oswhid

I only heard this second hand (and not from my husband - "J"). J had been with the company for almost 25 years and was one of three IT directors reporting to the VP who was retiring. All three were being considered for the job but J was probably the first or maybe second choice. The CEO ultimately overrode the choice and brought in an outsider who had family friend connections to him. J had been on adderall for just about a year at this point. He was highly respected and considered a valuable employee or had been for the first 24 years. I do not know if his behavior change was noticed at work during the last year but I must assume it was at least to some degree. My husband is naturally outgoing and can be sometimes a little too obnoxiously friendly in social situations but not normally in an aggressive manner. Probably due to coming from a large loud competitive but close family. But on speed, I shudder to think how he must have behaved at times. I usually saw more of the angry crash in the evenings than the tweaked out manic version but I got a glimpse now and then. At any rate, a couple of weeks before the new VP started, she came to a conference to meet all the execs and middle management. At a social event, she looked over and saw J talking to a group of people. I can only imagine how he was behaving - dominating the conversation, telling boring stories accompanied with embarrassing pantomime, and tapping people obsessively/aggressively on the shoulder to make sure they were listening. She asked the person next to her who he was and when told responded, "I don't like him. He's too.....'people-ly'. " (People-ly being the most polite thing she could think of to mean annoyingly obnoxious I suppose). Long story short, she fired him about six weeks after she started work. This was from a job and company than he had every right to believe he would be at until he retired. There was never a moment of job insecurity until that point, yet he was the first person she let go. He's never really recovered emotionally from that. It most likely contributed to his continued use and subsequent financial ruin. One more thing, during those weeks before she fired him, she practically yelled at him to quit clicking his pen over and over in a meeting. I guess he was tweaking out doing that! It would almost be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

My husband reached nine months today. There has been a lot of discussion lately about people still struggling months and even years after quitting. If you are questioning if it it worth it, as a spouse let me say that it has been worth it EVERY SINGLE DAY! We have had a couple of issues arise over the past month that after they were resolved, I sat back and imagined how everything would have unfolded had he still been using. How instead of having each other's back during a difficult time, he would have found some way to blame me or make me feel worse at every turn. I cry tears of joy. Happy Valentine's Day!

Well depending on how long you were on it, there is the possibility that you are just older and naturally have a slower metabolism than you did before you started taking it. I realize on one wants to hear that...

My husband 30-60mg for 11 years had feet and leg pain. Compression socks helped to some degree. He often had purple corpse feet as well. And cankles. The purple feet were from the adderall but I think that the swelling was due to adderall and one of the two blood pressure meds he had to take due to the adderall. He's been off adderall for 8 1/2 months and purple feet are gone. The swelling is almost gone. He still gets it a little now and then when he has to be on his feet a lot but he hasn't totally stopped the blood pressure medicine. He is taking about half of what he was and will hopefully be completely off when he gets his weight and fitness under control. Once, a couple of years before he quit, he tried running but he suffered such bad calf cramps that he had to stop. He used to run marathons pre adderall.

This isn't a specific question but just something that occurred to me. My husband is currently eight months clean after eleven years of adderall use. I was reflecting on how adderall made him so contrary to the point of disagreeing with me about pretty everything even when I was certain that he would have agreed with me in the past. I also thought about how little support I got from telling people about what was going on. They would act sympathetic but almost always revealed that they knew someone whose "little Johnny" was on it. Then I started thinking that surely kids have the same side effects as adults in that it made them nasty, little a**holes. Which led to me wondering how many high energy kids get an adhd diagnosis and put on adderall, only to start acting defiant and then get diagnosed with ODD - oppositional defiant disorder. When I searched online it seem that a lot of kids had a dual diagnosis. I have no experience with children on this but I can't help but think this is an epidemic that isn't being addressed. Just one more reason this stuff is evil.

Just doing my monthly check-in. Husband made it to 8 months yesterday. He has been exercising and watching his diet for just over two weeks. So far so good...

