“So, what do I take for it?” I asked.
“You mean, what do you do for it?”
“I don’t follow.”
Nettled but not surprised by my desire for a quick fix, Dr. Vowels told me I had to relearn how to walk. I had to go to corrective Pilates three times a week to train my body to engage my muscles and disengage my joints. Up until this point I had only been encouraged to figure out how to be engaged to a man, not how to engage my stupid core. I went to one corrective Pilates session and almost had a nervous breakdown from boredom. I never went back, but this time I did pay.
I know, you thought we were talking about my acne and now we’re talking about joints and Pilates. This whole thing is an admittedly circuitous way of explaining why at fourteen, I really should have been going to other doctors, but a dermatologist was ultimately the doctor I went to because vanity always won out over health. That said, doctors couldn’t even do much given my self-sabotaging impulses. It’s always been hard for me to go to a dentist, dermatologist, or even therapist because I used to be way more concerned with impressing them than with getting help from them. I remember spending a hilariously long time putting makeup on to go to the dermatologist—the exact person to whom I should have been revealing rather than concealing my facial carnage. I walked in, full face of Wet n Wild with a whisper of Urban Decay eye shadow. As soon as the dermatologist saw me, he quipped, “Oh, you’re going to need to go on Accutane.” In case you don’t know, Accutane is a medication for acne. I was so dysmorphic that I actually thought the centimeter of viscous beige goop was rendering my pimples invisible. This guy totally shattered my denial that three-dollar foundation didn’t instantly erase my flaws like a Snapchat filter.
Once I was prescribed Accutane, I finally felt I had a cure for my insecurity and fear of going outside. The doctor’s office gave me a thick stack of paperwork to sign, which is never a good, well, sign. I was then told I had to get a pregnancy test in order to secure the pills. I was fourteen, wasn’t it obvious that I wasn’t pregnant? Don’t answer that. I went to some other office to get a pregnancy test. The only sex I had really had at this point was the “sex” on the random cruise and in my head with Ethan Hawke, so I wasn’t particularly nervous about being pregnant. Once this was officially confirmed, I was given a second prescription—for birth control, which you have to take simultaneously with Accutane. Not gonna lie, I found it endearing that this medication came with a chaser. It got less endearing when I found out why.
When I picked up the package for my miracle drug at the pharmacy, I expected some kind of pretty, glittery pink box, since that’s usually how the pharmaceutical industry panders to females, but not this one. When I took the package out of the bag, a chill went down my spine. Accutane comes in little booklets, and on the back of each pill is a drawing of a pregnant woman with a red line through it, as if taking this drug while pregnant would cause both mother and child to immediately burst into flames. It didn’t just have one picture of a pregnant woman crossed out; there was one on every little pill satchel, so there’s like thirty crossed-out pregnant ladies. It was as if the pharmaceutical company hired Damien Hirst to design its packaging.
I also saw somewhere in the warnings that you can’t donate blood while you’re taking the medication. That one just felt mean. I had never given blood before, but I still felt robbed that I couldn’t if I wanted to. It felt rude to tell someone that they can’t help other people because they’re too full of poison. Also, if my blood is too dangerous to put in someone else’s body, shouldn’t I maybe not have it in my body? Or maybe somebody should be donating blood to me while I’m consuming this venomous toxin? I got that feeling you have when you get an X-ray and the nurse quickly scurries out of the room to avoid the radiation behind what seems to be bulletproof glass, while you just sit there like a moron getting zapped by it.
The crossed-out dead babies vibe on the packaging should have been a red flag. I mean, the package is literally all red, so it even looked like a tiny cardboard red flag. It was very red, but so was my face, and I couldn’t stand looking at it anymore. I took one of the pills, then started casually perusing the pamphlet of side effects. Usually side effects can fit on the side of the bottle or your laptop screen when you Google them, but this one had so many, it needed its own publishing company. I was new to medication at that point, so I naively read all the side effects, as if they had any bearing on whether or not I’d take the drug. It was sort of like reading a service agreement before clicking “agree.” You’d never have any decent apps if you actually read all the fine print.
