3:50pm June 1, 2012

Topamax. Blech.

I wish I could reply to other people’s ask posts. But I can’t. Someone asked sherlocksflataffect about Topamax and she mentioned that while she did well on it, other people get side effects sometimes.

I’m one of those people it does not work for in a big way. It did something to my feelings that is hard to describe. If you imagine this huge, flooded river coming at you at the highest speed possible, and sweeping you away in the most out-of-control way possible, then that gives you some idea. And while I knew something was wrong, I didn’t understand the full extent of my personality changes until I got off it. It felt horrible but it obliterated all perspective on whether things have always been this way or not.

My worst experience on it came when a friend said something to me. I forget what. It caused me a minor inconvenience. The sort of thing I’d normally blow off.

I don’t know how I got home. I got into bed. And was consumed with intense terror and rage and a sense that there was this bottomless pit of emptiness inside me, and a horrible yearning that could never be fulfilled. Every emotion cranked up to eleven. I felt like I was drowning.

And these emotions all converged on one desire: To go beat the shit out of my friend. This is not normal for me at all. Nor would it work – I suck at fighting and my friend is good at martial arts. But I ended up clutching my bed with my hands and my feet as hard as I could because I knew if I didn’t I’d somehow be swept over to her place and attack her.

The next day I told my neurologist to take me off it. Luckily, unlike my experiences with side-effects in the psych system, my neurologist just took me off it immediately no questions asked. In the psych system they would’ve taken this as evidence I had an underlying psych condition the drug unmasked and try to get me on meds for the purported condition rather than doing the sensible thing. It’s weird how both psychiatry and drug culture have this idea that side-effects are merely unmasking something that was already there. As if fucking with neurotransmitters can’t cause things that were never there. But I sure as hell know Topamax was like nothing I’d ever experienced. And I’m lucky I didn’t attack someone or kill myself or something.

Anyway. I do way better on Lyrica and Trileptal, I get what I consider minor side-effects but I’m almost seizure-free, and they clobber trigeminal neuralgia pain really well too. For whatever reason, Topamax makes my emotions go so out of control that who I am almost becomes impossible to find under all the rushing water.

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