THE INITIAL EFFEXOR EVENT, PART 2

By Friday night, I felt so awful, I considered having my husband take me to the hospital, but I was not running a fever. I thought it was extremely odd that I should feel so horribly flu-ish and not be feverish. The sounds of the television and the kids rambunctious play in the living room made me feel like I was going to start screaming. All my attempts to tune out the sound in the apartment were failing miserably, so I went outside to sit on a lawn chair by the front door. The cool night air felt good on my overly sensitized skin, but the sound of the parking lot light seemed unusually loud, more like an aggressive buzz-saw than the gentle hum I‘d come to expect. I could hear cars that sounded miles away, and voices that seemed to be both a few hundred yards away, and right next to me. The porch-light had a vivid corona around it, and I began to realize that my peripheral vision was altered, having a psychedelic corona of its own. It suddenly dawned on me that I felt poisoned, that this was not like being sick with some rogue virus or bacteria. My body was completely toxic. It was trying to compensate for having been chemically altered, and it was not doing a very good job. My insides were a roiling, tumultuous mess. My system was not being able to cope with the chemical changes happening within it.
I was getting cold fast, shaking, my body not being clear on how to adjust to the change in air temperature, so I went back inside, insisting that my husband turn off the TV and put the kids to bed. I thought I couldn’t possibly get much worse. I was beginning to feel like I was drowning. I didn’t know it was going to be a long way down yet before I reached bottom.
As they often did, and normally would have been okay doing, the kids resisted being sent to bed, and my husband turned the TV down rather than off. The urge to scream kept rising in my throat, but I suppressed it, still knowing that my children did not deserve to be yelled at due to my weakness. They finally drifted off, but my husband continued to watch Daredevil, a movie which might have otherwise been interesting to me. But due to my altered state, the dark sounds of fighting and the eerie music seemed to be emanating pure evil. I could sense it creeping in under the bedroom door. I felt certain that my husband was inviting Satan into our midst by watching such a demonic show.
I pleaded with him to turn it off, and he just looked at me like I was nuts, which I pretty much was by then. My memory of what exactly transpired after that is a little disjointed because I was disjointed. I remember thinking I was really, really cold, and I couldn’t get warm. I remember thinking a fire would warm me up. I remember having a moment of lucidity in which I realized we weren’t really equipped for a fire, that the only place I could start a fire without danger was in the barbecue. I remember not being sure how to start a fire, and thinking that the cardboard from the Kleenex box I had just emptied would make good kindling as I shredded it. I remember Jason stopping me as I searched frantically for the matches. I remember him having to drag me bodily from the door, while I clawed at his arms and wailed at him.
The next thing I remember was feeling completely lost, to God and humanity alike. I was in a place where nobody could reach me. Jason was trying. For all I know, God was really trying. I kept trying, to think happy thoughts, to try to get a handle on myself. I closed my eyes and tried to find a safe place within myself, but there was none. Every image, every memory that had ever been special to me, even sacred, any thing which I had ever associated with peace and/or escape was horribly disfigured, distorted, corrupted. The harder I tried to conjure some picture or feeling to soothe myself, the more grotesquely they became altered. Songs became dissonant and evil sounding, peoples faces became death masks, acts of kindness turned to acts of violence, and worse. My head was filled with unspeakable atrocities and abominations. Within me, humanity was on the brink of total, unforgivable annihilation.
Jason prayed with me, for me, over me, tried to bless me. He was probably wondering at that point where God was too. I finally drifted off into restless, whimpering sleep. I imagine my sweet husband really hoped and believed at that point that the worst was over. My dreams were filled with unspeakable nightmares. I woke the next morning in a cold sweat, unable to figure out where I was at first. Jason was exhausted too, so I let him sleep, and tried to manage the kids as best I could. Their noise drove me outdoors again for a time, where again I was struck by the feeling that I was poisoned. I was about to embark upon my darkest hour.
What transpired next probably only took about a second, but the details were complicated. My mind went through a series of thought processes which seemed logical at that time. My reasoning was this: if I was feeling poisoned, then surely someone must be poisoning me, and who would have the motive or opportunity to poison me but my husband. If he was trying to poison me, then he must really want me to die, and what a horrible person he must be to want to kill his wife. If I were to die, he would be left alone with the children, and did I really want a man who would kill his own wife to be taking care of my children? No, but what could I do to prevent them from falling into his hands after I was dead. I had no friends or family who were in a position to assume their care, even if it weren’t a father’s prerogative to get custody upon a wife’s death. They would be in his clutches, and there would be no one to know what danger they were in. The only way I could save them from him was to take them with me to the grave.
As soon as my thinking got that far, a power greater than me took over, fortunately. In retrospect, I must assume God was answering prayers at that point, prayers that nobody knew needed to be answered. In a state beyond reason, I had the strongest desire to take the kids to my friend’s next door. I gathered my little chicks together and walked them over. My friend could tell right away that something was very wrong with me. As soon as she asked, I dissolved into sobs. She unflinchingly assumed care of my kids, but had the presence of mind to go a step further. She asked me for my doctor’s name.
After a murmured conversation with Dr. O, she told me to go home and resume taking my Zoloft, doctor’s orders, and she would watch the kids. He hoped that it would help lift me out of the depression I seemed to be undergoing, since it had been the most effective drug I had taken. Neither he nor my friend had any real clue that I was well beyond depressed at that point, but it was too unthinkable, unspeakable for me to tell them what I had been thinking. I was afraid that I would be committed, have my children taken away from me… I was afraid I was really crazy.