Medication: Glucocorticoids / Corticosteroids
Symptoms: Brain zaps, cognitive impairment, suicidal ideation, tinnitus, severe anxiety/panic, muscle/joint pain, GI disturbances
Pharmaceutical drugs have some of the worst side effects. I was prescribed glucocorticoids and corticosteroids, and as a result, I have had topical steroid withdrawal for a few years. Many people have family and friends who are going through it, but they don’t really know what the side effects are. I’ll list just some of the things those with steroid withdrawal endure and just some of the side effects:
Weeping skin — your capillaries are fragile, so fluid leaks out of it and through to your skin. The discomfort is hard to describe because it lasts 24/7, and comes in stages, but it’s also cyclical. So fluid leaks, it gets yellow and hardens, it gets extremely dry, flaky and tight to such a degree that it’s hard to move. Then, it gets so itchy — not a normal itch, but a bone-deep itch — that you must scratch until you rip off the newly formed ooze scabs and either more fluid comes out or you’re covered in blood. This itch doesn’t believe in free-will, you are it's slave and your nails will do it's work — I can boast that the longest I’ve ever itched for was one hour straight...and then I did it again a few hours later!
Painful showers — Remember those 30 minute showers you took for relaxation? They’re torture now. Imagine recoiling at the thought of being under a stream of water because every time you take a step into it, you scream because it feels like acid (yes, acid) is being poured on your skin due to having deeply opened wounds and cuts. Now, for the first few times you will scream, but as you become accustomed to this torture, and you learn to endure the excruciating pain, you figure out that the only way to endure it is to dissociate your mind from your body and let the pain flow through you.
Nerve zingers — make a sudden movement, or just be hanging out in bed and you’ll have a lightning bolt fry your body. That’s what zingers feel like.
Adrenal fatigue — rest feels like work, and you’re never truly resting because you’re always cortisol maxxxxxxed.
Insomnia — you stay up all night because you can never fix your circadian rhythm, and you sleep during the day and wake up 20 times often wishing you would never wake up.
Abnormal sex drive — TSW patients have abnormally high nitric oxide levels—middle aged men will trade their paychecks for this at $511 a bottle. But for a young unmarried man, it feels like a hex has been placed on him.
Thermoregulation issues — You’re sweating because it feels like you’ve been in an infrared sauna for 40 minutes, but you also feel like you just finished a cryotherapy session because your teeth are tap dancing. Any small gust of wind will have your muscles tense up because it feels up on your open cuts.
Suicidal ideation, irritability, and mental breakdowns are another group of issues that come from this.