I Started The Prozac In Paris

This eponymous post accomplishes two important tasks: 1) it enables me to use the very-cool word “eponymous” in a sentence, and 2) it explains the name of this, my blog. In this post I describe my relationship with Prozac and other antidepressants which, like a series of bad relationships, entered my life with promise and a potential of making things better but mostly just made me cranky or unhappier or both – until I found, or rediscovered, The One. There were other things that also carried me through what has been, by far, the worst, the darkest time in my life: supportive friends, swimming and tai chi, chocolate, Jenny Lawson of thebloggess.com. But antidepressants opened the door, for me, to sunlight again. That very door had been blown closed by a threat to my child’s life and for a time I lived with the possibility that it would never be opened again. But I have been lucky, many times over, and so it was in this case with my daughter.

Both of my children have been challenged by Life, have had to deal with tough times and setbacks, emotional pain and disappointments. They’ve emerged stronger for it, better people, formed by their experiences. Of course, this is what Life is, experience molding you and chivvying you along in your “Becoming”. Watching your child(ren) navigate these challenges can be more difficult than going through those trials yourself (again); watching, helplessly, on the sidelines and feeling that lack of control feels like torture, and you watch from afar, hoping that they emerge intact.

It can break some of us, however, or leave us fractured; even when glued, our broken places still show. Of course, the Japanese have found a way to showcase the beauty of broken objects, rimming the breaklines with gold and transforming the fracture lines into new, beautiful details. People are more complex than a teacup, however, and the beauty of breakage can be more deeply hidden, its bounty tougher to experience, the chips tougher to buff. Moreover, I am not Japanese but Jewish, and the Jews are not known for pushing their optimism to the fore when confronted with life-threatening challenges, much like fighting a flaming house with a squirt gun. No, optimism and artistic spin are suitable for recovery rather than weaponry and in any case, although I kept holding on to them as to a talisman against disaster, I knew their only utility was for my own purposes.

Several years ago, my daughter became quite ill. Death was not an improbable outcome for her condition, but thankfully circumstances and determination and luck combined and culminated in a happy outcome of full recovery. The road to this outcome was, however, hard-won, and required a long period of convalescence. The task of building her back up again necessitated me being her primary care provider in a way I hadn’t needed to be since her early childhood. The stress of her illness and her hard-fought recovery took its toll, not just on me but on our entire family. Yeah, I’m a little bit of control freak and this simple fact made it that much more difficult. It’s hard to be Zen when death is on the other side of the table and you know you’re not great at arm wrestling – not to mention that you are not the one actually wrestling: you’re just the support staff, it is your child doing the wrestling and she likely has inherited your wrestling prowess (rather, your lack thereof)…

Not My First Time…

Unsurprisingly, it all started with my kids. I’m pretty sure, in retrospect, that I suffered from postpartum depression after my son was born. Then, a few years later when my daughter was 10 days old, a friend killed herself. The resulting hormonal post-delivery brew and the grief of losing my friend (and in such a way) sent me into a bit of a spin. I went to see my doctor about this and she suggested, among other things, a postpartum depression group, but I felt that the last thing I needed was to sit with a group of people who were just as, or even more, depressed than I was. I muddled through, finding solace in being busy with my young family. I worked through the grief of my friend’s loss and other emotional challenges. I resumed a modified version of my life and, soon, started to deal with my parents’ emerging end-of-life health problems.

Years passed. The deaths of my parents within a few months of each other, sundry challenges of marriage, child-rearing, struggles with life-work balance, the adolescence years, perimenopause, etc., passed. I’ve always appreciated my life, warts and all, and with one child launched and another performing equally spectacularly, I dared to get self-congratulatory. I was guilty of hubris, and the gods just couldn’t let it go. Yes, I fucked myself and I never saw it coming.

