Screw recovery. I'll stay nice and drugged up, thanks.

Welp, the last week was a complete disaster.

All I did was go from 200mg to 150mg. I tried splitting up 300mg pills, or taking an exact 150mg using three 50mg pills. (I am the Seroquel lord, owning all shapes and sizes at this point)

In the end, both approaches ended up with the same results - disaster.

I woke up constantly each night, and three nights I wasn't able to fall asleep (until I took Ambien). By Friday this lack of sleep took a toll on me, and I was half awake all day.

Then I started to feel sick, which is continuing to intensify as I write this. (I find I can get sick after not sleeping well - body lowering its defenses or something)

Very frustrating.

I've never had such trouble tapering off of a medication. I might get withdrawal symptoms such as nausea, but in this case I just saw a return of my old insomnia symptoms. (The whole reason I took Seroquel in the first place recently)

So back to the full 200mg, and thank god for that. Can't wait to finally get some solid sleep and hopefully soon feel well rested during the day/not sick.

Granted, Seroquel has a sedative effect in the morning, but I'll take that morning sedation over feeling like shit all day.

Final stage of recovery

To quickly summarize the blog, I've gone on a long road of medication adjustment hell over the last few months.

Finally, things have stabilized in the last month or so, to the point I've been able to cut out my Ambien and Rozerem medications, and still sleep great.

That means one medication, Seroquel, remains to be weaned out of my medication diet. It's done amazing things for my recovery, which I never expected, given I've always seen it as too strong of a medication.

But here we are, and I finally feel healthy enough to try tapering off of it.

I talked to my psychiatrist, and am going to try going down to 150mg from 200mg. In actuality I'm just sloppily cutting 300mg pills in half using a pill cutter, so it ain't perfect, but it's better than going down to 100mg by cutting up 200mgs (what my psychiatrist recommended).

Frankly I'm nervous as hell. Sure, I can always just go back to 200mg, but after everything being so terrible recently, and only recently being stable, I can't help but feel reticent.

At the same time, I won't consider this a full recovery until I'm off of the Seroquel. Now that I'm working again, I'm noticing how sedating it is in the morning (I just nap on the morning subway now). And now that I can afford to relax on the weekends, I just sleep for about 11 hours (about the amount of time it takes for the Seroquel to wear off, I believe).

Cross fingers.