Day one on Neurontin

The UAE is strange. Most anti-depressants are banned or very difficult to obtain, but you can walk up to the pharmacist and get almost anything you want without a prescription from a doctor. Birth control pills run about 20 dh a month, less than $7 a month and are stocked on the pharmacy floor. You can get antibiotics, medication, you name it. I'm not sure you can buy isopropol alcohol, but my latest experimentation with ineffective cough medicine found me chug-a-lugging something with ethanol in it. Didn't work a lick, and I spent last night moving from couch to bed to computer to kitchen to couch again. I chose to look on it as some well-deserved time to myself. A time to think and dream without a three year old whining, "You're not nice to me, you will not let me eat sweeties!"

Now, I talk a good talk, but leaving my home, my family, my friends, to move to an alien culture with no support group is hard. It's damned hard, and I've been suffering from panic attacks and anxiety, coupled with two years of sleep deprivation thanks to the King of Everything. On a recent trip Stateside, I had the great fortune to find a woman who prescribed a sympathetic course of medications to deal with these problems. Unfortunately, one of them was banned from the UAE. We discussed alternatives, and I was given the green light to begin using amino acids to manage the panic/anxiety. She recommended Neurontin, an expensive, by prescription only gabapentin that in theory should help with the anxiety, but if it were unavailable here in the UAE, I could take GABA and manage the difficulties that way.

Walk into any Whole Foods store and you'll find an aisle dedicated to vitamiins and other magical concoctions guaranteed to boost your intelligence, morale, sleep, health, longevity, vitality, sexuality, and all the other -ities that we need to keep tip top. Including a nice shelf full of amino acids like GABA. I bought a small bottle of GABA before I came back home, but figured it would be easy to find.

Nope. No health food store, GNC, pharmacy or Natural Centre has GABA without being combined with something else. And those inferior offerings are not at the dosage I need. In desperation I asked the pharmacist, "Can I get Neurontin without a prescription?" She smiled and led me right to a glass counter stocked high with little white cartons of just the thing I should be taking. 160 dh, and I'm out the door.

I don't make a great guinnea pig. I don't like taking medicine (the therapist said, "Why don't you like taking medicine? Don't you believe you have the right to feel better?") and the pile of vitamins, suppliments, and aminos I'm currently taking makes me feel like a Pez dispenser on rewind. But I can't find my beloved GABA, and after a week of feeling like a Hell pancake, I'm ready to begin the beguine again.

This stuff should really only be available on prescription. And I'm not sure I can go through with it. One 300mg dose and my eyeballs are tracking like a cursor with a speed setting too slow for the monitor, I'm dumbing down to Jello level and all I want to do is lay suppine. Not good for a girl who uses her brains and her hands for a living; if I don't concentrate, everything becomes disassociated. The feeling is enough, in and of itself, to cause panic... but somehow, it's just too hard to raise that much of a fuss.

And i'm supposed to be taking this three times a day?