Medication cons

I’ve been on and off medication for as long as I’ve had OCD. The first couple medications just didn’t really do it for me in terms of helping my OCD, as they were just regular antidepressants so it helped that part of my life. I got off them for almost five years and then this time last year my psychiatrist that was administering my TMS decided I should go back on them. This time they gave me one called Clomipramine which is specifically designed for OCD unlike the other ones like Zoloft, Prozac, etc. Keep in mind, I’ve always had an essential tremor that would only be noticed by others if I was holding something, because you could see my hand shaking. The first thing I noticed when I went on this medication was that my small tremor got immensely worse, like, so much worse I felt like I was dying. My entire body shook consistently, I could barely walk and forget about walking on any kind of incline because that was out of the question now. Now I dealt with this for over a month until I was able to get prescribed Propanol to help with it. I take the propranolol twice a day and it does help in the sense that it’s not as bad as it was initially but as I went up on the Clomipramine, the symptoms are pretty similar to how they were in the beginning, I’ve just gotten used to most of them. Sometimes its hard to drive because my arms and hands are moving so much that I can’t grip the steering wheel. I also have Myoclonus, which is muscle jerks. This makes it hard to drive as well because my leg and feet muscles are constantly jerking. Over the last year, I’ve pretty much just avoided every situation where I need to walk up or down stairs, or climb such as hiking. In my house we have stairs and I have to walk really slow and carefully put my legs down or else my legs will buckle and I’ll fall. Even if I’m just laying in bed, my body is shaking and jerking uncontrollably. It’s honestly kind of a nightmare because my OCD depends on my precision to be able to get from one point to the next as carefully as possible but I can’t do that if I can’t stay still. I used to use my feet for a lot of things, like opening the shower door and turning it off. I still do this but now I risk falling over because it’s too hard to hold one of my legs up as the other one can’t support it. Now what makes this even worse is that I’m getting married in June and want to get in better shape for the wedding because I haven’t been taking care of myself. The issue is that it’s impossible to work out, I barely have use of my legs and arms to even think of trying to work on them. I’ve been going on walks and at first I didn’t understand why I was having such a hard time walking and its because of the tremor. Every time I lift a leg to move it forward it’s causing the other one to have trouble staying up. It feels like as I walk, I’m carrying dead weight. I don’t even want to know what would happen if I tried to run. It just sucks because I can’t go off the medication for my mental health but it’s killing my physical health and there’s not much I can do to stop it. It feels like everything I do to get a step forward in my mental health only takes me two steps back in another area of my life.