Thanks so much for all the responses!
I actually had my blood work scheduled before those results came back, which was supposed to lead directly into an ultrasound appointment at the Mayo Clinic. Unfortunately, that’s all off the table now. To be honest, my doctors pretty much fried my brain with benzodiazepines, and I've been struggling to find any sense of stability for over a year now. Since my last episode, things have just spiraled; I’m currently dealing with a massive flare-up that’s been dragging on for about two weeks, and everything feels like it's getting significantly worse.
I’m really hoping this is just one of those final setbacks before things finally start looking up. Usually, that's how my luck works—I’ve been through this twice before, where I thought I was making progress, only to completely mess things up by trying to help myself with something that ended up wrecking my receptors. It's a tough lesson to learn, but here we are.
Honestly, trying to get any real help from doctors has been a complete waste of time. It always boils down to the same thing: they just deny what I’m actually going through, start making things up, or try to pin non-existent diagnoses on me. To make matters worse, they keep pushing these psychotropic toxins that feel like they'd only end up destroying me even further.
It had been about six months since I last touched any benzos, so by last December, I felt like I was finally back on solid ground and doing significantly better. Then, life happened—I came down with a nasty bout of the flu. A few days after that, I decided to take a single Panadol Extra just to manage the symptoms, and honestly, it felt like everything just reset to zero overnight. The reaction hit me incredibly fast; within about thirty minutes of taking it, this intense tension started creeping into my hands, and I began experiencing these strange, psychedelic impulses flashing through my mind. It was jarring, to say the least. I only found out much later that the ingredients can actually affect the central nervous system. By then, though, the damage was already done.
What I’m dealing with right now—this struggle—is fueled by a medical system that feels fundamentally broken and corrupt on a global scale. It’s frustrating to see how much suffering is just brushed aside, all because of these toxins that are causing agony for millions of people. Honestly, it’s heartbreaking; there are people out there losing their lives because they can't get the support they need. In my view, even patients in the final stages of cancer don't have to endure the kind of denial and dismissal that I am experiencing right now.
It honestly feels like I’m living in a constant psychedelic trip. Everything is dialed up to eleven—scents, sounds, visual stimuli all hit me with this intense, overwhelming force that rushes through my head and vibrates through my entire body. There are moments where it feels like I’ve been regressed back to being a three-year-old, as if my brain is somehow physically redeveloping and experiencing the world through those raw, unfiltered impulses all over again. The physical sensations are just as jarring. At times, it feels like fifty percent of my skin and muscle tissue is literally searing. I’ll get these flu-like symptoms without any actual fever, or my upper back and neck will suddenly lock up so tightly that it feels like something is snapping whenever I try to turn my head. It hits in a heartbeat and vanishes just as fast. Then there are these surreal, visceral fears—this terrifying sensation like acid or poison is coursing through my veins while my whole body constricts. I deal with this crushing internal tension, like I’m slowly turning into a stone pillar, making it impossible to find any sense of relaxation. I struggle with bouts of uncontrollable aggression, and the night terrors are easily one of the most harrowing parts of this whole ordeal. My entire body vibrates, there’s intense pressure in my ears, a constant ringing, and sometimes my jaw makes this painful popping sound—I suspect it might be my Eustachian tubes acting up. On top of all that, the akathisia is incredibly violent. Honestly, it’s hard to even keep track of everything; there are so many symptoms that come and go or just cycle endlessly that I can barely list them all.
Last summer, I went in to get some bloodwork done to check my thyroid levels and cortisol. It was right around the time all those symptoms started hitting me—even from tiny doses of benzos over just a two-month span. My thyroid came back perfectly fine, but that cortisol reading? In my morning test, it was 300 points above the normal range. Honestly, I was going through an absolute living hell.
I first ran into these issues back in 2010. At the time, I had a handful of highly opinionated doctors trying to convince me that everything was just "all in my head." Every time my condition flared up or things took a turn for the worse, they’d brush me off, essentially telling me I just needed a year or two to snap out of it and get my act together. It was incredibly frustrating. Then, last year, things went from bad to worse. Dealing with the benzodiazepines was a nightmare because I had been fed nothing but misinformation; I actually believed the advice I was getting and thought those meds would genuinely help me stabilize. Instead, they made everything a hundred times more difficult. Now, honestly, life feels like a constant uphill battle. Every single day is just a struggle to keep my head above water and make it to the next one.
I didn't exactly pull the plug overnight, but I had to speed up my tapering process. Honestly, I started experiencing some pretty strange paradoxical reactions as early as the first or second week of taking it, and looking back, I just wasn't able to connect the dots in time to realize what was happening.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last year really digging into the research on PubMed, and I've also been chatting with a few folks who are navigating similar situations. Because of that, I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp on exactly what's going on with me and why it's happening.
Tens of thousands of people have cycled through the BenzBuddies forums because of this exact issue. It’s a heavy reality to face, but most people eventually find their way back to health after a few years and come here to share their stories of recovery. Sadly, there are others who don't make it.
I gave magnesium a shot back in May, but man, I had such a terrible paradoxical reaction to it that I ended up right back at square one. Because of that setback, my recent scans from the Mayo Clinic—specifically regarding those stray erythrocytes showing up in my urine—don't even matter much to me right now. Honestly, if it turns out to be something like an inflammation or whatever else might be going on, I wouldn't be able to stomach any kind of medical treatment anyway. I just know that if I went down that road, it would completely fry my central nervous system.
