My name is Mike, this is my experience.

[karenp]

Well it's good to see you are feeling so well Mike, you are enjoying playing pranks on your wife, ha ha.
Oh ta Jarrod might check that out (:

[Tunnel]

Day 50:

I can't believe i am at day 50 already. It has truthfully gone by pretty fast. Yesterday i had a good day mentally. I got home from work last night and went about my normal routine. I helped empty the dishwasher and put out the garbage while my wife made dinner. I always finish eating way ahead of my kids, so i usually try and do anything i possibly can to make them laugh. Its fun and i enjoy it. The jokes are usually very silly and at my own expense, but yesterday i used my wife instead. Unfortunately for her, in a house with 3 immature males in it, my wife gets ganged up on sometimes. There is usually a lot of toilet humor too! After dinner my kids had their baths and went up to watch TV.

I decided to turn on my beloved 5 year old PS3 console on and shoot some bad guys. Its a great way to de-stress sometimes. It can totally take your mind off your worries for a period of time and i highly recommend it! So i'm in the middle of an intense online battle... with little doubt my toughest opponents being online 10 year olds that are kicking my arse all over the place. All of a sudden the screen goes blank. The PS3 turns off all by itself and the front light blinks yellow once, then red continuously. Oh no i thought!! As soon as i saw the yellow light, my heart sunk. I have read about the famous "Yellow Light Of Death". I go over and attempt to resuscitate my PS3 and nothing.. It won't go on.. I can't even get the game out. Sigh. If i thought for a second giving it the heimlich maneuver or mouth to mouth resuscitation could somehow revive it i seriously would have tried! :( Upset, i go upstairs and i tell my loving wife my horrific situation and all i can see is this little smirk appear on her face. Zero sympathy! So after spending an hour or so before bed trying to quick fix it i gave up. My wife says Christmas is coming. Ya right! I'm not waiting that long and will be buying another one tonight! I'll work overtime!!! I have to take the old one all apart to get my old game out which stinks. I'm kind of annoyed at the situation, but between the boys and I it has a zillion hours on it. I know being a bit of an electronics geek that anything electronic that runs that hot for long periods of time will eventually break down. It ran really hot, so it was inevitable. I have definitely gotten my moneys worth out of it. It still sucks though. Maybe its Gods way of getting me back for hanging my wife's bra on the Christmas tree yesterday morning.

Jarrod: I will look into that link, thanks for posting it.

Take Care Everyone!

Mike

[karenp]

So glad you seem so better Mike xxxxx

[simms]

Day 50:

I can't believe i am at day 50 already. It has truthfully gone by pretty fast. Yesterday i had a good day mentally. I got home from work last night and went about my normal routine. I helped empty the dishwasher and put out the garbage while my wife made dinner. I always finish eating way ahead of my kids, so i usually try and do anything i possibly can to make them laugh. Its fun and i enjoy it. The jokes are usually very silly and at my own expense, but yesterday i used my wife instead. Unfortunately for her, in a house with 3 immature males in it, my wife gets ganged up on sometimes. There is usually a lot of toilet humor too! After dinner my kids had their baths and went up to watch TV.

I decided to turn on my beloved 5 year old PS3 console on and shoot some bad guys. Its a great way to de-stress sometimes. It can totally take your mind off your worries for a period of time and i highly recommend it! So i'm in the middle of an intense online battle... with little doubt my toughest opponents being online 10 year olds that are kicking my arse all over the place. All of a sudden the screen goes blank. The PS3 turns off all by itself and the front light blinks yellow once, then red continuously. Oh no i thought!! As soon as i saw the yellow light, my heart sunk. I have read about the famous "Yellow Light Of Death". I go over and attempt to resuscitate my PS3 and nothing.. It won't go on.. I can't even get the game out. Sigh. If i thought for a second giving it the heimlich maneuver or mouth to mouth resuscitation could somehow revive it i seriously would have tried! :( Upset, i go upstairs and i tell my loving wife my horrific situation and all i can see is this little smirk appear on her face. Zero sympathy! So after spending an hour or so before bed trying to quick fix it i gave up. My wife says Christmas is coming. Ya right! I'm not waiting that long and will be buying another one tonight! I'll work overtime!!! I have to take the old one all apart to get my old game out which stinks. I'm kind of annoyed at the situation, but between the boys and I it has a zillion hours on it. I know being a bit of an electronics geek that anything electronic that runs that hot for long periods of time will eventually break down. It ran really hot, so it was inevitable. I have definitely gotten my moneys worth out of it. It still sucks though. Maybe its Gods way of getting me back for hanging my wife's bra on the Christmas tree yesterday morning.

