Don't try this at home

I insisted on doing it at my boyfriend's instead, which has air-conditioning and internet access. So insistent was I, that when I arrived on his place at 10pm on Sunday night with a key to the main door but not to the security door, I called him and demanded that he arrange a locksmith. At a distance of 400 km, he clearly preferred that I just take a taxi back to my own place and that we sort things out in the morning. But I'd walked nearly a kilometre, God damn it, drifting in and out of consciousness, electric shocks pinballing about in my head, dizzy with the fatigue of travelling 400 km myself just to get home to water his front garden, an activity subject to very precise time, date and method restrictions during this time of drought. My eyes and nose were just about providing enough precipitation to keep his native plants on floral death row for a little longer, so the hose only received a few cursory flicks while I waited for the locksmith to arrive. After he drilled out the original lock and let me in, it was my turn to unpack the tools of my trade, my recipe for potential disaster:

Zoloft cold turkey

One bed, preferably double
One large bottle of the benzodiazepine of your choice
One bucket, for when nausea waits for no toilet
Two boxes of tissues (one for blowing, the other for wiping)
One big plastic bag (for dirty tissues, torn up suicide notes)
One packet of laxatives
Two packets of cold & flu tablets
Lots of lemonade
At least two weeks of sick leave owing

Definitely no alcohol. (I cannot stress this enough - it just amplifies the dizziness.)

I'm now up to Day 10. The dizziness, electric shocks and the 'my foot's asleep' feeling that pervaded my entire body have mostly abated, but have left me with a degree of fatigue that forces me to carefully ration my daily activities. A half-hour walk, yes, but then a half hour nap. My appetite's gone but unlamented as a dry hacking cough can easily turn into a puke session.

Why am I doing this? Quite simply, I began cutting back slowly from a dose of 300mg, and as noted in a previous post, discontinuation syndrome had already struck by the time I was down to 225mg (which is still more than the standard maximum daily dose). Given this inauspicious beginning, I deduced that if I continued with fortnightly reductions of 25mg, I would be too unwell to work for at least ten days out of each fortnight. Given my full-time work and part-time study commitments, such an arrangement hardly seemed feasible - it would amount to six months of being sick. And yes, I'd done it before, and I wanted to see if I had the balls to do it again.

Not that I will ever put myself in this position again, but the one thing I shouldn't have done is attempt to work from home. Those people who go out of their way to give you the shits every time you deal with them? While your synapses are readjusting themselves to the point where you could swallow two tabs of ecstasy and not just sit on the end of the sofa thinking "hmm, nice party, nice people, think I might get up and dance soon", such people should be avoided like Joe Cocker on a plane. In the past few months at work, I've been put through an emotional wringer - a long-overdue promotion was finally 'formally' offered to me, but after a lengthy period during which said promotion was never reflected in my pay packet, I decided to play detective and discovered that no such promotion was ever going to be offered to me as far as HR were concerned - until I played nasty. I guess once your brain clears of the chemical maelstrom inflicted both by the drug per se and your withdrawal from it, you see where the causes of your unhappiness really lie.