Well, It’s Here…

Each of us answered the call to my daughter’s illness in our different ways but my mandate was clear, even if the way ahead was not. Navigating and managing serious illness requires mental focus for both patient and caregiver(s), and what is ‘necessary’ for this component is not always obvious or intuitive. My daughter had her own ultimate mandate which, while at odds with other priorities of hers, was to recover from her illness so that she could go to university. I was down with this. This abstract goal, 18 months hence, was a good carrot and we all held onto the stick for dear life.  My husband’s aim was to support her in any way that he could, both financially as the sole breadwinner and emotionally where possible, establishing a habit of walking with her (when she was ambulatory again) that continues to this day whenever she graces us with a trip home. My son’s job (as we insisted to him) was to continue to wring the juice out of his university experience and be whomever he was needing to be, to become in his own life. My task was literal care-taking and the minutiae of day-to-day necessities of care, ceaseless and demanding: the emotional component of this care was substantial.

Fast forward a bit and my daughter achieved her goal of beginning university after high school – no gap year for her. Today she seems well (let’s not talk about the eczema) and generally happy. She continues to excel and outstrip her own many successes, and we look forward to whatever she chooses to do next, hoping only that her choices tend to her happiness. 

My daughter’s departure for university was a milestone for my husband and me. We were now empty nesters! We enjoyed nightly, leisurely dinners that I’d cooked, and we’d drink wine. I could think about what I wanted to do next with my life.  I could travel easily and spontaneously now with my husband, unencumbered by the weighty roster of details that must be sorted before taking adult time. In the years to come I would accompany him to Australia, Hong Kong, The Netherlands, Washington, DC, Seattle, and Paris. My life was lovely, but my cracks were starting to show.

Several months after having the house to ourselves again, a very close friend sat me down and told me I might possibly want to acquaint myself with the world of antidepressants. I knew that I was struggling, but I didn’t feel that I had anything to complain about. However, I listened to her and because I am a very open sort of person when advised what to do (hah!), it took me a mere week to finally make an appointment with my most excellent doctor. 

Visiting My Doctor/Going Shopping in The Catastrophe Aisle

“So, what’s going on?” When my doctor asks this of me at the start of my visits, I usually enumerate the likely cancers from which I am suffering that explain my presence in her office that day. I then proceed to offer my differential diagnosis as to what ails me. She patiently and respectfully listens to my recitation, then we calmly review my cancer symptoms, deconstruct my differential diagnosis and settle on a course of management, if merited. She ‘gets’ my humour and sees past it, even using it to engage me in conversation over what I want regarding management of what ails me. Sometimes, I have so-called success in these self-assessments: I have twice diagnosed my own basal cell carcinomas!

Today, however, the issue was not physical but mental, and my putative diagnosis was brief and unequivocal. Depressed though I was, humour was still present but in a dark, 95% cacao sort of way, right down to the bitter notes. I told my doctor that I had been depressed, very depressed, likely as fallout of my daughter’s illness and its attendant stresses. The warning signs were certainly there, and in plain sight:  “I’ve been spending a stupid amount of time on Facebook, and I’ve also been watching a lot of YouTube videos. Animal videos, especially animal rescues, but anything where the animals are kind to each other. They make me cry. You know that one with the big dog and the tiny bunny, playing in a box?” “No, I don’t know that one,” my doctor replied, her professionalism not allowing her the eyeroll that was niggling her. “Well, that one made me really weep,” I continued. “I want to talk antidepressants.”

First, my doctor had me take a depression index test. I felt compelled to retake it after seeing my first score, which was almost the maximum – I missed points because I wasn’t interested in suicide, just in being dead. Confronted with proof of how depressed I actually was, I burst into tears. My doctor agreed with my proposed diagnosis of clinical depression and added post traumatic stress disorder for good measure. She prescribed a medication and released me back into the wild. I filled the prescription.

I began popping my pills and in a few weeks’ time I was indeed happier, even functional. I was Ariel, The Little Mermaid, Part-Of-Your-World-again functional, although with fewer forks (and yes, I was now more amenable to a good fork).

