"Baby, did you forget to take your meds?" Meds -- Placebo
The bottle sat on the table in front of me, the pills peach coloured, the label coldly clinical.Venlafaxine hydrochloride, 37.5mg, to be taken with food once daily.
I had been staring at the bottle for the better part of an hour. When I first put it on the table, my hands were trembling. After an hour of looking at it, my whole body was shaking.
I was terrified of what was in the bottle, what it represented and what it would do to me.
And I still didn't understand what was happening to me and how I had reached this point.
This one had been a long, slow descent. It was insidious in every sense of the word. I had been doing fairly well since about 1996. After completing my degree at St. Francis Xavier in 1995, I spent a couple of years living with friends in Halifax and working at a grocery store.
In 1997, I attended journalism school at the University of King's College, part of Dalhousie University. After graduating -- and finding out there were precious few job opportunities out east -- I reluctantly moved back to Ontario. Within six months, I landed my first paying journalism gig as a reporter at the Alliston Herald.
Being busy at a new job and in a new relationship, I was doing fine.
(Disclaimer -- when I say fine, I mean there were no terrible dips in my mood. It would still fluctuate much more rapidly and deeply than most people's. The depression would still gnaw in from the edges. There were few days when I was completely symptom free. But I could still function and pass myself off as normal. Or mostly normal.)
I managed to live on my own for a year before Paula and I moved in together. I did well at my job. I even started swimming laps on my lunch hour for almost a year.
Things were going well.
And then, as it always does, the bottom fell out.
Although my depression can come and go with seemingly no good reason at all, there have been several incidents in my life that have, for whatever reason, hobbled me enough for the black dogs to catch me and sink their teeth into my flesh.
Jeffrey's death was one. Constant harassment at my last place of work was another.
To be clear, these incidents weren't the sole triggers for my breakdowns. They were merely the proverbial straws that broke my back when I was already ill and vulnerable.
There had been a fire at one of the houses at Canadian Forces Base Borden and a five-year-old boy named Brandon died in it. The news release from the base said he was transported to the hospital in Alliston -- about 20 minutes away -- where he was pronounced dead. My editor wanted me to find out why he hadn't been taken to the hospital on base and if it would have made a difference.
I spoke to one of the paramedics who was on scene and he told me the boy had died at the scene and the only reason they took his remains to the Alliston hospital was to have the body cleaned up before the parents saw it. None of that made it into the story, of course, but it hit me extremely hard. Not only the death of a child, but the fact I was working in a profession that required me to even ask those questions in the first place.
Several months later I was in a meeting with my editor when, out of nowhere, my heart started racing and I broke out in a cold sweat. I grabbed at my chest and stood up, wild with fright.
"What's wrong?" asked my editor.
"I don't know. I think I'm having a heart attack," I answered. I stumbled outside to get some air. Gradually my heart rate returned to normal and I felt better.
But I was shaken. I had no idea what had happened or why.
A week later, it happened again, this time as I was driving along Hwy. 89. I pulled the car to the side of the road, sure I was having a heart attack. But, once again, I felt better within minutes.
Spooked, I made an appointment with my doctor. He ordered a holter monitor, a device you strap to your chest to monitor your heart. I wore it for a week but, in that time, didn't have another episode. The results from the monitor were negative.
Despite these positive results, my anxiety continued to climb. I became more and more obsessed with my health, spending long hours on the internet, trying to self-diagnose.
Come Saturday morning, the anxiety and depression would return, stronger than before, wrapping around my spine. I continued to research my symptoms and was sure I had a brain tumour and that I would die.
That was soon replaced by another fear, a fear so ridiculous in hindsight, it’s hard to believe it consumed me for the better part of a couple of weeks.
One Friday afternoon, when I was living in Bradford, I made my habitual trip to the Winchester Arms to get a head start on my weekly self-medication session. As I opened the door, I noticed something dark was moving on the ground near my right sandal-clad foot. I bent over to get a better look at it when I realized it was a bat. I entered the pub and told the bartender about it. She promptly dropped a fish and chip basket on top of it and called animal control. Within 30 minutes, it was gone and everything returned to normal.
