The Detox Diaries: Cold Turkey

Gentle Reader,

Have you ever heard the phrase, “I can’t brain right now; I has the dumb?”

That’s me.

After two weeks of every-other-day, intense nausea occasionally accompanied by other unpleasantness, I have decided to go off of Cymbalta completely. Every time I felt sick to my stomach was a day that I had taken it. My doctor recommended the day on, day off weaning cycle, but I just can’t handle it. I would rather have one or two weeks of complete awful and then be done with it than constantly go back and forth.

The last dose I will ever take (God willing), I took on Saturday. So it’s been two days.

And I feel stupid.

Like, really. I ran errands with my brother this morning, and more than once he had to remind me where we were going. I wasn’t driving dangerously or anything. He’d just say, “Don’t you need to turn here?” I’d be all, “Oh, yeah.” Without him in the car, I might have driven to Canada and then wondered how I got there.

Earlier this afternoon, I was potting petunias, as I usually do in the spring. (I like the wave/trailing kind, that spill over the pots). After filling my favorite red ceramic pot with wonderful-smelling dirt and pretty, green-and-white plants, I picked it up to move it to a place of honor on the front stoop. The thing broke. Literally just rent in two in my hands and dropped to the ground, dirt, plants and red ceramic all over the garage floor.

I stared at the mess for what was probably less than 30 seconds, but seemed like a couple of days. It took that long to comprehend what had just happened. Another pause for the synapses to fire so that I could grab the broom and clean it up.

And there goes a “whomp, whomp, whomp” across the “little grey cells,” as Hercule Poirot calls them. (Thank you, Agatha Christie). I can hear the blood pounding in my ears and feel my brain turn to jell-o.

I hate jell-o.

As bizarre and slow as I feel, I still thank God. A wasp got into the house and those things are just mean. As stealthily as possible (translation: loudly and with some screaming), I darted down the hall to my bathroom and got my secret, wasp-killing weapon: hairspray. I closed the door for a second and prayed, “God, if you could just speak to this wasp and tell him to go back outside, that would be really cool because I really don’t want to fight with him.”

Creeping back into the living room, I spied my enemy hanging out on the screen door of the slider that leads to the back porch. Tip-toeing around the kitchen table, with the hairspray loaded and ready, I slammed the slider shut. Sucker got trapped between the glass and the screen. He pounded against the glass for a bit, seeking his vengeance, but then flew away.

So don’t tell me that God doesn’t answer prayer.

To read all the posts in The Detox Diaries series, go here.