I hope someone here can help me. I have been taking clonazepam 1mg. tablets sometimes 2 mg. tablets for two years or so. My doctor is just a nurse practitioner actually. She told me nothing about the pills other than they will help my mind to stop racing at night so I can sleep. The prescription actually said to take a pill in the morning, at noon and then 2 at night. I never did take it like that though. I usually take 2 at night and not every night necessarily. Sometimes I have taken even 8 or more when I really felt I wanted to sleep. There were alot of days when I took none at all too. I basically thought I was taking a sleeping pill. For the past several months I experienced sexual dysfunction and my wife figured it was a side effect to the pills. I travel all over the US for work, so I really have not talked to my doctor much at all other than to call her and have her call in a prescription for me when I would be close to running out of pills. About a month ago, I figured I was sick of the sexual problems so I simply stopped taking these pills. Within a week after stopping them, my body went back to normal as far as the sexual dysfunction. Great, I thought. Within about 9 or 10 days though, I started to feel sick. My mouth tasted like metal, my jaw hurt, I felt dizziness and disoriented, pins & needles so bad in my arms at times I can’t stand it, nausea, etc. My wife worried that possibly I might have high blood pressure that somehow was kept under control with the pills I had been taking and that since I was no longer taking them…I may have a blood pressure problem. We had my blood pressure checked, it’s a little high but nothing to panic over. My wife then started to research the clonazepam and what she has read about the cold turkey withdrawal is terrifying. I have so many of the withdrawal symptoms including my heart racing. Our situation is that we are in a city far from home and know nothing of doctors in the area. I don’t know if I should reintroduce the clonazepam back into my system now at this point since its been a month…or what??? And since I never regularly took a ‘set’ amount…how much should I even start with to try to get on track and then slowly taper myself off from there? Any advice at all would be helpful. I am 40 years old.
