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I was driving home from work, when I was hit with a panic attack and it turned out that the new doctor, or one of them, had prescribed me another ace inhibitor, Ramipril’s half -brother, just as I was starting to look forward again! So there I am back in the anxiety stuff again. So how the hell had that stuff been prescribed, it was on my file that I reacted badly to them. Well, I had some time off so I could walk it off over the next few days, or so I thought. Unfortunately I had blisters on both feet from the previous weeks walking, and I hadn’t really done enough to heal them properly, so I was caught in the clutches of severe anxiety, enhanced by the realisation that my normal coping method was no longer available to me.
I go to the doctor, explain the situation, and tell her I could just do with something to tide me over for a few days, just until my feet come back to play. Bloody blisters, all it was, blisters on my feet, what did it for me as they say. My feet failed me, but let’s not get beyond ourselves, that would be unforgiveable. So, somehow, I get sucked into accepting a prescription for Citalopram and a six week set up process, to this day I cannot connect tide me over to six weeks but there you go.
The first week on this stuff is, well, until these pharmaceutically induced episodes of anxiety, I had never had any kind of anxiety in my life, but this stuff pulls anxiety out of sealed up cupboards or something and just parades it in front of you, behind you, above you, beneath you, and most of all, through you, and it is horrific for about three to four days and then it settles down and things are better. You do kind of wonder why the doctor doesn’t mention this first week effect, or maybe it’s just me. Actually I’d found online that this was a common effect for the first week, but had I not I might well have thought it was me. Anyway, after the first week, I can function, though I have a tension headache like a too tight balaclava on my head. After what I’ve been through of late though, a headache is almost a relief.
I was back at work when I reached the six week stage, the time when the full effect of the drug comes through and I’m fully expecting my tension headache to disappear. Well the headache didn’t disappear, but I did get a change of my too tight imaginary headgear. If you remember railway clerks in the old westerns, or the telegraph man, they wore what were visors with elastic bands, at least I think they were elastic, that went round the back of the head. This, was, my new headache profile, definitely not an improvement, but in fact more bothersome being nearer the front, but that wasn’t the worst change, something else came along that was totally unexpected; I got a tickly face. Now, don’t read tickly as funny, it was anything but, it was like having some ephemeral spider crawling over your face, unpleasant is an understatement here.
Something even stranger happened at this time too. These changes had happened after a shift at work and I wasn’t sure whether to go in the next day or not. A headache I could cope with, but a tickly face in a laboratory was a non-starter if ever there was. So I get up the next morning with full expectation of phoning in sick but what do you know. No headache, no tickly face, so I go to work. The pattern became obvious over the next few weeks. When I left work and got home the tickly face and the headache would come back. If I was off work I had both problems, indeed the only time I didn’t have these problems was when I was at work, talk about a Calvinist headache, it allowed me to work, but pleasure, and leisure, were simply not permitted. John Knox would have been proud.
I saw a doctor and explained the problem and he kind of intimated that the tickly face thing was kind of normal. Well, it sure as hell wasn’t my kind of normality, and I’d never heard of anyone whose normality it could be. He suggested dropping the dose of Citalopram with a general view to coming off it. That, thought I, will do for me. So that’s what I did with the following effects. As I dropped the dose of the drug the headache and the tickly face began to creep closer to work, also I began, as I dropped the dose a second time to feel intimations of anxiety again, at which point I realised that this was the anxiety that this stuff was supposed to have sorted, all it had done was suppress it. So here we go again, I’ve got a headache, a tickly face, and anxiety all creeping closer to my laboratory, and simply driving home was becoming difficult. I remember the last shift while taking that drug; I felt the headache take over as I took off my lab coat, I couldn’t even have a tea break without a tickly face. I was supposed to drop the dose one more time and keep at that level for a month, but the dark forces of anxiety, the front head headache and the dreaded tickly face had me surrounded and I couldn’t do it. I had to stop from the current level. I had some leave booked so I decided I’d stop it then, thereby giving myself some time to recover from any withdrawal effects. So I stopped.
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