It's been so long since I have written, I guess that I should recap.
When I went back to my doctor I explained that the past few weeks had been the most depressing of my life. I spared him the details, such as the heartfelt desire to cut myself open. Yes, I wanted to cut myself. Frankly, I have never understood it. The need to feel your pain. So *see* your pain materialized before you. Then, there it was. In the forefront of my brain. But I am a scientific man. I try to find logic in things. So I instead took to burning myself, which didn't leave any noticeable damage. Oh, but I am getting off track.
The good doctor explained that he had suspected that the Depakote drug by itself would leave me with depression symptoms (you think?) and that he had no reservations about putting me on an antidepressant. With that he wrote me a script for Zoloft, and away I went.
Even 24 hours later I felt like a changed man. It was like that dark cloak that I had been wearing had just fallen off and freed me. This was truly the best I have felt in years. I was finally rid of the patterns and activities that I had forced upon myself, and no longer living through a dark landscape of depression.
But then one morning, quite suddenly, my penis didn't work.
Now this, my friends, is what I call "the full disclaimer". One morning I had stepped out of the shower, to find my wife waiting for me as she often did for a morning quickie. But I could immediately see that things were not right. My dick somehow felt like a foreign object to me, and was obviously going to be of no use to me today. I can only imagine the hurt and confusion this put on my wife, and it was a tough couple weeks after that day. But I was also pretty angry and I demanded some answers.
So I looked up the side effects of Zoloft, and there it was plain as day, "sexual side effects". And then I went on a search through various forums where real people were talking about their experiences. Women on the drug said that they simply didn't want to have sex any more, or be touched even. The men said that when they did feel like having sex, things barely worked - if at all.
I know at this point I should have stopped taking the drug. But I didn't want to go back to that dark place. I decided instead to start splitting my pills in half. And for the most part it worked.
But here I am weeks later, and I'm still not 100 percent. My dick is mostly functional. And that is good. But I cannot say that I don't still feel the lingering effects. I had never had anxiety with sex before, and now I find myself in constant fear of another 'malfunction'. And the depression? Well, that is obviously there too. I shouldn't have expected that I could ween myself off of this pill and not feel the effects. The sneaky part of it is that is seems to take weeks to feel any sort of change on this drug. And the same way that I one day woke up with a dysfunctional penis, I woke up last week with depression.
Yesterday I called up my doctor's office and just asked for an appointment whenever they could find me one and it just so happened that they had one that day. And so I got to have the awkward conversation with a female nurse, who I work with, about erectile dysfunction. And when that was all over with, the physician came in and sat down and then said "so what brings you in?". I guess that I had always thought that the reason that the nurse came in and asked you about everything, and then typed all that shit in, that the doctor would read it and then wouldn't have to ask you all the same things. And then I told the whole story over again.
The good doctor put me on Wellbutrin, and said that while all of these drugs have sexual side effects, Wellbutrin was the least damaging. At this point, I want to abandon all trust in physicians and pull out my phone to do some Google searches. But I am desperate for a change, and I agreed to try something new without really knowing anything about it.
Last night I came home in a pretty good mood. It was an awful work day, full of stupid clumsy mistakes. But I felt like I had made some progress with that quick doctor visit. I spent a good couple of hours sweeping all the floors, mopping the kitchen, doing laundry, etc. I even bough my wife a rose with the little amount of money I had in my pocket. And even though I know for a fact she had gone off earlier in the day and pleasured herself without me - I tried not to let that hurt my pride and weigh me down. Maybe she still had a bit of energy left for me.
I guess my mistake (or at least one of my mistakes) was mentioning the doctors visit to my wife. I wanted her to understand where I am at with it. And she is my friend. Really, the only friend I have. But this was the same doctors office that told her she needed to lose weight if she wanted to lower her blood pressure. So here I am visiting the doctor that "told her she was fat" to talk about my dysfunctional dick. And then she sort of blew up at me, and shut down on me. She told me that it seems odd that I never have trouble "jerking off". But I can only imagine that this was pointed toward the dirty videos that I had sent her months earlier. Truth is, I haven't jerked off since then. Partly because I am not interested in doing it (odd effect of the drug?) but mostly because I don't want to waste any sexual energy on myself.
I don't know how to make her understand that I want to have sex with her (badly). And these problems that I am having with these drugs are not her problem - they are mine. Hell, I would have killed for a handjob last night. I was all over her. All day long, every chance I got. I mean, I really tried to set the mood too. First with doing all the housework. Then with bringing her some soda and a rose. And then with slathering on some good smelling cologne and washing my dick in the sink. But at the end of the night, she got into bed pissed off and went directly to sleep. And nothing I could say would make her feel better.
And as I lay there contemplating all of the bad choices I had made that day, getting out of bed was number one on my list. And by far the best idea that I had was taking a shot of whiskey earlier that night. Yeah, yeah, I know. I shouldn't drink any alcohol. But my "give a damn" is definitely in bad shape this past week. And that near-coma that it put me in was just the good rest that I needed.
Although today, I feel ... not so good. And there is that depression again.
Maybe I was better off just being a part time drunk with manic tendencies?