It was astounding to me, that I felt so different. Medication is a marvel! The buzz around antidepressants was not exaggerated, I realized. Exercising was no longer a drudge but a joy, and I hoped that it was no longer an exercise in endurance for friends to be in my company.  But when my doctor

evaluated my progress a couple months later, she felt that I was only “about 70%” of where I should be, joy-wise. She added an adjuvant medication: when I looked at the prescription for dexedrine I asked her in a quiet voice, “Isn’t this Speed? You’re the Best. Doctor. EVER.” That combination worked better but still left room for improvement, although I’d never been so energetically depressed before! And so I tried another drug that ended up being a step back, as it rendered me pretty unamused by animals – or amused by anything else, for that matter. And so I tried yet another antidepressant, my third. As each new medication requires 6-8 weeks to take effect, the time investment involved in finding ‘the right fit’ is considerable. Lucky You if you hit it right off, which I thought I had, but the success of my first medication – my gateway medication, as it were – positioned me to fall for the promise of even greater pleasures, and so I was open to experimenting.

Then, I hit Lexapro. 

While this is a wonder drug and a godsend for many, it affected me in ways that I never hope to experience again. Watching Republicans slithering around in the US government nowadays is as close I can get to describing how I felt: almost-sociopathic, disaffected, despondent, irritable (beyond my usual). I was laser-focused on wanting to not act out my mysterious and unexplained fury (at least with the U.S. government, I know who to blame). It was a challenge for me to pass time without itching to inflict bodily harm on someone should they just happen to rub me the wrong way. Unfortunately, just looking at me rubbed me the wrong way, so this was a full-time preoccupation. Yes, I was a treat.

It was during this magical time that I went to Paris with my husband, two weeks after the 2015 cafe shooting and suicide bombings in Paris and Saint Denis. 

Depression or No, Girl’s Still Gotta Prep

In preparation for our trip to the City Of Love, I put aside my online Italian lessons in favor of le francais so that I could at least try to interact meaningfully with the locals of Paris. Surely they would LOVE to hear my own brand of homage to the French language. When travelling abroad, I think that it is a sign of respect to try to communicate in the native language; it is likely that they in turn think it painful to hear such (i.e., my) butchery of their lyrical tongue. I also strategized my next move regarding my ever-changing antidepressant adventures. Not wanting to start on a new, unknown medication, I decided to tough it out with the Lexapro but bring the next medication on the roster, Prozac, to start if the Lexapro became unbearable. Or if I saw that I was becoming unbearable. And then….

Paris!

Paris!

Paris was… well, Paris!  We landed, Michael went off to work (big climate change meeting, if you believe in that sort of thing – apparently, too many do not, incredibly) and I went to the Hammam (Morrocan steam bath) in The Great Mosque. Priorities.

If you EVER find yourself in Paris with a couple of hours to spend, get your ass down to the 5th arrondissement and enjoy the gorgeous old hammam with its beautiful tiling and scent of history. Bring a bikini/monokini in your carry-on luggage and go. It was there that I marched through the doors to the reception, asked for the services I desired and then thanked the gentleman at reception, my accent perfect, all in Italian. I even elicited a pitying look when I thanked him with a heartfelt Grazie Mille, although my money is on this gentleman being fluent in French and Italian, in addition to Arabic.

Despite my ineptitude in language, the Hammam was brilliant and I was able to engage in gracious conversation with some of the women in the steam rooms using my pidgin French – one of the women even shared her Moroccan mud with me. Yes, I ‘mudded‘ through. After steaming out the airplane cabin filth from my pores, I had my gommage: a coarse salt debriding/massage that leaves your skin feeling soft and unweathered like a baby’s bottom.

