I am new here. In fact this is my first ever blog-log action. I engage to say a sincere thank you to those who have posted in the past, whose logs I have read and therein have been able to save my sanity. I cannot emphasize how grateful I am to those people, in particular one woman's encouragement to remember (after posting her meticulous bead count-down execution) that "you can do this". I have had her words reverberate time and again since I began weaning off in August 2015.
I was prescribed 30mg Cymbalta about seven months following serious traumatic brain injury. I believe my neurologist did so to help with pain, in addition to great sadness and grief over the realization that my brain was not going to return to normal. That was in the spring of 2010. A few months later she increased the dosage to 60mg. In the springtime of 2015 I realized that my brain felt odd, "toxic" is the best description, and I began to look into getting off of it, for that reason as well as liver health and not wanting to be trapped by a drug.
In August of 2015 I spoke with my primary care provider who cut the dose by half, to 30mg. Fine, no issues at all. Stayed there for two months and went down to 20mg. Still OK, but symptoms which you all know about began. Stayed on it for about a month and began to wean by going every other day down to nothing, a span of about two weeks. All the usual symptoms came into play, except for vomiting, and it summarized by a collapse at my doctor's office wherein it felt like my entire body was caving into my chest cavity/heart.
Break here...I will work on this again later.
I was so ill and so shocked and so incredibly frightened that I immediately went back to 30mg dose and decided to wait to wean off until next year. Again that was November 2015. I began weaning again about four months ago probably, and stayed on 20mg for quite a while. The latest phase is that I've been opening the capsules (the grains of which are not uniform, are jagged and of various sizes)...and am down to probably 6 or 8 mg where I've been for about three weeks now.
