I’ve been waiting to write about this until I was finished being angry. It took almost 7 months. And it will take another year or so to be truly past this chapter.
More than 20 years ago, I was hanging out at a friend’s house and had an allergic reaction to her cats which caused me to have my first asthma attack. I went to the doctor. Explained my symptoms. She handed me a prescription for Singulair. Take it every day. It should prevent this from happening again.
I ended up switching doctors many times over the years. But I continued to take it every day. For decades. Eventually switching to the generic. With every new practitioner refilling it for me with no questions asked.
Around the same time I started taking this asthma medication, I started having psychiatric symptoms. Depression. Mood swings. Unpredictability. Anger. Dizziness. I told one doctor I felt like I was buzzed even though I hadn’t been drinking. I had no idea what was happening to me.
I was sent for blood work, and eventually an MRI of my brain to rule out a tumor. When my doctors had zero answers, they finally sent me to a psychiatrist.
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and placed on a regimen of very heavy medications (I was on 5 different prescriptions at a time) that fucked with my body and my mind in a myriad of ways and never really seemed to completely handle my symptoms.
The stigma of being labeled with bipolar disorder is not something I ever really got past. Mental health issues run in my family and witnessing my grandmother’s struggle with depression left its mark on me.
I was very careful about who I told. I didn’t want ANYONE to know. Most people aren’t kind about it. If they happen to know about your illness and you do something they don’t like or approve of, it becomes all about your illness. No one grants you the grace to be human. Offhand and unkind comments about people with mental illness by friends, co-workers, and family shoved my mental illness further into the closet.
These drugs wreaked havoc on my body. Some made me ravenous. Some made me dehydrated. Some made me retain fluid. Some made me have tremors. Some stole my vocabulary. Some made me fatigued. Some made me lose weight. They all completely obliterated my sex drive. And that’s just scratching the surface of the unpleasantness caused by these medications.
My psychiatrist and I would find a cocktail that somewhat worked and then it would either stop working or I would have a side effect that meant I had to switch to something else. Like the side effect that caused me to have blood sodium levels so low they were afraid I was going to slip into a coma. Yep, can’t do that. That sounds dangerous.
I was a human science experiment. What will happen when I try this one? Maybe we just need to increase the dosage. Nope let’s back off that.
Even the change of the seasons would throw everything out of whack and require a tweak.
But I was alive. I was functional. I could work (that seems to be the gold standard). I was surviving. Not thriving. Not living. Just existing.
During the pandemic I got hives all over out of the blue. I suspected one of the drugs I was taking and stopped it cold turkey. It took 9 days to get it out of my system. And two rounds of steroids to manage the hives.
My psychiatrist said let’s see if we can manage this with fewer meds.
I went to work most days and I struggled. And I told no one how much I was struggling. Because I had tried all of the drugs. There was nothing else left to try. No reason to tell people I was struggling. There was nothing anyone could do for me.
Less than a year later, a second med that I had been taking for quite some time started giving me tremors so badly that it was noticeable. It looked like I was having-a-hypoglycemic-meltdown kind of noticeable. My psychiatrist switched it to another drug, same class. I
ended up in the ER with that one.
The conclusion … now an entire class of drugs is off limits to me. It became apparent I was going to have to learn to manage this (eventually) without drugs. It was only a matter of time.
I asked a friend about yoga. Do you like yoga? She said come to a class with me. I’m going Sunday.
I loved it.
I started going to yoga class on my own. Got a monthly subscription to a studio. If I was going to have to learn how to manage this with fewer meds, yoga and meditation seemed like the way to go.
It helped. It wasn’t a silver bullet. But it helped.
This is actually a much longer story, but the Cliff’s Notes are: I met my first spiritual coach, left my job of 23 years, moved to a new town for a new job in a new industry. Found new doctors. And found a new therapist. And got diagnosed with PTSD.
Fast forward about 18 months.
I came down with hives again. And no one knew why. I was still taking some meds (fewer than I had in Florida), and only one of them was known for rashes. I was already in the process of trying to get off my meds. And since none of my doctors seemed to know why I was having an allergic reaction, I took myself off all of my meds … ALL of them … except my hormone replacement therapy and my thyroid pill. Cold turkey. Including Singulair (the generic).
I don’t recommend this. I spent every spare moment of many days lying on my yoga mat on a bolster with a sleep mask over my eyes, covered with a blanket, listening to my nervous system as it screamed bloody murder in my head.
I unraveled. Physically and mentally.
