Anxiety & Panic Community

I've been on Effexor for about a year now. I take it to treat/prevent pain caused by fibromyalgia. I am currently taking 225mg/day, and have been for quite some time now. Every now and then, I would have a day when I forgot to take it, but the only side effect I noticed was increased pain in my legs. So I never worried about it much. My Dr had me taking 6 capsules of 37.5mg each for awhile. So he changed my script to taking 1 tablet of 225mg/day. Unfortunately, that made the cost at the pharmacy go up quite a bit - from $5 to $35. Being the cheapskate that I am, I put buying it on hold until I could see if my Dr could make a change. Bad idea!!! The last dose I took was on thursday morning. By saturday morning, I was a wreck! I was light headed, dizzy, nauseous, shaky, unstable, having hot flashes, and getting emotional. Not to mention, my dreams were wild and vivid. At first, I thought it was due to the muscle relaxers I had just started on friday night. So imagine my surprise when I woke up on sunday and continued to feel awful. Only problem was that the symptoms were even worse! By this point, I was crying uncontrollably, and screaming at my kids for everything. I felt like a monster! That's when I realized it wasn't the new muscle relaxers, it was withdrawal from the Effexor. I called my husband at work in a panic, and begged him to get my prescription from the pharmacy asap and bring it to me. I couldn't even bare the thought of driving anywhere. Thankfully I had it w/in the hour and took it right away. Within an hour of taking it, I stopped crying and started feeling a better. Now my body is just wiped out from such an aweful 48hrs. As soon as I could bring myself to get out of bed, I looked this up and read everyone elses' experiences with withdrawal. Wow!! I had no idea what a nightmare I was walking into by not taking this stuff. If I could do it all over, I would've paid for my prescription on friday night and not been so cheap. Makes me wonder if I should talk with my Dr about the possibility of slowly weening myself off of this stuff so I never have to go through this again.