Year three: the magic wears off
For about two years I took my 0.5 mg of clonazepam every day and everything seemed fine. Then, somewhere around the start of year three, the effects started dwindling, especially for sleep. Same pill, same time, less and less magic. So the dose got raised, and then raised again, four times over the next year and a half or so, going from that original 0.5 mg all the way up to 2 mg a day. For reference, 2 mg of clonazepam is equivalent to about 40 mg of diazepam, which sounds like nothing when you say “two milligrams” and is actually a lot.
The side effects move in
And that’s when the side effects really started. I felt so sick, sick to my stomach like a hangover, just an overall malaise, this persistent feeling of being drugged. Slow on the outside but jittery on the inside. Inhabiting my own body felt wrong, and my mind was mush. I was lucky to be working remote by then, mostly left alone, so nobody really noticed my performance. I was there, going through the motions and existing, but it felt wrong.
The sneaky part is that I felt worse so slowly that I didn’t even notice it happening. It’s only looking back now that I can see it clearly. At the time, all my tests came back normal and my prescriber wasn’t concerned, so what was I supposed to think? Was it side effects, or was I in interdose withdrawal, my body starting to withdraw between doses? Honestly, to this day I’m not sure, maybe a bit of both.
One word changed everything
I did not think it was the benzo. Why would I? It was medicine, from a doctor, taken exactly as prescribed. So I googled my symptoms over and over, looking for another diagnosis, some new illness I’d developed, chronic fatigue maybe, something neurological. Then one day I added one word to the search: the name of my medication. And voilà, I was not alone. People were describing exactly, and I mean exactly, what I was experiencing. Apparently this is extremely typical, people spend months or years convinced they have some new illness before anyone connects it to the benzodiazepine. The treatment had become worse than the illness it was supposed to treat.
So I got an appointment, described what I was feeling, and told my doctor what I thought. He said this was a normal dose and he wasn’t concerned (lots of people take way more for years, he said). And then he told me I could stop if I wanted to. I hadn’t done any real research at that point, so I thought I could just… stop.
I’m guessing you can infer what happened next. That’s the next post.
