Hello!

I haven’t posted in a while for various reasons. Going on new medication, getting used to side effects and coming off said medication cold turkey was a rough time. I wasn’t myself and frankly I was horrified by both my physical and mental symptoms. I still don’t think I’m out of the woods yet but I will get there.

I was put on Venlafaxine in February, it’s an SNRI medication which in my case was prescribed to try and suppress my REM sleep. This was meant to help reduce my nightmares and I trialled it for 5 weeks. Unfortunately, it made me feel awful and I had to stop taking it. I had nausea during the day and my excessive daytime sleepiness was even worse. I was so disappointed. I felt like it was such a waste of time and that I was going backwards instead of forward. When my sleep consultant contacted me he also decided that my excessive daytime sleepiness was at a level that made it unsafe for me to drive. This was another blow and I’ll be honest, it took me a wee while to dig myself out of the dark hole it put me in. I’m still afraid that I might slip and fall back down there and I am slowly working towards managing the beast again. I had also completely lost my funny bone which discouraged me from writing because I couldn’t string a sentence together much less write a blog post or make it entertaining.