Seroquel has a pretty straightforward effect on me. In the first half hour I’ll start to feel a sort of warm fuzzy feeling. Think, nice stoner high. Most of us are familiar with that. As the minutes tick off I start to lose the ability to create words and sentences without lots of concentration. It is actually somewhat amusing, since what soon follows is coordination. I try to be near a bed or couch, since soon I will be flat-out. That is okay, since seroquel is supposed to help me sleep. If I don’t go to sleep I will soon be quite ill. Something about being upright causes pretty bad nausea. I always make sure I am laying down to avoid that side effect.

There have been a handful of times when I had a very different experience with seroquel. Last night was one of those times. As I felt my words start to slur I found my way upstairs and happily settled into bed. It was a cold night and the down comforter was very welcome. My mind soon started to depart into sleep. Wham. My right thigh went from completely relaxed and loose to a solid contracted muscle. My brain in its sleepy haze registered the pain and awakened. I knew this feeling, as I have been there before. I tried to just ignore it and prayed the seroquel would knock me out before the muscles really got going. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. After about an hour of this repeated muscle cramps, spasms and feeling like I had electric current running thru my legs, I finally hauled myself out of bed. I could not spend another minute in that hell. I was lost in this semi awake, semi asleep state. It is a pretty scary place to be. Voices, along with almost dream like sequences often occur. Seeing things and hearing things seem pretty common. With such a heavy sedative it is hard to differentiate which is real or not. Once completely awake, and not sedated, it is easy to say what is dream and what is not. But when that lost in space, it all loses context. You get lost in that place. Minutes feel like hours, hours feel like eternity. Last night was forever. I searched the house for benedryl.  But we had none. I wanted to drag myself upright and wait it out, but you can’t do that with seroquel. There is no upright with seroquel. The only option was to lie down into that hellish place. To invite the pain and the voices and the dreams, all without sleep. It is utter powerlessness. I can’t even begin to describe a place so dark and horrible.

So tonight we add another medication to offset the side effects of the higher dose of seroquel. A drug to take a drug. Seems endless. I just want to feel better. So now I run the risk of new side effects to stop the others. None of them are without them. I am exhausted from my night. Frightened of the thought of another like it. So, here another drug may give me some peace tonight. At what cost….