My husband made it to seven months today. He is doing well. Exercise is still pretty much on the back burner but hopeful about getting that going soon. I still can't wrap my head around interacting, talking, laughing and being affectionate with the person that I married and was with for nineteen years again. There was one true thing in my life back then - my husband loved me and would never leave me. Yet that person literally disappeared for eleven years replaced by someone (something) that was unrecognizable. Someone filled with rage and was cold unfeeling, and cruel. Someone who mentioned divorce or leaving on a regular basis because "this isn't working". Someone who I could not have even the most casual of conversations with without him finding something to contradict or misinterpret and inevitably turning into either an explosive argument or me walking away in frustration, disbelief and sadness. So much sadness... Now I just returned from a ten day trip. He couldn't wait for me to come home. And I couldn't wait to be home. I wouldn't say that he is 100% yet but getting there. He is slow to anger and quick to recover but his emotions are still more volatile once they are stirred. But nothing like while he was using. My anxiety about him relapsing has eased a good bit but it's always hovering there in the background. He still does not seem ready to accept that the damage caused by the decisions he made and the actions he took was influenced by his adderall use. As if he doesn't want to throw his former "best friend" under the bus. That discussion needs to happen at some point but I am patient. Maybe after the one year mark even two. We became grandparents two weeks ago. Hopefully he will only know us as a loving couple.

Another milestone reached. My husband made it six months today. We had a stressful month due other things going on in our life but he forged ahead. Thanks once again for all of your help!

Perhaps you have now gone low enough that you have entered into full withdrawal. Continuing to take that amount may prolong it. I suggest you should go ahead and quit altogether and get it over with. Gastric reflux like other rebound symptoms such as constipation, nasal congestion, and insatiable hunger are to be expected with withdrawal and will diminish over time.

Word really needs to get out about the side effects of this drug. When family members are affected by this, they can't even find anyone to confide in that can offer support. Everyone thinks that they are exaggerating. After all, "doctors prescribe it to children and all of the college students are taking it". So not only has someone you loved morphed into a monster, you are pretty much all alone in dealing with it.

Just a quick update: My husband made it to five months today. All seems to be going well. I've prepared him for the "five month slump" that many seem to have where there is a marked increase in anxiety. I thought maybe he was experiencing it last week but he had a lot going on at work and is better this week so maybe not. Yesterday he had to fly out of town and back in one day which made for an 18 hour day. He mentioned that 153 days ago, he could have never have done that. I pinch myself every day!

Congratulations! I was following your progress and was worried when we hadn't heard from you for a while. Glad to hear you made it!

I just wanted to say that my husband made it to four months yesterday. I know it's unusual for a spouse to be the one posting here. I had a whole long post typed up about how we got here but I decided not to post that now. Maybe later. Let's just say it wasn't pretty... Instead, I will stick to how things are progressing and how he is doing. We are not spring chickens so keep that in mind. The first week was not really hard as he stayed home from work due to a minor medical procedure. The next few weeks, he would come home, eat and pretty much went to bed right away. He has been lucky in the sense that he immediately started sleeping well. Him getting a full eight hours sleep has made all the difference. He doesn't like getting up in the morning but not due to fatigue but just due to being "not a morning person". This is how it was before adderall. He gets up anyway though without a problem. On adderall, he would get up early on weekday mornings and scurry around like the world would end if he didn't rush off to work. Pre-adderall, he was one of those people who could go to sleep the minute their head hit the pillow. On adderall, he would toss and turn and twitch and sweat and wake up over and over. His blood pressure is way down. Pretty much in normal range. He is still on medication but when he starts exercising and gets in shape I think he can get off of it all together. His blood pressure was one of the main ways I finally got his attention. He couldn't deny the reading like he denied a lot of other stuff. I haven't heard him complain of headaches and neck aches recently. I noticed he hasn't bought any of that stuff for dry mouth recently either. I guess it hasn't been bothering him. He's got a good bit of weight to lose but that will come. His appetite seems to be gradually getting back to a normal level. He ate everything in sight for a while. His digestion is stabilizing. One extreme on adderall - the other when he was first off. (trying to be discreet here He changed positions at work. Prior to quitting, he knew he potentially had a choice between his current position managing 60+ developers and a more technical role managing about 10. It was a lateral move but a tough choice. After quitting, he immediately accepted the new role when asked which he preferred. This has turned out to be a great decision that he was lucky was available. His biggest stress was all the paperwork, email, and time spent trying to keep that many people happy. It was a role he never has really liked but adderall helped fit the square peg into a round hole. He's much more in his element dealing with technical issues and a few workers that are more of a team than a whole department. One funny thing. We have discovered that he has a mild cat allergy. We have always had one or two cats without a problem. We are currently keeping our son's two cats while he is out of the country for a total of four. I guess this is enough to set off his allergy. The antihistamine effect of adderall must have kept that masked. So he now takes a claritin now and then. Off the shelf claritin not over the counter claritin-d that is used in making meth!!! He said that while he doesn't get as much done, his focus has pretty much come back. He has started reading for pleasure at home again and has finished a few books. Before, everything he did was either work related or watching nonstop TV. We have started getting out of the house a lot more. As far as supplements, I read a lot on here and this is what he is doing: l-tyrosine lion's mane fish oil (he was already taking this) b-12 Maybe one cup of coffee in the morning. He's not a big coffee drinker. He adds the milo flavored energy drops with caffeine to water and drinks it during the day . He tries not to have any caffeine past 1pm as to not interfere with sleep. He takes one five hour energy a day. Another funny story. I'm not a religious person but just a few weeks before he quit, I had ordered some kitty litter online. Instead I was sent four 12 packs of 5 hour energy drinks. How that happened, I have no idea but it did seem like a sign! As far as how long he should take supplements or how much caffeine or energy drinks he should consume, for right now anything goes. The goal is just to drag yourself to the finish line each day. My guess is that he will just gradually stop using it as he no longer needs it. It was never anything he was into before. And the biggest news: While there is still a lot of work to be done, my husband is back. I truly had given up hope of this ever happening. I sometimes can't decide if I just woke up from a nightmare or I am currently dreaming. Wish me / him luck. And thank you because if it wasn't for all of you, I would have never been able to guide him toward the light.