Or so I thought.By the time I returned home that night, I began to obsess about that stupid bat. ‘What if it bit me?’ I thought. Off to the internet I went. What I read was like throwing gas on a fire. First off, I read, a bat’s teeth are so sharp – sharper than a syringe – one can bite you and you might not even feel it. ‘Could this have happened?’ I wondered. I was wearing sandals. Maybe I got close enough to it for it to bite an exposed part of my foot.
I managed to push it out of my mind for a day or so. However, my anxiety was now out of control. Each day seemed a thousand hours long as I struggled to rein in my racing thoughts. I was having non-stop heart issues – fluttering, racing, skipping. I couldn’t focus enough to read for any length of time. I was sure I was dying. I felt like a caged animal, desperate, frantic, pacing.
My thoughts circled back to the bat. Bats carry rabies, I thought. What are the symptoms of rabies? A quick check of the internet caused me to go into full panic: the symptoms included anxiety, paranoia, depression and heart failure.
When Paula walked through the door later that evening she was greeted by the sight of me wearing my sandals and stepping next to my wallet on the floor. I was using it as a stand-in for the bat and trying to see if there was any way the bat could have bit me while wearing the sandals.
Paula tried to reason with me, but it made no difference. I was convinced I had rabies and that I probably only had a week to live.
“Why are you here today?” asked the triage nurse in the floral-patterned scrubs.
“I’m not sure. Depression. Anxiety. I think there’s something wrong with me," I said in a monotone.
“Okay. Have you thought about hurting yourself?”
I’ll never forget my father’s expression when I said yes – a look of terrible grief and anguish that I had fallen so far.
I had thought about it daily, hourly, sometimes minute by minute. If the pain gets to be too much to handle, there’s always a way out, I would tell myself and, oddly, it would calm me down a bit.
They eventually concluded I was stable enough to attend an outpatient program at the hospital. I would meet with a psychiatrist and start daily counselling sessions. I needed to take a couple of weeks off work in order to do this.
And I needed to start medication.
So here I was, sitting in front of the bottle, shaking.
At the time, I knew nothing about anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications. I figured most people who were seriously depressed were prescribed lithium. I now know that while it is still used, it’s mostly used on patients with bipolar disorder (previously known as manic-depression, that condition that sends its sufferers on wildly parabolic arcs between blackest despair and almost god-like mania). I knew nothing about first-, second- and third-generations anti-depressants.
I was prescribed Venlafaxine hydrochloride, more commonly known by its brand name Effexor XR (XR meaning slow release).The psychiatrist started me at a low dose of 37.5 mgs (I now take the suggested maximum dosage of 375mgs).
So why was I so afraid to take it?
For several reasons. First of all, I didn’t understand the drug. What would its effect on me be? What were the side effects going to be like?
Second, and more terrifying for me, was the question ‘Will I disappear?’
Let me explain.
Depression and anxiety had long been a part of my life, long been a part of what made up me. For as long as I could remember I had laboured under the symptoms of depression, even as a young child: guilt, despair, worthlessness, low self-esteem, overwhelming sadness, a strong sense of injustice and unfairness. (When I was five, I watched one of those infomercials featuring starving children in Africa, their bellies swollen by dystrophy. I promptly asked my mother if there was such a person as Santa Claus, why didn’t he deliver them food? What could my mother possibly say to that? That was how I found out the truth about Santa.)
Depression had coloured my whole life. I gravitated to depressing music like Joy Division and Depeche Mode.
I read depressing literature by Camus and depressing poetry by Dickinson.
Now I was about to take a pill that might make that depression go away.
If it did, where would that leave me?
With a trembling hand, I opened the bottle, shook out a pill, placed it on my tongue and swallowed.
And then I waited.
End part 1…
Depression, like most mental illnesses, eases up with age, Jason. Hope knowing this may bring some comfort to you.
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