Okay. Okay. I know that title is slightly provocative, but it caught your attention, didn’t it? But, not wanting to lead you too far astray, I must admit that Remeron is a medication and not a woman with a strange name and loose morals.
For the record, Remeron (the generic is Mirtazapine) is used for several things. In higher doses it is used to treat depression, and is also sometimes used to treat eating disorders because it causes rapid weight gain. (However, I can do the rapid weight gain thing all on my own, thank you very much; I certainly don’t need a pill to do that.) But, in small doses, Remeron is used for insomnia.
So, the true beginning of my romance with Remeron starts about three weeks ago. I’ve mentioned lately that I’m fighting a lot of pain, at times so much I can barely stand and have to use a cane to support myself while I walk, so it’s no real surprise that I started having trouble sleeping. I would fall asleep okay, no problems there, but I’d wake up in 2 to 3 hours, doze for another hour, and then not be able to fall back asleep at all. Now 3 or 4 days of limited sleep I can take, it really happens all the time to me, but usually after about 4 days I have several nights of really long, peaceful slumber, and wake feeling as refreshed as possible for someone with advanced RA. However, my catch-up days never happened this time, and at the end of two weeks of only sleeping for 3 hours a day, I was pretty miserable (an understatement) and looking for any kind of help I could find. And so, Remeron enters the picture.
Remeron has kind of an unusual quirk, the lower the dose, the better it is at making you sleepy. Strange, but true. So, my doc prescribed that each night I take half of the lowest dose on the market. And so I did.
By the way, as a side note. Along with the RA I have Fibromyalgia. Now those two diseases often go hand in hand, but they have some strange quirks of their own. For instance, Fibro likes exercise, but RA not so much. If you do too much with RA, you most definitely will pay. Fibro also likes sleep. If you can get 7 or 8 hours of good rest, Fibro loves you. However, if you don’t get at least that much rest, Fibro is very vicious and makes you pay with pain. But, on the other hand, if you’re not careful, and get too much sleep, your RA makes you so miserable you don’t ever want to sleep again. So, balance is key.
But for me, after two weeks of only 3 hours a night, my Fibro caused me more pain than the RA did. It was murder, I’m telling you! And so, Remeron to my rescue. Or so I thought.
Now, the first night, I took my prescribed dose, stretched out on the bed, put my little ear phones in and listened to some of my favorite music (right now it’s Tom Petty and Taylor Swift), and got ready for sleep. However, I had read that Remeron only takes about 20 minutes to work, so after an hour I was thinking...well, you can fill in any word you think appropriate, but I was convinced it wasn’t going to work. And then, voilà, I wake up 14 hours later – yeah, I said 14 hours later. Unfortunately I felt like I had a hangover. Huge headache, ringing in my ears, tremendous pain because I slept too long and my RA was ticked, and maybe worst of all, I felt exhausted, even worse than when I went to sleep. Plus, I kind of felt like I hated the world; everything ticked me off.
But I figured, hey, so I’ve got some minor (lol) side effects to deal with, things will get better. So, I struggled through the day, and at bed time took my little half of a pill and bam, I wake up 16 hours later. And all of the bad symptoms from the previous day were even worse. Plus, again, I felt exhausted, and my RA was Furious, and so punished me relentlessly.
Day three, bedtime arrives, and with some trepidation, I take my little half a pill and shazam, I wake up 14 hours later pretty much wishing I was dead. It was a terrible day to endure. Every bad side effect times infinity. Mostly I stayed in my room.
But when bedtime arrived, I thought, crossing my fingers, tonight will be better because a lot of the people on the forums say the side effects wear off after three days. But as I’m getting ready for bed, Pip, my often annoying cat, starts whining outside my door. It’s a problem sometimes, because he wants in the room, and the little stinker will literally throw himself against the door again and again and meow loud enough the neighbors could hear. So, I shooed him away. He ran, came back just as I got into bed, and I got up and shooed him away again. Now I won’t get into the behavioral issues here, remember, this is a story about Remeron.
So, to make this long story shorter, I will tell you that after the 5th time of this happening, I found myself chasing Pip through the house, throwing furniture and screaming at him at the top of my lungs. It’s kind of funny when I write it, but it wasn’t really funny for me, Pip, or everyone else in the house. I don’t behave that way. I simply don’t. There’s a lot of reasons I carefully control my temper, but control it I do; until that night.
So, realizing the only thing that had changed in my life was the Remeron, I decided to do a little more research. And sure enough, it didn’t take long to find that one of the signs that your body is having an adverse reaction to Remeron is, now get this, RAGE. I kid you not, that is exactly what I found, and exactly how I felt. I think it actually said: excessive aggression, explosive anger, and Rage. Laugh out loud.
By the way, Pip is fine. He’s a quick little booger and I never caught him, and even if I had I wouldn’t have hurt him. Animal abuse should be a capital offense in my opinion. So Pip was fine, gave me little Pip hugs afterward, and I apologized by rubbing my beard stubble all over his cheeks and neck (he goes crazy for that – it’s weird to some, but there’s nothing like hearing him purr when he rubs against my face).
So, night 4, no Remeron. But dang if that stinking medication doesn’t have side effects for stopping cold turkey. Now come on, I only took 3 half pills, so I didn’t expect withdrawal symptoms, but sure enough, the next few days were really wacky for me.
Thanks Remeron for pretty much ruining a week of my life.
Now I did read that Remeron helps a lot of people, and so I don’t in any way want to take away from the good that it does others, but it did not work for me. Falling instantly asleep was neat, but the side effects were miserable.
So, I dumped Remeron after only a 3 day fling. I guess I’m the love ’em and leave ’em kind of guy.
