Nortriptyline discontinuation complete?

The taper down to 10mg/day was a bit difficult, but the final discontinuation seems to have gone pretty smoothly. I suspect I could have actually discontinued sooner, and the withdrawal symptoms I was having ont he last few days of 10mg/day was specifically because I was toggling right around some threshold for things. But I’m glad I took it slow all the same, and in any case I feel like the worst is behind me at this point.

Basically, my last dose was Friday night, and Saturday I still felt like crap emotionally, but today I felt pretty good mentally, aside from a little bit of dizziness and a small amount of nausea. But like, I’m feeling pretty calm and collected and was able to work on music and I even got into a fairly intense conversation about someone about things that would have easily made me fall apart like two days ago but I was just… totally fine?

Oh, and I got a bunch of chores done that I’d been having trouble with recently. Maybe I can keep them up.

The downside is that at least for now I’m much more acutely aware of my baseline pain levels. Also I assume that my anxiety will be back again. I actually had my first panic attack in a long time early Friday morning (when I was still at 10mg). Good thing I have nowhere to be anytime soon and won’t be, like, driving anywhere.

I do have a followup appointment with my pain doctor tomorrow (virtual visit, although the clinic’s only a few blocks from me anyway) and hopefully we can start talking about the next steps. I think for now I’d rather just like… go back to self-medicating with cannabis, and forget about ADHD meds for now. I mean, I always found that cannabis also helped me focus too, at least when the distraction was due to pain, so… I dunno. I’m not terribly fond of mainstream medicine right now, as far as pain and ADHD treatment are concerned.

This baseline pain level is a bit troubling but it also feels different than it did before I started on this whole treatment journey anyway. It could just be a lingering nortriptyline effect, or something? Well, whatever. Time will tell, and maybe a more holistic approach will work out better.

(So far no medical treatment — including CBD — has been found effective long-term. So holistic options are basically all I’ve got.)

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