Jarrod: I will look into that link, thanks for posting it.

Take Care Everyone!

Mike

As a fellow gamer I can appericate playing games as a distraction. I've been taking cit for a few weeks and am feeling better. I managed to complete 4 games when I was off work for a couple of months on my xbox360 and I never usually complete them. The nintendo wii u was released here in the uk this week and am sorely tempted to get one, even my wife approves but I'm not sure if that approval will hold up if she how much if cost

[karenp]

I'm so games unsavy I had no idea there was a new wii out, ha ha! You never know what Santa might bring Simms (;
Glad to hear you feel much better on Escit. I'm only on week 3 and a bit and feel anxious today and totally exhausted from not sleeping properly. What dose are you on?

[ewood79]

Mike that is a classic!

I have the ps3 about a year old! I'm hoping I don't see the yellow light for a while!!!

What shoot em up games do you play?

Cheers

[Tero]

The question about drug interactions:
Do not take this medication if you:

• are allergic to escitalopram, citalopram, or any ingredients of the medication
• are taking the medication pimozide
• have taken a MAO inhibitor medication (e.g., phenelzine, tranylcypromine, moclobemide) in the past 2 weeks - MAO inhibitors should not be taken until at least 2 weeks after stopping treatment with escitalopram
• ----

That's pretty much it. I have migraines and take citalopram for the anxiety and sumatriptan for the migraine. Both deal with serotonin, but I have not experienced bad effects, just a slight wiped out feeling when the migraine is gone.

There are interactions with drugs taken to reduce stomach acid. This site lists most of them. The list at the site is a bit too alarmist, but go ahead and read.

http://www.drugs.com/drug-interactio...m,lexapro.html

[Tunnel]

Day 52:

Woke up this morning feeling a bit anxious. There was definitely some anxiety there, but more to do with i think being overtired. On the way home from work yesterday i went and purchased a new PS3 to replace my old and deceased PS3 Fat 80 Gig.. Its one of those things where its hard to re-spend the money on something that you had yesterday working just fine but it happens. When i think about it, it wasn't sounding very good the last month or so. So after work i bought the new PS3. On the drive home i received a text from a few co-workers who decided to meet at a little sit down bar and have a drink. They desperately wanted me there, so i decided to detour and meet them. Felt zero anxiety and had a reasonably good time considering i had just worked 9 hours. We had a good conversation, ate wings and I drank some Coca Cola. I decided that i wasn't ready to try drinking alcohol yet while taking Cipralex. I am not much of a drinker anymore anyway, the hangovers kill me the next day. With the Christmas holidays coming, i imagine i will have a few drinks over that period but as of now i'm in no rush to try it. I got home at around 8 PM and immediately got to work hooking up and setting up the new PS3. I didn't back the old one up, so i lost some of my saved games info which stinks! My fault though. After everything was hooked up, i had to perform an autopsy on my old PS3 to get my Black Ops game out of it which i was successful doing! YAY!

I didn't get to bed until 12:30 which is really late for me. I also drank two or three glasses of Coke at dinner, so the caffeine probably didn't help me sleep. I didn't get the most restful of sleeps last night. I was in bed until about 9:00 AM, but i was waking up intermittently and my sleeping schedule was about 4 hours ahead of normal.

