My experience with prescription pills and stuttering (Cautionary Inspirational Tale)

My experience with prescription pills and stuttering (Cautionary Inspirational Tale) I would like to share my experience with prescription drugs and stuttering. It’s a bittersweet cautionary tale type story so take it for what it’s worth. I have stuttered my entire life. It’s the blocking, repeating, tongue out, word changing full spectrum stuttering, and it’s evolved as my life has gone on. My stuttering began as a child and as far back as I can remember by mother tried everything in her power to help me with this curse. We did years of speech therapy, experimental treatments, breathing therapies, the speech easy, you name it we did it. Nothing really helped. It wasn’t until I was in college that we found something that truly worked, or so we thought. At 21 years old I went to see the top neurologist at Tufts University to pick his brain about my condition. He immediately went to his list of prescriptions for anxiety medications, as I quickly learned a lot of doctors do now. To preface this experience, I have lived a very sheltered life. I was never into drugs, I drank socially with friends, partied at a healthy rate, and never knew about the addiction crisis or anything related to it. So here I am in front of the man in charge of the neurology department at Tufts Medical, and he recommends I try klonopin, which is a highly potent benzodiazepine. Not knowing anything about these pills, and desperate to speak fluently I said sure, what did I have to lose by trying? This is the real fucked up part, and the part that makes this so incredibly hard: after taking my first 1mg pill of klonopin the speech impediment/curse/torture that I had experienced my entire natural life was GONE...I mean completely gone, nonexistent, vanished into thin air. My life immediately changed from that point forward. I could speak, I could talk, I could flirt, I could make phone calls, order my food at a restaurant, tell jokes, participate in school, you name it. At 21 years old my life had just started, or so I thought. Fast forward 8 years. I had put on 120lbs, developed a severe drinking problem, and the 2mg of klonopin that I was originally prescribed had made its way up to 24mg per day. What my doctor had failed to articulate to me is that these benzodiazepines are some of the most addictive and ruthless medications on planet earth, and that over time people develop tolerances to them, which have to be supplemented with, you guessed it, more medication. I was prescribed 340 pills per month by this man and never once sold a pill. He literally told me to keep going up in dosage as long as my body could take it. In the mean time, I was also supplementing the pills with drinking. Drinking at night would help me when the pills effect would wear off and I would withdraw. It was a fucked up twisted cyclical thing that I put myself through for nearly a decade. And I’ll reiterate that even at this point in my life I was still completely unaware of the prescription pill abuse epidemic, but here I was right in the middle of it. At this point in my late 20’s, I had gone from a healthy, happy, stuttering but stable person, to a 320lb prescription pill addicted alcoholic, who I’m told was days away from dying. My mother, the one who had given years of her life trying to help me with my speech, quite literally was told that she should be looking for places to bury me and to start thinking about funeral arrangements. That’s how bad my health was. Then it all came crashing down. I have no idea what sparked it, but I was simply exhausted. I told myself either go get help, or get in your car, and go as fast as a you can into a tree and end it all. I then got on a plane to Florida and spent 60 days in a treatment facility, and what my doctor failed to articulate to me is that coming off of klonopin is essentially the same as heroin, then combine that with alcohol and you have the makings of a brutal withdrawal sequence. I did it though. If stuttering made me one thing, it’s a tough son of a bitch. My skin is made of leather, and I came out of that treatment facility just happy to be alive. The hardest part of this story wasn’t the pills or the weight gain or the drinking or the withdrawal. The hardest part was for 10 years I didn’t stutter. Now, at age 32, my stutter is worse than it was before. I’m not sure if it’s the lasting neurological damage the medication did to me, or the fact that I didn’t have to use any of the skills I learned for 8 years and my brain went back to square one. All I know is before klonopin it was very bad, and now after it is severe. It’s not all bad though. I made it out alive, I have the most amazing wife, and a little girl on the way. I own my own Junk Removal business (look up ACE Junk Removal in MA on FB) and I have a very good life. I suffered for it though. I would have never made it out alive if I wasn’t a strong person. Stuttering made me a strong person. For as much as I hate it being a part of me, it’s given me a strength not many people have. So here I am today, my speech is horrendous, has gotten progressively worse, and has really gotten me down lately. So once again I’m at a crossroads. I can either go get help, or get in my car and go as fast as I can into a tree. It’s not in my nature to give up. That’s not who I am. And coming to this board in the last few days and hearing a lot of your stories has put me in a better frame of mind, and given me the push to put my big boy pants on and tackle this problem. If you’re depressed, angry, resentful or exhausted with stuttering you aren’t alone. I feel these emotions every day. But don’t let them define you. Be strong, don’t seek magic pills, and keep moving forward no matter what life throws at you. Thank you all Alex