Hi Mari

overall, i am better than before.

Now, today and yesterday my mood has been way low and I've been in a migraine phase but this one seems light so far (fingers crossed). Just a couple more days and then i'm clear for a couple weeks anyway. This is just run of the mill though.

Other than that, I recently realized I've been having withdrawal sx d/t my benzo switch (to Valium). It was mild at first, and insidious, so it was a couple weeks before I suspected withdrawal. I then up-tweaked my original benzo by a teeny fraction of the amount I'd swapped out, and felt significantly better after 5 days (~1.2 halflives... enough for some re-accumulation). This confirmed my suspicions. It's 7 days from that tweak now; I figure I'll need at very least another week to settle fully. I might have avoided this glitch using a few loading doses of Valium. I'm a little irked that it didn't occur to me, and perhaps even more irked it didn't occur to my doctor (on top of his giving me bogus equivalence values).

Thanks for listening. I don't know why i posted this. Maybe because I have no one who understands this stuff. I think you can possibly relate a bit (I recall your going through worse than I am now), and perhaps get my sense of frustration too, somewhat. I tried talking to my parents but all they see are symptoms and sometimes I get jumped on for it. They do not get how addiction or withdrawal works, nor the fact that even a doctor cannot predict individual reactions for a given drug, nor the fact that "course corrections" take time. I cannot even post the details on forum because I am afraid of being jumped on in one way or another. I would not deal with that well.

I hope your weekend went well. Did you end up cleaning? I had been doing lots of cleaning ... even deep cleaning of some areas. There's lots more cleaning that could be done but I got really fed up. I also needed a break. Did you get a break? You sounded much better in your posts... last week sounded just awful.

Here's wishing you a good week this week. Well, a good rest-of-week.

waves