what the doctor said. The substitute was a barbiturate. I took it three times a day for 10 years. My mother used to scold me because I yawned all the time. It took me ages to make the connection. Barbiturates!

When I was in high school, some of my peers were dabbling in the “fun” drugs…LSD, marijuana, some were even messing around with angel dust. I steered clear of all that stuff; my epilepsy now under control, my worst nightmare was that I would start having seizures again if I partook. I completely avoided alcohol. But because I was kind of weird, offbeat, a bit of an oddball, and had extremely dark eyes, I found out that a lot of the kids assumed I was a stoner because my pupils appeared to be perpetually dilated. They thought I was always high. Never. I was always perpetually sleepy.

In my 20s I was plagued by constant bouts of bronchitis. My doctor prescribed endless quantities of useless antibiotics, neither of us making the connection that maybe the coughing was because I smoked too much? The useless antibiotics would cause angry vaginal infections, and I’d need prescriptions for anti-fungal meds to clear them up.

I also discovered cocaine, and began to self-medicate with it. It was unsustainable because it was expensive, illegal, and was damaging my nasal passages. But there was something about it that drew me in and held me, those moments of crystal-clear thought that I longed for. The short-lived release from scrambled thinking wasn’t worth the pounding heartbeat, the need to drink alcohol to bring me down, the lack of funds, restful sleep, or the depression that followed in the aftermath of the high.

When I was 28 years old, I experienced my first unrelenting depression. After enduring months of therapy in my flattened state, my therapist finally convinced me to try antidepressants. I was vehement in my resistance, but she wore me down. I didn’t want to take medication; I’d been off my seizure drugs for 10 years. I was proud of my drug-free status. Being a patient had defined my earlier life, and I was finally free of it. But I wanted to feel better, and I stopped trusting my instincts. I grudgingly gave in and made the first appointment of many with a pharmacologist.

I had to fill out a 30-page questionnaire about my symptoms, my medical and family history. This was the year Prozac made its grand debut. The doctor was so into meds, he nearly trembled with delight as he said, “You’ll see, better living through chemistry!” Rah-rah.

Prozac helped. A lot. I lost my appetite completely, started losing weight––an unexpected side effect I loved but clearly fed my disordered eating behaviors. I was unable to sleep or have orgasms. I was so happy to be happy, that I didn’t care about the missing orgasms, but I did care about sleeping. I spoke to the doctor, and he said, “No worries, there’s a pill for that.” I was verging on anorexia, but I was clueless. I loved being skinny. Then the Prozac stopped working and I cycled into another depression.

That depression began a 35-year nightmare cascade of one pill after another. I came to believe I couldn’t manage my life without them.

What started out as one or two pills, quickly turned into one scrip on top of another. The long parade of doctors referred to them as “cocktails.” Was that supposed make them sound more appealing? At one point, I was taking 7 different psych meds at the same time. Slogging through life, I became a professional patient, barely surviving on disability payments, terrified to be without the financial and medical safety net the benefit provided. I experienced miserable side effects; the fallout is still something I’m dealing with. Bad teeth because of constant dry mouth, tremendous weight gain, and sleep issues for years. I gave up trying to lose weight and indulged myself in anything I wanted to eat.

I became dependent on benzos, Ativan, Klonopin. Weaning off that class of drugs is a beast. I don’t recommend starting them. I was taking a combination of 3 different sleep meds every night for almost 30 years. Three. And my sleep still sucked.

The depression was sometimes under control, but I walked through my life in victim mode, always looking to medication for a cure. There must be a pill for that. I begged for the one or two or three that would fix everything. When the meds would stop working, there was always a new one to try, a new combination, until there wasn’t. I tried almost every medical intervention there was to treat the sadness, the hopelessness. ECT (shock treatments) and one very extended stay, a long “vacation” of sorts in a locked ward. During the pandemic I dabbled in IV ketamine treatments, with some success. It did interrupt a terrible bout of the blues, but the use of that medication felt like a slippery slope. I played doctor already, and after years of meds had gotten to a point where I got cocky and started self-medicating even more. Ketamine was just too seductive.

The experience of flirting with death brought my behavior out into the open, and I realized that I was depending on something outside of myself to make me well, but in truth, I was making myself sicker. I realized that I had to choose to participate in my own recovery. There’s a wise woman in my meeting who says that every time she shares. I had given my power away. To chemicals. I was missing from the mix. I still take one medication to help me sleep, but it IS more benign than the several I’d used in combination for such a very long time.

I used pills to abdicate taking responsibility for my health. All those years ago I stopped trusting my instincts, made doctors gods and didn’t work at solutions that might be harder than popping a pill or two or three or more, hoping for an easy solution. Those choices ended up making it more difficult to heal, not easier. Some meds are entirely appropriate and a godsend. I’ve learned to discern the difference.

Now, I take old lady drugs, for my elevated blood pressure and cholesterol. I take a reflux med to help with my old lady GERD, which I didn’t even know I had until a doctor told me I did. One anti-depressant and my epilepsy medication as a gentle form of insurance against possible seizures, that have cropped up every now and then, but it’s been years.

I just started taking a GLP-1 (a weight loss med) with hopes that I can eventually undo some of the physical issues that have come with my larger body size. I’d like to stop taking some of those old-lady meds. I’m using the “better living through chemistry” idea as an adjunct to being an active participant in my own recovery. I’m not hiding from my life anymore.

There’s no pill for that.

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