Having tried to return to working and failed, I decided to try
a final role of the drug dice and go with an SNRI this time: Venlafaxane. And
again a try at a phased return to working, starting where I’d left off, at about
33% of my contractual hours. It began and then so did the weariness.
I slept for much of the weekend at the end of which England lost,
on penalties, the final of the European football contest they’d been competing
in. I didn’t get to watch that as I’d had to retire to bed during the second
half through simple exhaustion. I’m not a huge football fan but I took my inability
even to stay awake for that epic football moment as a sign that this was not
working and gave up the drug (after a month) though not the return to work.
I’d say that I have had mixed success. While coming off
Venlafaxane was nothing like as bad as the dreadful Paroxetine, I have remained
poised on the brink of a kind of physical illness akin to jet lag. Get too
tired and I am unable to hold down food for some days. I don’t think that this vomiting
is psychological – so my body has decided that it is an appropriate response to
both physical and mental unwellness – but I’m obviously at the limit of what I
can tolerate, in part, no doubt, because I am working more or less – but never
more than – my contractual hours. I had hoped that stopping the drug after a
mere month would return me to approximating the health of an unfit 70 year old that I'd reached before starting it.
Not yet, it seems. I remain a stranger to my thing-of-strange-beauty Moulton bicycle, for example.
So here I am. Going to bed before 10pm, unable to exercise, easily being sick for physical or – separately – mental reasons. I think I’m not mad. (One reason for coming off Venlafaxane was that it obviously affected my aesthetics in a dark unpleasant way.) But this is August: fewer work meetings, more sun, less darkness than the season to come. My work will get more intense, my mood will naturally tend to the depressive end of things, my dreams will turn to Cthulhu’s.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
