Another Seroquel rant

My battle with Seroquel continues to rage on and I'm sure it's starting to aggravate people with how much I spout off about my hatred of this drug lately, but it's my blog...feel free to stop reading any time. In fact you might want to stop reading right now because this post will be another rant about how toxic I believe this drug from hell really is.

I'm not in a good mood today, which is probably an understatement, but I'm not exactly sure how to describe how I'm feeling. It's that place, somewhere between blah and suicidal, that's void of description. Unless you've been there, there's no way to express what it feels like. There's some irritation, some depression, some anxiety, some paranoia and an overall general feeling of blah. If I could have stayed in bed all day I probably would have. But that's where a lot of my bad mood stems from...lack of sleep.

Sleep has been hit or miss since I stopped taking Seroquel over three weeks ago. I'm lucky if I average three hours of sleep a night. That's right, 3 hours, A NIGHT. No one can live on that little sleep, no one. The problem isn't just the lack of sleep, it's also a lack of quality. There are five stages of sleep and I'm lucky if I ever make it to level three. Most nights I feel trapped in level 1.

My frustration with not sleeping has developed into a near nightly struggle of do I breakdown and take the poisonous Seroquel that got me in this position in the first place or do I keep trying to figure out how to sleep without it and hopefully someday break my brain's addiction to this evil drug. How much suffering can I endure, will I have to endure, before I am able to sleep like a normal person again instead of being dependent upon the drug induced coma of Seroquel?

When I found myself still wide awake at 4 am almost every night this past week, it was painfully obvious that I had no choice about whether I take Seroquel or not. The drug and the damage it has done to my brain have made that choice for me. As a result, I gave in and choked down 100 mgs of Seroquel the last two nights in a row.

How can doctors so carelessly prescribe such a potent drug to treat insomnia? That's the only reason I was ever put on it, because I wasn't sleeping. That's the primary reason most people I know started on it. The last few times I've been in the hospital, nearly every single patient on the unit was either on Seroquel or had been on it sometime in the past couple of years. Surely there are better alternatives, medications that were specifically manufactured for sleep disturbances, rather than putting everyone on an anti-psychotic.

Unfortunately, like most people, I was first given the drug while inpatient. At the time I was borderline catatonic, barely able to even remember what year it was let alone read the patient information I'd been given on any of the medications they began pushing on me in order to give informed consent. It'd be another seven months before I was at least mildly stable enough to start asking questions, but by then I was already hooked like a crack addict. I gladly went along with each dosage increase because I was too depressed to care.

Now I'm paying for it...dearly.