Yesterday at the gym I was doing my regular chest routine with my good friend & workout partner Shannon Riley and something very painful happened inside my head. To give this very painful thing some context I should say that I’ve been lifting weights for over fifteen years now and am a complete beast (raaaaaaaawwwwrrrr!) when it comes to lifting. I think the first time I put up 6 plates on a bench press was when I was 15 and working out at the Morse Center at the Medical University of Ohio, where I was working at the Center for Creative Instruction, which we then called the Digital Meat Locker. But I digress…
So I started the workout with my usual light warmup set. I don’t lift like some retarded high school football lineman where I bounce up and down on the bench and tense my whole body and hold my breath for the duration of the set. Rather, I relax beforehand and try to make each set into a much more fluid, constantly-breathing motion. So the warmup set went fine, and then we alternated until my last set: 295lbs x however the hell many I could get up. I aimed for 8 reps.
I managed to get all the way to the 8th rep and still had some energy left, so I went for 10 reps. At the end of the 9th rep something very bad happened inside my head. It felt like an electric shock started at the base of my skull and radiated up around the outside of my brain, landing oh-so-pleasantly at the backs of my eyeballs and then continuing to throb maniacally with my heartbeat. It also briefly clenched my stomach up into a ball the size of my fist, though that particular affliction didn’t happen again. Luckily the shock happened on the concentric part of the lift and not when the weight was coming down, because I was able to just essentially drop the weight on the rack and cry out in shock and pain.
I have never had anything even remotely similar to this happen to me before. I have high blood pressure caused by my sleep apnea, so my first thought was that I had just had a stroke. After this notion wore off a few seconds later Shannon asked me if I wanted to quit our workout. Like the stupid weightlifting beast that I am I of course said no, and we moved on to incline bench. I did a lot less weight this time, a more-reasonable 135lbs, and still the pain shot through my head. I then dropped it to something like 85lbs, and it still happened.
So my next thought was to try something where I wasn’t holding weight over top of me, but rather something more simple, like a cable machine. Shannon and I went over and I tried doing cable crossovers, and the pain shot through me again. I decided to call it quits.
I came home, took a Vicodin, smoked a bowl, and tried to fall asleep. I couldn’t. I tossed and turned all night long, having weird dreams and alternately sweating and being cold. This had actually happened the night before, as well, but I never really thought about it.
So today I woke up (late, of course, after getting no sleep) and went about my day. 5:30PM rolled around I was off to the gym. Shannon and I decided to pick up the previous day’s chest workout and jumped on the incline bench. I knocked out a warmup set and felt the dreaded tinglings in the back of my head, but they didn’t shoot through my whole skull. They stayed put in whatever hellish otherdimensional vortex they came from. Then I did my first real set (which was still comparatively light for me), and again made it to the 9th rep, when suddenly the little electric maggots broke through and ricocheted around my head. I dropped the weight on the rack and sort of shouted “My head hurts!”
Shannon was just as supportive as he was the day before and said “Let’s get out of here.” We left, and the pain again stayed with me, throbbing with my heartbeat. We left the gym and I dropped Shannon off at his place. We were supposed to go see Nikka Costa tonight but I just couldn’t see myself in a small club with super-loud music — the music would be fighting with my heartbeat to decide who got to control the tempo of my pain. Shannon encouraged me to stay home.
At this point I was really kind of scared. Tears were actually welling up in my eyes on the way home, which of course made the pain worse, so I tried to calm down. I had never had anything like this happen and I didn’t know what to do. I called my doctor and got the answering service, so then I called my mom.
I love my mother and she is a great nurse with a lot of experience, but my sisters and I have taken to calling her the Angel of Death in the past few years because she has a penchant for telling people that they are going to die. She generally gives excellent medical advice, but I’ve had to learn to toss out the inevitable proclamations of fatality she sprinkles in like poisonous fairy dust. Indeed, she pointed out that my dad had some vertebral problems in his early 30’s and that I might as well, but she also mentioned that it might be a brain tumor.
See what I mean? Ángel de la muerte.
Well, I decided to do what any self-respecting geek would do: I Googled for it. “weightlifting headaches,” “exercise headaches,” “weightlifting high blood pressure,” etc etc etc.
Then I hit it. “Brain shocks.” The first result was about brain shocks resulting from discontinuing the usage of Celexa, an antidepressant.
I take Effexor, a SNRI antidepressant, and have for perhaps 5 years now. I have somewhat severe generalized anxiety and the Effexor sort of, kind of helps. I ran out of it this past weekend and amidst all of the birthday revelry I just forgot to go pick up more from the pharmacy. I took my last pill on Saturday, meaning that I went without it on Sunday and again on Monday, and then most of today until I went out and picked some up this evening. I have gone without Effexor for a day or two before, but I have never really critically examined the way I felt as a result of going off. Nor, for that matter, have I ever critically examined the way I felt while on it.
So I started reading all about Effexor withdrawal symptoms, and suddenly everything fell into place. I was ready to cry at completely random things that normally wouldn’t make me cry… I was alternately sweating and feeling cold… I had severe insomnia… And I had severe, lingering brain shocks and then aftershock headaches during activities that have never caused those before.
Wyeth acknowledges the shocks and whatnot on their withdrawal side effects page. In fact, they have a euphemism for it called “severe discontinuation syndrome,” which is Pharmaspeak for “We have your ass hooked on our junk and it’s legal, hahahahahahaha!”
It turns out that this withdrawal is an acknowledged problem with SSRI’s and SNRI’s — the wool isn’t totally being pulled over anyone’s eyes here — but I never realized how widespread or severe the results could be. Then again the effects of antidepressant withdrawal aren’t exactly waved in front of society’s collective consciousness like, say, the withdrawal effects of cocaine addiction, even though they can be just as severe. This is a perfect example of how the pharma industry is allowed to develop and push highly addictive drugs that are “acceptable” (read: taxable) to the government while other drugs are demonized and prohibited because no one can patent them and make money on them.
Here’s a list of links of information and other people discussing this problem:
I think it’s time to go off the meds. I am still going to get the whole battery of tests now, the MRI and the EKG and all that crap, but I am going to talk to my doctor about tapering off the Effexor. It’s time.