I've wanted to respond to this for several days. I hesitate because I am not very good at expressing myself. I am a bit "on the spectrum" so to speak so I can come across as weird or awkward. Actually, I am weird and awkward. But if you can look past that, I will try my best to give you my perspective. There are a few of us spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends of users on the board. I think most have ultimately ended their relationships. If I had not known my husband for 18 years and had 3 kids together before he started taking adderall, I would not have fought so hard to get him off. But I knew what he was like before. He was on it for eleven years. He has been off for 122 days now. So now after after dealing with the anxiety of having to live with a ticking time bomb, I now have to worry about him relapsing. It is a constant source of anxiety which I have to mask because I don't want to add stress to him in these early days. I think if he stays off, we will eventually be able to have something close to what we had before. We are both working hard at that at least. For the first time in years, I have hope. Everything you have described has been my life for over a decade but I had an 18 year history, 3 kids and am not able to support myself. My advice is to run. Issue a futile ultimatum first if you wish, but run. But whatever you do, do not have kids or lose your financial independence. Oh, one more thing - that way he twists things around to make you feel like you are they crazy one - it's called gaslighting and adderall users are experts at it.

The personality change is real. My husband's personality changed 180 degrees. He went from a friendly, easy going, happy person who was an optimistic glass half full person to an angry, nitpicking, pessimist. He used to love to socialize but turned into someone who never wanted to do anything. When in public he could still fake the friendliness but as soon as he got home he pretty much had something negative to say about everyone. It was so surreal because he used to find something to like about everyone. I say was surreal because after being with him 18 years prior to adderall and then 11 years of adderall hell, he is currently 96 days sober. I feel like I have woken up from an 11 year nightmare. He has his ups and downs and has all the typical paws symptoms but all in all is doing very well. I think you do have an advantage of having a couple of weeks a month to get through to her. Since my husband never ran out and only abstained on weekends which wasn't enough time to clear the mind, it was almost impossible to reach him.

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So great to read about someone who is backing away from the abyss before it's too late! Congratulations!

I've seen quite a few up you mock yourselves about how "awesome" you thought you were when you were using only to look back and discover you were only a legend in your own mind. My question is when did you make the transition from romanticizing your abilities to facing that what you did while on adderall wasn't all that special after all? Was it after a certain amount of time had passed or was it when you read or saw something you had done and realized that it wasn't so awesome after all? Or both?

