Heydee:
I am recovering from a knee replacement and had insomnia and pain and doc prescribed cymbalta. I started it because my husband, daughter, and sister take it and all have positive results and I have chronic pain issues beside my knee and I trust my doctor. As soon as I ramped to 60 mg after a week I started having severe side effects including not sleeping and extreme anxiety, sweats, palpitations, and awful dreams. I started doing research at this point and thought I don't want to cold turkey off of it and dropped back down to 30 mg....so I did 30 mg 7 days, 60 mgs 7 days, 30 mgs 4 days, and 20 mgs for 4 or 5 days and side effects had lessened but were still awful. I felt totally ramped up physically and emotionally. Talked to my doc who was incredulous about what I experienced and told me to just stop it which I did 12 days ago. I'm to check in with her after 2 or 3 weeks and do some bloodwork....I told her I wanted to get back to where I was before I would discuss more medication.
I knew I might experience some discontinuation symptoms but could not take the side effects and didn't want my brain to get any more adjusted to it. First 3 days weren't bad and then about day 5 or 6 I started having bad muscle aches and pains and I feel like I'm fighting off a cold bug/sore throat. I'm also still having night sweats/occasional hot/cold flashes and vivid weird dreams and lots of low grade anxiety. I'm in the middle of trying to get my body back in shape and I'm looking for work which I need to have to survive. So lots of life stresses and my body isn't 100% and this sucks big time.
After researching cymbalta effects and withdrawal I really want to have as positive attitude about this whole process as I can even though I'm feeling like it is costing me alot for no real benefits (except it did help my pain alot).
I am hoping the muscle aches will improve and I will start to feel better in the next week to 10 days. Just trying to not feel discouraged by this process.
Thanks for listening, K