The anxiety passed pretty quickly. My wife went Christmas shopping this morning, so once i felt like getting my tired butt out of bed i went to feed my two sons. Sometime ago i made up goofy nicknames for my 6 and 8 year old boys. I call them "Pete and Repeat".

It was a big and exciting day in my house today. My wife and youngest son (Repeat) were going to the Justin Bieber / Carly Rae Jepson concert tonight in Toronto. We took the kids to their skating lessons this morning then we relaxed a bit at home afterwards. The wife and I even had a little quick rendezvous this afternoon. All i can say is thank God for Nintendo DS's or i'd have no sex life at all! My kids are like zombies playing those things. So we stick the kids in the other end of the house, lock the bedroom doors and... well... do it.. Just to update, ummm Little Mike reported for duty right on schedule and once again made the wife sing songs i never thought she even knew!?!? The Cipralex hasn't given me a problem in this area at all! Before i started taking this med it was a big worry of mine with all the people posting it was killing their libidos.

In the late afternoon, once my wife and youngest left for the concert i asked my 8 year old son where he wanted to go out and eat. I told him we would go eat dinner anywhere he wanted. So he chose an Italian restaurant. It was nice going out with him and spending some one on one time with him. He is a good kid, and i am very lucky to have him in my life. After dinner i asked him if he wanted to go do anything else. He said he just wanted to go home and get in his jammies and play a few more video games, then he wanted to watch the Avengers movie with me. My oldest is a homebody. He loves to spend time at home, he is exactly like me in that regard.

My appetite is back in full force, actually i think i am starting to eat a little too much. I havent weighed myself in 3 weeks or so, but my pants are still loose, so that's all that matters to me. I do think i am going to need to be a little careful over the upcoming holidays!

Karenp: Thanks for the encouragement as always. I feel good overall. As i said, i get the odd blip like i did this morning, but i truthfully had forgotten all about it an hour later. I know it was caused by an up and down sleep. I really think your insomnia is probably slowing down your progress a little bit. I do think you are improving though by the sounds of your posts.

Simms: I wouldn't say i am a huge gamer. I usually find one or two games i enjoy and play the heck out of them. It is a great way to forget about life for an hour or two. I do use it to de-stress! Its a lot of fun.

Ewood79: If you own the PS3 slim, you probably will never get the Yellow Light of Death. That was more of a problem with the original larger fatter PS3's. The games i have been playing the last year or so are the Assassin's Creed series, the Uncharted series, and lately i have been playing a lot of multiplayer in Call of Duty: Black Ops.. The first one, not Black Ops 2 that just came out. I am getting that Black Ops 2 for Christmas though! If you want to look me up my game name is "Maniac_With_Mop".

Take Care Everyone!

Mike

(RIP PS3 FAT 80 GIG)

[Thumbelina]

Thank you Mike for such an opened and positive thread. I personally can relate to almost eveything you have and are experiencing and also take 5mg cipralex for the past 2 weeks after over a year break. It helped me allot and i forgot about anxiety for 1, years. I stopped though doctor was not agreing to it. Anyway she is not mad now at me, she just says when i knew the stressors around me increased above the limits i should have started cipralex again as prevention for what is happening now, 8 months after the first problems around me started.
I will keep reading your experience, i have the samw issue with eating. At the moment still very bad, cant eat at all...

[karenp]

Hope you don't have anymore little blips Mike (:
Hi Thumbalina, really hope you feel well again soon. I wish I'd never come off normal Citalopram too as I was so well on it for 3 years but then my doctor persuaded me to stop it and I was ok for a year then my marriage broke up. What dose of Cipralex was you on last time? I've been on 5mg for 26 days now and still had a panic attack this morning so feeling sorry for myself today as I thought the med was beginning to really help me as I've had 2 of the best weeks this year since I went on it but have been taking Lorazepam too and had run out today ):