I Feel Like A Guinea Pig

The last 4 days have been an absolute nightmare for me.  I don't feel like writing or reading or doing much of anything today.  I'm exhausted- exhausted but so relieved.  The awful roller-coaster of akathisia is over for the moment (akathisia is an agitated, climbing-the-walls feeling you can get on atypical antipsychotics).  I've been crying and lying down a lot, but my body feels relaxed and wiped out.  I saw my psychiatrist 5 days ago and I complained to him about "the bad feeling" I've been having at night: an awful, slightly agitated angst that kicks in a couple hours after I take my Latuda (an atypical antipsychotic).  I take it at dinner, because you have to eat at least 350 calories with it, and since I'm trying to do intermittent fasting, I finish eating by 6:30pm.  Basically, it's been feeling like a race against time to eat, take my pills, hopefully not feel too awful, and fall asleep as soon as possible.  When I feel this way, I can't watch TV or movies, read, browse online, or do anything to distract myself.  The only somewhat tolerable activity is crossword puzzles, but when I get stuck I lose my concentration and have to stop.  When I first reported this feeling to my doctor, we suspected it was a reaction to my body "running out" of Lamictal.  We tried splitting the dose into morning and evening, but nothing improved.  So this time he suspected that this could, in fact, be a form of akathisia from the Latuda and suggested moving it to a morning dose instead.  I took a half-dose that night, then a full dose in the morning for two days, then split the dose into morning and evening, and I'm now going back to just nighttime.  The plan is to eat a late night snack and take the drug right before going to sleep, throwing out intermittent fasting for the moment.  The agony of the days where I took a daytime dose was so intense, so invasive and bewildering, that I felt like I was losing my mind.  It was like the "bad feeling" was there all day long (the nights were actually OK- way better, in fact).  So the lesson learned was that yes, this feeling I've been having at night is probably akathisia from the surge of Latuda soon after I take it.  I'm probably sleeping through much of it (though not sleeping well), as opposed to the long, never-ending daytime-dose nightmares.  Yesterday I was on the phone with my husband for 6 hours while he was at work.  At one point I told him I was "having an emergency" and wanted to go to the hospital.  He suggested I take Klonopin and wait for it to kick in.  I did, and was able to sleep for a bit.  Then I had dinner and we did crosswords over the phone.  Today has been emotional and I'm really tired, but the relief of not taking the Latuda in the morning is phenomenal.  This is the kind of experience that is difficult to explain to people.  If someone asks how I'm doing and I say I'm going through medication changes, I usually get a blank stare and a change of subject.  But if you know what it's like, if you've been through or are going through it, you understand how complicated and difficult it can be.  To have your brain undergo chemical experiments is at times terrifying and traumatic.  You wonder if you can ever get yourself back.  You forget what it was like before the changes were made.  You find it impossible to describe how you feel, or to compare one day to the next.  I've been through so many medication changes over the years that it would be impossible to count them all.  This all adds up to a sense of trauma and you can't even explain exactly why you're traumatized.  I'm crying a lot today because I feel sorry for myself.  Not in a selfish way- if anything in a compassionate way.  Having compassion for myself has been impossible at times, but I think it's actually happening for me right now.  Now that the experiment is over, I actually have the perspective to see what hell I had to go through.  Having your brain play guinea pig is not a passive experience.  It usually doesn't take place in a controlled environment.  It shifts everything about the way you see the world and makes it hard to separate the symptoms from reality.  It makes you doubt yourself in an extreme way.  It makes you wonder what your reality is actually like.  Today I slept in a bit, exercised, went for a quick coffee, but got too tired to concentrate.  Matt and I came home, and he rubbed my feet and made me lunch.  I've been in bed since then, watching some YouTube, folding some laundry.  I'm relishing the relief.  But in the back of my head, I know that tonight I will have to face that feeling again.  Hopefully I will sleep right through the worst of it.  We left a message for my doctor asking how to proceed.  Perhaps the dose will come down a bit.  Perhaps I can escape "the bad feeling" for good.