The side effects of this drug are borderline violent: joint pain, bone pain, back pain, drowsiness, blurred vision, nervousness, dizziness, headaches, sleep problems, and crying spells. That said, these were all problems I had had before I started taking Accutane, so I figured it might actually be good to finally have an excuse for them.
But there were some that were harder to stomach. Rectal bleeding, for example. Ah, well, I reasoned, I guess I’d rather have a bloody ass than a bloody face.
Hearing loss was also on the list of side effects. That one’s pretty alarming now, but back then I figured that most of what I heard at fourteen was either the word “no” or stuff about y = mx + b, so losing my hearing might actually be a welcome relief.
Another one that didn’t faze me was “changes in your fingernails and toenails.” I had already lost a toenail from running too much, and if my fingernails got jacked up, I figured it was nothing my signature mid-nineties French manicure couldn’t obscure. I basically justified taking the medication by figuring out how to hide any of the impending side effects or rationalizing that I already lived with half of them.
I was told that my skin would get dry for a couple of months, which was already happening due to my scorched earth approach to facial imperfections, but nobody prepared me for the giant sheets of skin that started to fall off my face during school. I’d scratch my face during class and skin would flake off like pasty Post-it notes. I was so embarrassed that I would surreptitiously put them in my pocket, carrying around pieces of my molting face in my pants.
After I had been taking the medication for a month, my headaches got worse and so did my skin. With Accutane it’s one of those “it gets worse before it gets better” deals. For some reason, I feel like you only hear this adage in the medical industry. You never hear a waiter say, “The spaghetti tastes like actual shit at first, but just keep chewing and I promise it will grow on you . . .” or a diet product about which they promise that “after you gain fifty pounds, you’ll be thin as a rail!” It just feels like if it gets worse before it gets better, the product isn’t ready and they should maybe circle back to the drawing board and let us know when it’s actually ready for public consumption. When I brought this to my dermatologist’s attention, he said, “Look, doctors do the best we can with the information we have.” I guess this is why doctors call what they do a “practice” and not “the championships.”
After a couple months on Accutane, my skin eventually got a little better, but by the time I was fifteen, my insomnia was getting worse due to a myriad of maladaptive behaviors. I drank diet soda pretty much all day long like an idiot, began to severely restrict calories, and my perfectionism over schoolwork started possessing my brain. One thing I thought was odd about my house as a teenager was that our medicine cabinet always had way more stuff in it than our refrigerator. I deduced from this that Band-Aids, metaphorical and actual, were a better solution than preventive action. Don’t eat, just take vitamins. Don’t support your immune system, just take a Sudafed when your immune system collapses. You get it. Anyway, I’m not sure when I discovered NyQuil, but this revelation was like finally meeting my knight in shining armor: drug-induced sleep.
From what I can gather, the problem with taking these drugs to sleep is that they don’t provide REM and delta wave sleep, so you’re not getting the deep r
est your brain actually needs; you’re just in a short-term chemically induced coma. Also, from what we all gather, I am not a doctor, but doctors have told me this so it must be at least half true. Anyway, I was sleeping more, but my headaches were more awake than ever. They began screaming the moment I woke up instead of around the predictable noon start time. Even if I was still sleep deprived and sluggish all day, at least my headaches were up early, starting their workday with renewed vigor. I didn’t think to stop taking them or address the wounds that caused insomnia, I just figured I needed better sleeping pills.
Once I was in college, I moved on to real sleepy drugs like Ambien and Sonata. After all, I was a grown-up now; it was time I waited in line and overpaid for my pills.
To put it bluntly, Ambien and I do not have good chemistry. I have great chemistry with men who are addicted to Ambien, but the pill itself and I are mortal enemies. On Ambien, I’ve done some very stupid things. Like, even for me in my twenties, they were stupid. Once on Ambien I e-mailed a lawyer and fired him even though he was not my lawyer.