Honestly, I’d much rather face cancer and meet my end like a man than endure this kind of horrific, inhuman agony twenty-four hours a day, month after month, year after year. I actually had to turn down a job offer recently because of my current condition. I was trying to run a little side business from home during those brief windows when I felt even remotely okay—I honestly don't know how I managed to pull it off.
If it weren't for someone looking out for me, I'm certain I'd be dead by now. There are moments when my brain just completely locks up my body with this intense pain, leaving me unable to even stumble into the kitchen for a glass of water. Then, every so often, there's a sudden window of clarity where I can actually go for a walk through town, even if I still feel far from well.
At the end of last month, I had a sudden streak of maybe four or five good days—probably the best stretch I've had in months. My head calmed down, my body settled, and I felt about 80% healthy. But then, the nightmare came rushing back.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the way it goes; I suppose it's just how damaged GABA receptors try to find their way back to a baseline.
It’s something doctors seem to have absolutely no clue about, and frankly, they don't even want to admit it—especially psychiatrists—even though it's foundational stuff found all over PubMed. They're too busy protecting their own jobs. All this talk about "withdrawal" lasting only a few weeks is nothing more than medical folklore used within professional circles. Sure, some people might deal with minor issues for a month, or some might have no reaction at all, but others—like me—are left suffering in indescribable agony for years.
The only thing a doctor at the ER told me a few months back was that some level of neurological damage had occurred, and that there's no treatment or help for it; I just had to avoid anything that affects the brain.
In theory, neurological damage would be permanent, so perhaps that isn't quite what's happening here, though Dr. Ashton did mention that neurological damage is a possibility since some people suffer for years with these specific physical symptoms.
I am in a state that most people simply cannot fathom. Every single avenue I've taken while searching for help has met with denial, dismissal, misdiagnosis, or sometimes even outright mockery.
Once I recover (if I ever do), I plan to document everything that has happened to me. I’ll put all the links to the professional literature on a site like WebMD along with the names of every doctor and psychiatrist who put me through this—people who, when I begged for actual help, tried to just drug me with even harsher benzos like Xanax. And of course, they'll be joined by those "antidepressants," which are basically just placebos with life-threatening side effects.
If there's one thing I've learned from all this, it's that I have to become more informed than the professionals themselves. It's easy to lose your mind, and I certainly did because I placed a little too much faith in their fabrications and lies. They mocked me with made-up psychiatric diagnoses like anxiety and sub-depression, which only showed up after my brain had already been fried.
Since I'm not a total idiot, I know the difference between standard anxiety and this surreal, terrifying agony that makes me pray to a higher power every single day to just take me.
So, the Mayo Clinic visits and everything else will just have to wait. I'm not even sure how I managed to make it out to get blood work done. I had one moment of feeling better, but it vanished the very next day, leaving me unable to even pick up my results myself, so I had to send someone else.
Part of me wonders if I should feel privileged to experience an agony so profound that most people couldn't possibly comprehend it. When your brain is taken from you, they've effectively taken everything. If you lost your limbs, you could at least crawl to work, but without your brain, you lack the basic strength to even lift yourself off the floor when you're twitching in hellish pain, wanting to crawl out of your own skin, knowing it's impossible.
This has been my life for about half of the last 16 months:
Anyway, I needed to vent... again. Though I know it's probably futile. Until the system evolves, psychiatry will continue to kill millions of people every year... or at least 500,000 across the US and Europe, according to the detailed findings of Peter Goetzsche, the chemist, biologist, scientist, pharmacist, MD, and director of the independent Cochrane Institute.
https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Psychi...dly+psychiatry
Or maybe this one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4046551/There are mountains of studies on PubMed that point toward organized, mass-scale criminality within the medical establishment and the outright faking of clinical trials—but honestly, those are even more fascinating, though perhaps a topic for another day.
I truly feel a sense of sadness about all this. I know there are doctors out there who genuinely care about patient health and well-being, and we all recognize that conventional medicine has incredible breakthroughs that save lives every single day. It’s just that the corruption at every level seems to have spiraled completely out of control.
In the States, if the FBI were to go after something like the 360 corrupt GPs involved in that massive scandal involving the pharmaceutical giant Farmal, the entire healthcare system would probably collapse under its own weight:
It’s such a tragedy. It looks like Farmal was actually stepping on the toes of a much larger corporate player, and the doctors—who are already essentially on the pharma industry's payroll anyway—were simply used as scapegoats this time around.
I didn't realize the full extent of any of this until I nearly lost my life because of this awful toxin. That was my wake-up call; I started digging into how it’s even possible for something so toxic to be handed out to everyone like they're pieces of candy. That's when it hit me: people and their actual health aren't the priority here at all.
Because of this experience, I find myself in a position where I can't trust anything for treatment anymore. There's just no way I'm taking an antibiotic for anything, given how many of them impact the central nervous system.
I don't even know how local anesthetics at the dentist affect the CNS, or how long I'll have to wait after I recover before I can, say, enjoy a beer or take an antibiotic if it becomes absolutely necessary.
Regardless, my central nervous system is compromised, and I am absolutely, fundamentally screwed.