I burned some relationships to the ground.
And my new spiritual coaches helped me start putting myself back together again.
I marked my calendar for how long each of the meds would take to get out of my system. And I did a lot of research. And kept counting down the days. The hives slowly went away. The dermatologist that took the biopsy of my rash granted me the grace of a steroid shot to get me over the hump.
In my research on the half-life of the meds and how long it would take to get them out of my system, I stumbled across some information about Singulair (and its generic equivalent) which I will link at the end of this blog and below.
Singulair has a black box warning from the FDA because it causes psychiatric symptoms.
Yes, you read that correctly. An asthma/allergy med. It crosses the blood/brain barrier. It also affects the gut. Which makes sense because the brain and the gut are pen pals.
I also *may* have a gene that causes my liver to process meds slowly. Which means in my body the dosage doesn’t clear as quickly and it builds up to levels that are too high and cause side effects. I’d have to pay for genetic testing to know for sure. But that could be why I always have such a bad reaction to prescriptions eventually, but not right away.
Since I have been off Singulair, I have been managing my mental health issues with therapy, yoga, meditation and my spiritual practice. (Please don’t do this yourself without working with professionals. When I was coming off these drugs I had a team of no less than 4 doctors, 2 therapists and 2 spiritual teachers that all had their eyes on me, plus some really understanding co-workers).
Do I have bipolar disorder? That’s still in question. But I feel better today than I have in decades. With no psychiatric meds. And I have to be quite careful with all prescriptions.
But I was angry. Really angry. Because no one caught it. No one questioned that prescription. The diagnosis of bipolar along with the prescription for Singulair raised zero eyebrows.
Decisions I made for my life over more than two decades that had all been clouded by this drug that caused psychiatric symptoms and clouded by the drugs to manage those symptoms. What would my life have been had I never taken that drug?
Relationships (many of them) lay in ruins. When I blow on the pile of ashes to see what’s underneath, a few of them are so freshly ruined they are still smoldering.
But we get no do-overs in life. There’s no going back and fixing any of it. All I can do is move forward. And so I am moving forward with as much grace as I can muster. One of my teachers told me to forgive myself for the things I did when I was just trying to survive. That permission helped me shift.
I am rebuilding my life brick by brick. Rebuilding my identity. Going back and picking up pieces of myself that I left on street corners. Trying them on like an old pair of jeans, and seeing if they still fit.
One of my spiritual teachers told me expect 18 months of emotional roller-coastering after going cold turkey off these meds. My psychiatric nurse says there is zero research but in her experience my teacher is accurate. About 18 months for things to level out. Which would be my birthday in 2027. One more year (and a week) to go.
So why am I writing this? I’m hoping if anyone out there is still taking this drug that they are aware of the damage it can do. Because I wasn’t aware of it. And many of my doctors didn’t seem to be aware of it either.
And in all of this … lessons (actually many, many lessons. Too many to put in this blog).
And here comes the gratitude. And that I can be in gratitude about this is a testament to the work I’ve been doing and also to my teachers and my therapist.
Everything had to happen the way it happened for healing to occur. It couldn’t have happened any other way for me to be where I am today. Everyone who came into my life and triggered me/taught me. And this experience made me strong as fuck. I’m a bad bitch.
Believe me, even without a bipolar diagnosis, I have enough mental and emotional bullshit that needed to be handled. If the drugs had worked, if I hadn’t had the adverse reactions I had, then I never would have handled my shit in this lifetime. I would have stayed numb and just existed.
All of this forced me to wake the fuck up. It put me on the spiritual path almost 6 years ago. And I found yoga, and I found a mentor, and I made a lot of huge changes. And I found (and am still finding) myself.
And all of the bad that came along with it, well I learned from it. And grew through it.
So I’m grateful. All of those lessons. Maybe they’ll go in a book. Maybe not. As I learn them I’m more inclined to be grateful and move forward than to do too much looking back. I’m writing about it because my teachers (many of them) are telling me to write.
I told one of my teachers it feels like I was spiritually constipated by my words. And I can’t weave the words I am meant to weave in this lifetime while all of these words are blocking them. It’s a drawing out. The writing and sharing acting like a spiritual laxative. I’ve been assured the people who need to find my words will find them and not to concern myself with that. Just write.
So I write. It’s a practice. Just like my yoga practice. My piano practice. My singing practice. My Irish Seabhean practice. All of the other things I’m practicing, too many to mention. And all of the practicing is helping me heal.
It's a Practice 
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