As most of you know the last 2 years have been a bit of a challenge.
October is our 2-year anniversary Klonopin Free! As incredible as that sounds it has turned our life upside down! Klonopin according to the experts is as addictive as heroine! Can you imagine putting an 18 year old autistic kid with limited vocabulary on something that addictive? We, as every desperate parent with an epileptic kid, will try anything! So in we jumped.
He was 18; his seizures had come back with a vengeance swallowing us whole and falling into the abyss. Epilepsy is terrifying. With every seizure you wonder will it ever end or will it be the last. How many more can his brain endure before its just gray matter and we have nothing left. So Klonopin was our golden ticket out. This one would surely work! Well guess what IT DIDN’T!
So 2 years later, we decide he is having seizures anyway, it isn’t helping, so lets get him off of it.
HOLY FUCK!!!! Close your eyes and picture the worst thing you can imagine hearing in the middle of the night. Something dark and scary ripping you from your bed. That is what woke us every night for weeks, months, a year. Until we stop and agree this is not his epilepsy episodes but WTF is it. It’s Klonopin Daze.
Klonopin withdrawal. We had followed the Doctors orders but what we really needed was an addiction specialist. Rehab wouldn’t touch him because he had epilepsy. Here we were once again failed by medical professionals and left to figure it out on our own. I joined a benzodiazepine recovery group on Facebook that was recommended by a friend of mine and found a sponsor. Imagine that! A mother of an epileptic joining an addiction group just to figure out how to get her kid off a drug! SAY IT WITH ME, “WHAT THE FUCK! “ Thank God I have addicts as friends! I would be lost without them!
We learned about the Ashton Manual out of the UK that perfectly outlines tapering off all benzos and side effects we would encounter. Everything I read in the manual and from others on the Facebook group came to fruition. Flu like symptoms every two weeks has been the most common thing we experienced. And this sort of exhaustion and under the weather stuff is just enough to put Dane over his threshold. But again, we were looking at a very different type of seizure. What I realized in all of this is that when I stepped back and quit living in fear of what ifs, I started seeing the effects of the drug and the difference in his seizures. We were able to take control and fight for our son back.
Fear is the hardest thing to let go of when you have an epileptic in your midst. It rules our lives. Its take our sleep from us and let me tell you 24 years of sleep deprivation is a real problem. Just let that sink in. But because I released my fear we are here today celebrating his body healing. His language improving, his thoughts are clearer, he is better than he was last year and by the Grace of God will be even better next year.