Ativan/Lorazepam Withdrawal
Spirituality, Reading and Writing Are Helping Me Through It
Just the Facts
I should not have trusted my doctor. Not without verifying. She kept me on a dose of 2 mg lorazepam (generic Ativan) for over a year to combat insomnia. Not the recommended four months.
Withdrawal grabbed hold of my body for a week. It shook me like a bulldog ripping a Cabbage Patch Doll. It included:
- Mood swings all the way into despair.
- About 15 pounds weight loss from skipping two and a half meals per day.
- Sleep down to three and a half hours at the worst point.
- Diarrhea at an urgent moment’s notice.
I had felt safe. Another doctor had prescribed lorazepam many years ago for anxiety after a traumatic life event. He told me I might have to stay on it for the rest of my life.
Since I don’t like the idea of medicine for life, I came off it under his direction after a few months. Gradually.
Overdose deaths involving benzodiazepines — such as Xanax, Librium, Valium and Ativan, drugs commonly used to treat anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, seizures and insomnia — have quadrupled between 2002 and 2015, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. — Ashleigh Garrison
Thankfully my withdrawal did not start from full cold turkey. I had started reducing my dosage but then lost track of how many pills were left. On Good Friday morning I requested a refill through the web portal. That left me a half-dose each (1 mg) for Saturday and Sunday.
- Monday: No Refill.
- Tuesday: No Refill.
- Wednesday: Message to doctor reporting symptoms / No Refill.
- Thursday Morning: Message from doctor blaming pharmacy / Refill.
- Thursday Afternoon: Tried to stay off it despite worsening symptoms.
- Friday: Medium writer Kira Dawn convinced me to read up on it.
- Saturday: Two pharmacists convinced me to go half dose for a week.
It’s easy to grow numb to warnings about rare side effects of drugs. Lorazepam withdrawal can include sudden death, seizures, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts.
While I escaped the worst symptoms, the pharmacists told me I was in with a big crowd of people to suffer severe withdrawal. They had helped many other folks get through it. Thank you Kira for convincing me to seek their assistance instead of charting my own path after my doctor had grown non-responsive.
An MD friend of mine in residency years ago joked that sudden death was the only side effect for which a doctor might face liability. He learned to never tell patients the bad stuff. They would talk themselves into it.
Lessons Learned
- Having a good experience with a drug once does not guarantee a good outcome the next time. Withdrawal differs under different circumstances. Lorazepam can have the opposite of its intended effects in older people by aggravating anxiety, sexual longings and insomnia. Between middle age and old age lies a gray zone.
- Trusting a doctor to pay attention should not substitute for one’s own vigilance. I should have better learned and believed the prescription papers. Continuing without the drug after getting past the worst of the withdrawal made no sense. I should have demanded that my doctor offer guidance right away. Instead I waited for a web portal response that never came.
How Spirituality, Reading and Writing Help
One hour of morning meditation usually leaves me feeling good all day. As I sank into withdrawal, two hours meditation would calm me for the next two hours at most. At the lowest point, I could not meditate. I sat for hours with my eyes closed, unable to achieve it. Then I paced all over the house.
For me, the real work of meditation is less to achieve ends, like improving moods or lowering blood pressure; it is more about making sense of whatever mood I experience. The worst moments reminded me of the many months I had felt depressed a few years ago. I experienced that time as a dark night of the soul.
The worst moments of withdrawal refreshed my memory, not only of the low point of my life, but of the spiritual lessons learned through it. I had discovered what is left when the ego crumbles. I learned that things of truly lasting value support the heart rather than the sense of self-importance.
In moments of despair, the body turns to lead. Only the desire for meaningful engagement could stir me. I battled entropy by reading my favorite authors and by writing. Most of the ramblings from that pit will never make it to your eyes. It is already erased. But it kept me from staring and pacing.
One low point came after three hours of applying for a government job. I could not submit the application because I was missing some RIF-50 form from my last government job. I felt like breaking something.
I apologized to my wife for failing her. My income had gone down for the past two years before the crisis and was now taking another nose dive just when her employer began layoffs.
“Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
After those three wasted hours, I started another application. My motivation to push forward was not some internal “rah, rah, I’m the best” speech. No, it was spiritually-based grim determination to avoid surrender. It was resistance to seeing myself as nothing more than a 59-year-old drug addict facing a job market with 15% unemployment.
It was a conviction that, if I am going down, I will go down meaningfully with dignity. I won’t give up.
What may save me from the economic pit is the body of writing that I have produced here on Medium. The editor-in-chief of the company where I applied wrote me a detailed message. She had obviously gone carefully through my portfolio of writing on Medium.
As of the time of this publication, I do not have a contract, but an employment interview is scheduled. This hopeful development improves my mood and encourages me to push on. I highly recommend that anyone who applies for a writing or editing job put a portfolio on Medium.
Whether you are battling addiction, anxiety, depression, grief, chronic pain, debilitating bodily symptoms, or despair, please soldier on.
Make every attempt to succeed. But don’t base your self-respect on success. Never believe that failure will make you worthless. That belief could turn fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Believe in the deepest part of yourself that cannot be destroyed by failure or success.