One time in an Ambien stupor I walked to a 7-Eleven in Philadelphia at three A.M and bought an apple. This was already out of character for me because I had maxed out on apples when I was fifteen and experimenting with the most low-calorie foods I could find, subsequently losing my taste for them completely. Ambien apparently erased that trauma and I found myself buying myself a beautiful giant red apple from 7-Eleven. This apple was so good that I ate it voraciously before I even got out of the store. The next morning, I woke up thinking about this beautiful apple, so I went back to 7-Eleven to get another one for breakfast. Imagine my surprise when I walked in and saw that all the apples were wrapped tightly in thick Saran Wrap.
“Are these apples always in Saran Wrap?” I asked the cashier.
“Yes.”
“Like, if there was an apple here at three A.M. last night, would it have been wrapped in Saran Wrap?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.”
Shortly thereafter I went to the doctor to renew my prescription, I joked that I had eaten about ten square inches of plastic wrap in the middle of the night. He looked as concerned as I had ever seen a doctor look, probably more about getting sued than my actual health. He suggested I stop taking Ambien and take something else called Sonata. This works in time-release increments of three hours, so I could take it to fall asleep and then ease into some natural sleep myself. I knew this healthy upgrade would never work for my manic brain, so I just figured I’d wake up every three hours and pop another one. (And people say women are bad at math.)
I took Sonata for a while with equally embarrassing results. One time I was on a flight to England for a job and I was flying first class for the first time. It was so fancy—the seats turned into beds, and they gave you a bag with socks, pajamas, and a duty-free catalogue of things to buy like perfume, booze, overpriced corny hooker necklaces, and already outdated electronic gadgets designed to save you thirty seconds. It was basically all I’ve ever asked for in life: free drinks, ample legroom, and products I couldn’t afford.
It was such a long flight that they turned the lights off so everyone could sleep. Given that I couldn’t sleep alone in my own bed, the prospect of sleeping with a bunch of strangers in the sky felt particularly challenging. I took my Sonata and got down to business. To the shock of my entire body, I fell asleep almost instantly. I woke up seven hours later in yummy British Airways pajamas to English flight attendants making announcements. I was thrilled that I finally got seven hours of uninterrupted deep sleep until I looked down and realized I had no recollection of dressing myself in the pajamas that were on my body. I looked to my right and saw my other clothes perfectly folded next to me.
Uh-oh.
Oh no.
The flight attendant slowly and timidly approached me, panic in her eyes. Clearly we had had a very intense night together I didn’t know much about. I looked around and noticed a couple passengers also looking at me with both fear and disgust. I found out that during my “sleep” I had disrobed in front of everyone on the flight and changed into my pj’s. As if that weren’t mortifying enough, on my way off the plane I was presented with three bags of tiny stuffed airplanes, which apparently I had ordered in a Sonata stupor from the duty-free catalogue.
When I tried to go off Sonata, my migraines got even worse, I’m sure exacerbated by sleep deprivation and chemical withdrawal. Luckily, Lunesta came along, which was sort of positioned as the “healthy” sleeping pill, maybe because it was a mature blue color, maybe because the name sounded like a majestic white horse. Lunesta became the American Spirit cigarettes of sleeping pills, still horrible for you, but somehow cool and accepted by health-conscious people who go to Spin class and eat acai berries but can’t seem to get to sleep. Probably because they’re so hungry from Spinning and eating acai berries.
Don’t be jealous, but by my mid-twenties, I started dating people who struggled with addiction, which was a catalyst for my having some awareness about my own addictive behavior. I went to an AA meeting with a guy I was dating and heard people talking about how their chemical dependencies started with sleeping pills, and how they panicked if they were low on pills or temporarily misplaced the bottle. To my surprise and chagrin, I related to what they were saying. I started to gain a comprehension of my own addictive DNA and realized that my pill popping could very easily evolve into something very ugly and US Weekly-y.
I’ve never been into drinking or doing recreational drugs because by a stroke of dumb luck my addiction to perfectionism and control eclipsed my desire for a hedonistic escape. My role was that of the caretaker, and I got my high of validation by caring for inebriated people. Like, literal validation—I’d get their parking ticket validated, drive them home, clean up their puke, and fall in love with them.