Traceme - You wanted to know "can anyone make it". I think so. I hope so. My husband is currently tapering down after 11 years of adderall use. 2005: When he had only been on it a short while, I insisted he quit when he came home from work each day an agitated, angry a**hole. He agreed to. That was the first lie. Looking back it's scary how fast it turned an honest, loving husband into a lying, secretive person who barely noticed I existed other than to get angry at me about nothing and everything. He proceeded to keep it a secret for four more years. I knew he had changed but we had been married for 18 years and he had never lied before so my mind just never went there. 2009: I only found out when our lives completely fell apart probably due to bad decisions made on adderall. Long story but I will just sum it up saying that we lost everything financially and it was all kept from me until it was too late. When things first started going downhill, if he had told me, we could have cut our losses and survived but his adderall fueled risk taking and grandiosity kept him continuing on the path of financial destruction until the bitter end. 2010-2015: I don’t know what he was on previously (he won’t talk about it) but from insurance records, I know that he was prescribed 30 mg XR during this time. He was back now to an 8-5 job (not that he kept those hours – more like 7-7) and coming home irritated and angry every night. On Saturday, he would sleep almost all day and by Sunday night he was starting to withdraw and he would start getting anxious and depressed. When he wasn’t sleeping on the weekends, he would be watching Netflix on his ipad pretty much nonstop while holed up somewhere by himself. Despite becoming an Olympic level eggshell walker, I was constantly subjected to raged filled screaming if I crossed him in any way. At other times, I would beg for him to not treat me this way, only to be met with an emotionless, cold zombie response. But the hardest thing was that there was never ever any remorse. I understand being stressed and saying things you don’t mean and are sorry for later but that never happened. It was always my fault. I was always to blame. There was no remorse. No apologies forthcoming. All through this, he would never talk about the adderall. No matter how many times I tried it just ended up with him saying I was the problem and it just devolved to another screaming match where he said the most outlandish things. At some point, I discovered this website. I think it saved my sanity. At least it explained everything. After years of him twisting around everything I said and trying to make me think that I was the crazy one, I felt vindicated. Sept 2015: I saw on the insurance records that he was now prescribed 10mg IR in addition to the 30 mg XR. WTF! More? This is a man who was tuning 60 in a month, unhealthy, overweight, out of shape, and on two blood pressure medications. Side note: just a few years before he first started taking Adderall, he qualified for and ran the Boston marathon. Nov.2015: The last of our kids finally moved out. As we drove home from the airport, I looked over at him and said, “Day 1â€. For whatever reason, it seemed to resonate with him. We made an effort to get along. Of course, for me, that just meant not saying anything to upset him. He still was getting angry but was making an effort to control it a bit. But slowly a tiny crack was starting to appear. He actually listened quietly while I made case for him getting off of adderall. He was and still is in deep denial about what it does to him, how it has changed him and what effect it has had on our lives. I think what finally happened was that I took away his biggest excuse – that he would lose his job. With the kids finally no longer a financial responsibility, I was able to say that while your job is important, quitting is more important. You need to quit and if you can keep your job – great but if you don’t – so be it. Jan 2016: He saw his doctor and had his prescriptions filled again. I confronted him and he said he talked to her about quitting. She must have recommended tapering down 5 mg every 2 weeks because that is what he is doing. He still will not openly discuss it with me except to briefly answer my questions if I push. It makes me extremely anxious that he is doing this all on his own. Tapering without anyone else controlling the drugs does not have a high success rate. One thing he has going for him is that he seems to place a lot of faith in anything a doctor tells him to do, so it appears that he is following her instructions exactly. Everything I have witnessed so far seems to confirm that he is indeed tapering. Yes, I am watching him like a hawk! But the way I figure it is that he has the option to taper correctly or run out and have to go cold turkey. Under no circumstances, is he to get more prescribed. He is not the type to seek multiple prescriptions or try to get it off the street. I am pretty confident that if he can get off, he will stay off especially if he starts running again. Feb 2016: As of right now he is down to 10mg. He has one more week at 10mg and 2 weeks at 5mg left. I keep referencing a “flushing ceremony†for the remainder of the pills when he takes the last dose. He doesn’t seem that enthused about it but I act like I don’t notice. I’m just acting like it’s definitely going to happen so I think he’s becoming resigned to the fact that he is not going to be able to have an “in case of emergency†stockpile. I have already started to see little bits and pieces of the person I was married to for 18 years coming back. I cannot tell you how great it feels to step on an eggshell and cringe, waiting for the explosion – and it doesn’t come. And if it does come – it is much smaller, shorter lived and more often than not followed up with an apology. He said yesterday that he had the choice to go to a meeting at the end of the day or catch up on his emails that had to be done before he came home. He said that he skipped the meeting because he knew there was someone there that could brief him on anything that he needed to know and did his emails instead. He then looked at me and said, “Before I would have gone to the meeting and stayed late to answer the emailsâ€. I considered it a breakthrough. So back to the question: “Can anyone make it?†I’ll keep you informed….