Posted by mollie on December 5, 2004, at 23:32:10
i have been taking effexor xr since 1999. i was diagnosed with fibromyalgia at that time and the pain from that disease was so bad that i was barely able to function and moving was hard. in about 5 days after i started the effexor one of my co-workers asked me what had happened to me and i asked her in return what she was talking about. her reply was--"you're moving so much more easily." she was right and i've been thankful ever since for effexor.
two years ago, following an assault, i was thrown into a terrible bout of post-traumatic stress reaction/disorder. luckily, i was quickly referrred to a shrink whose specialty is trauma reactions. i ended up having to take two years off work as a result and spent 8 weeks in an outpatient program at a local psychiatric hospital. several new meds were added to my regimine and dosages were adjusted up and down and with good therapy and medication i am getting my life back. recently, i did not have the money to purchase 3 meds at the time they needed to be refilled, so i went about 6 days without them. one of those meds was the effexor. during that time, i experienced a severe migraine, something i had not had in a long enough period that i could not remember the last one (they developed as a result of brain injury from the assault). a friend knew that i had been without the drugs and had done some research on the interenet about withdrawal and effexor. she has been wondering if the migraine was a withdrawal symptom, since the effexor has such a short half-life. i also reached a point where i had fibromyalgia pain again so badly that i could hardly move.
so, all that to say--in reading some of the information available on this site about effexor withdrawal symptoms, i found alot of information but it wasn't really concise enough to be useful to me, e.g. people wrote about brain zaps but i couldn't really get a good idea of what they were exactly and others wrote of bad pain and headache but i couldn't get a feel for what exactly bad pain was or what constituted headache. it would be very very helpful to me if someone or more than someone would make me a list of the specifics of as many symptoms as possible. i can't imagine ever going off the effexor because it is so beneficial to me in terms of improving my quality of life. and we have decreased the dosage from 300 to 150 mg each a.m. and i realize that i can't let that drug slide if i am having trouble being able to purchase them all. i would like to be better educated about the drug and i also wonder what kind of side-effects there may be that i don't know about
i'd appreciate any specific information any of you can offer. thanks in advance. (oh, i was on wellbutrin, strattera, elavil, trazadone, and remeron in addition to effexor. we have reduced the effexor, weaned me off of the strattera, decreased my elavil, decreased the trazadone, and weaned me off the remeron at this time.)
poster:mollie
thread:425043
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20041201/msgs/425043.html