I realized my sleeping pill habit had gone on a little too long for my and my liver’s comfort and decided I wanted to stop. I went to a doctor and told him this, but instead of helping me wean off the pills or sending me to a therapist to address whatever was keeping me up at night, he prescribed an antidepressant that had the side effect of drowsiness. This way I was on antidepressants technically, not sleeping pills. Small technicality that makes no sense now, but seemed like a genius life hack at the time. I was too desperate for a good night’s sleep to process how ludicrous it was to prescribe someone a drug solely for the side effect. I did have to hand the doctor some points for creativity, though. This was something that also happened to me later when I was given a prescription for an Alzheimer’s medication that apparently had a side effect of reducing headaches to treat my migraines. Again, medicine is called a “practice.”
Going off sleeping pills and onto antidepressants pushed my migraines into overdrive, although by this point I couldn’t really tell the difference between side effects and withdrawal symptoms. Nobody told me that you have to wean yourself off antidepressants, but that may be because I didn’t ask anyone. Probably because I didn’t want to know the answer. I stopped taking them cold turkey, thinking I was some kind of hero. I started having what are called “brain zaps,” which is like having tiny lightning bolts hit you in your brain all day. I personally feel that if any medication causes you to feel like your brain is being electrocuted, that should sort of be the opener when it’s prescribed to you. Maybe something like, “Hey, if you ever want to go off these, give us a heads-up or else you’ll be twitching during conversations for three months,” which would have saved me a lot of weird looks on dates.
Alas, my migraines got worse. I was getting migraines every couple days at this point, and the symptoms were escalating. When I was a kid, the headaches would feel like aimless banging, but now they had evolved into a more sophisticated migraine: My left arm would go numb; I’d lose vision in my left eye and couldn’t make out words. This was getting serious. I could tolerate physical pain, but not being able to text really pi
ssed me off.
This got especially scary once I moved to Los Angeles and had to drive a car. I didn’t know the city well, which isn’t necessarily indicative of my idiocy, given the city seems to have been planned out about as carefully as a Jackson Pollock painting. This was pre–Google Maps, back when us ancient fossils had to actually read street signs. I know, ridiculous.
I had a lot of really scary moments driving with a migraine and being far away from home. Before the pain really sets in, the warning my brain gives me is that I can see words, but they might as well be hieroglyphics. A couple times I had to curl up in my car and wait hours for a migraine to pass so I could figure out how to drive home. A few times I took cabs and had to have someone drive me back to my parked car the next day. I had all the behavior of a crackhead, but without the fun part of getting to do crack.
A lot of people ask me what a migraine feels like, and I still struggle with describing it. From what I gather, everyone who gets them has different experiences, but if I were to try to describe mine, I’d say it’s like an incredibly intense pressure that pushes against my skull, eyes, and nose. It’s like my head is in labor. I also get very nauseous, my muscles feel super sore, and my left arm goes numb. It’s like being attacked by eighty birds while recovering from the worst hangover you’ve ever had. When the pain got physically intolerable, I’d have to go to the emergency room. I tried to do this as rarely as possible because it’s comically expensive to be sick in America and I never paid my emergency room bill, so I had to alternate hospitals once I had one too many invoices in collections. And by this time, I had pieced together that the worse my credit was, the worse my headaches were.
One particularly annoying episode at the ER happened when my dad came into town to visit. At the time our relationship was strained but also incredibly important to me. As I mentioned before, my dad was very funny and endlessly charming, perhaps to a fault. We spent most of our time together acting out Chevy Chase movies and maligning businesses that we think are scams, such as organic foods, vitamins, and protein powder. The more I think about it, the more I realize that my dad wired my brain to think critically, always questioning authority and commonly embraced truths. He challenged things that other people blindly accept and take for granted, which always fascinated me. We’d go to the grocery store, and while he was perusing the fruit section, he’d open up to the whole store, asking loudly to anyone who would listen, “How do we know this is organic? Who decides this stuff?” I honestly have no idea if anyone else would find this funny, but it would make me laugh until my ribs hurt.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 18