This treatment (gommage) was performed in the company of women who gossiped and yakked in French (I think) as one of them slathered coarse salt onto my still-steaming body and then, aided by a rough sandpapery mitt, rubbed my outer three layers of skin off. It was exquisite. Then I hit the City which was, as ever, poetic and mysterious and beautiful, even with her bare trees and monochromatic dress of greys. Paris is gorgeous anytime…

…But it all fell on eyes that did not want to see, ears that were indifferent, a palate that was incurious and apathetic. I could and did order pain au chocolate and baguettes in the morning in passable French, eliciting a smile free of pity or impatience from the clerk, but I experienced no joy in my small success. I wandered for hours every day, visiting chocolate shops, cafes, and stores. I ate patisserie (baked goods) and fromage (cheese), drank cafe’ (coffee), watched people (humans), looked into stores where I knew I’d never drop a euro. But there, in the glory that is Paris, all I wanted to do was to return to our hotel room and watch Netflix and close out the world. Something had to give, and the ‘something’ that was on hand was Prozac.

So on our 4th morning there, I started the Prozac in Paris. Unfortunately, it made my stomach roil and the nausea it produced was unrelenting. I gave it 2 days before giving it up as a bad job. And yes, it did make me feel a little better, by comparison, being on the Lexapro:  at least I wasn’t nauseous. Don’t say that I can’t be optimistic!

I’d Still Rather Be On Bad Antidepressants In Paris…

Our time in Paris had wonderful moments, wrapped up as they were in the enchilada that was my depression, and Michael and I had fun with each other and with other people from his meeting. I tried not to reveal my actual state of mind; I remembered what it looked like, at least, to be contentedly functional. But, I still felt less than fully present, less than fully myself. It was like watching someone else enjoy those Patrick Roger dark chocolate-covered orange peels

and then insisting on going back for more, my greed surely the influence of the medication. Or watching la serveuse (the clerk) behind the counter in Pierre Marcolini Chocolat being tortured by someone who was just a tad indecisive in her choice-making while filling a chocolate box…

– oh wait, apparently that was me in Pierre Marcolini, innocently torturing the clerk who was filling a 64-piece tray/box with individually-selected (by me) colourful chocolates.

I still feel bad for what I did to this poor woman. After I had selected the first 50 or so chocolates for our box, she arranged them quite deliberately in a visually balanced and pleasing pattern, taking her time and carefully placing this one here and that one just there. However, when I asked her to remove, after all, one of the pieces of the basil pernod ganache, to be replaced by a few pieces of the dark chocolate-covered ginger that I’d decided I simply must have, Michael and I thought she might weep. Because of my dithering and probably some inhuman corporate training that she had had to undergo, she obviously felt compelled to take out EVERY SINGLE ONE of the chocolates thus far in the tray, dozens of them, and incorporate the new choices with painstaking care and a critical eye, repacking each and every chocolate with thought and silent reference to her knowledge of Game Theory (I’m guessing). She would look at the visual impression of her new arrangement, tilt her head in appraisal, then unpack and repack them yet again. By the time I noticed the worm hole into which I was dragging us it was too late; we were in deep, the tray not yet filled-and-arranged to the clerk’s satisfaction. I felt like a monster. It really was torture, but in all fairness let’s leave the Lexapro out of this particular episode. Our protestations of “c’est bien, vraiment!” were ignored, but eventually we were able to pay for our chocolates and allowed to leave the poor woman in peace. Hopefully she is not dependent now upon Lexapro for relief. Perhaps she has started her own blog, “J’ai commence la Lexapro pendant au travail a mon enterprise Pierre Marcolini…”

When we returned to Canada, I tried the Prozac again under more controlled circumstances, but no magic was forthcoming. I eventually went back to my initial medication combo, an amphetamine kicker providing amusement to my pharmacist whenever I’d accidentally ask for a refill of my methamphetamine (vs. the dexedrine on file), and that was that. I know that for many, Prozac is a wonder drug, but not for me.  I tried Prozac but even when coupled with the inherent joys of Paris, it could not lift me to where I needed to go.