Side effects of Chantix

Hey dear readers,

Aside from the occasional blog and my daytime job working in tech sales, I moonlight as a smoking cessation guinea pig.

Besides acupuncture and hypnosis, I have tried:

• Nicotine patch
• Nicotine gum
• Nicotine mints/lozenges
• Zyban

For a summary of my experiences with the aforementioned products look here:

http://www.madkorean.com/blog/?p=49

And here:

http://www.madkorean.com/blog/?p=25

Last week I tried the latest and greatest in quitting smoking products - Chantix. Chantix (varenicline) works the same way that methadone works for heroin addicts, but for nicotine!

What Chantix does is bind to the nicotine receptor in your brain, thereby reducing your cravings for cigarettes. As an unexpected bonus, if you smoke while taking Chantix, you won't get a nicotine buzz either, since the Chantix is already at home in your nicotine receptor.

The whole process, I'm told, takes 3 months. You quit sometime between 2-3 weeks after you start taking it, with a "ramp up" dose for the first week.

I've just begun week 2 at the full dose. My experiences so far:

The positive: I don't crave cigarettes as much

I can now go 3-4 hours without having a cigarette, and successfully restrain myself from murdering others! I found this out while I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep. I realized that I had watched 3 back to back episodes of House MD without getting up to smoke cigarettes! Crazy...

The negative: Shit makes me crazy yo

From the Chantix website:

"Some patients have reported changes in behavior, agitation, depressed mood, suicidal thinking or behavior when attempting to quit smoking while taking CHANTIX. "

While I'm not suicidal or depressed, Chantix gives me a little pep in my step. I'm a bit more manic than usual. This may not be a good thing for innocent bystanders - saying I'm a bit more manic is like saying Charles Manson is a little more crazy today.

Well shit, if I'm catching a little buzz, it's ok by me. What's worrisome to me though is that I've developed a bit of an involuntary facial tic. Hope that goes away soon.

"The most common side effects include nausea (30%), sleep disturbance, constipation, gas and/or vomiting."

The nausea hasn't really bothered me that much - sometimes my stomach hurts a bit in the morning if I take Chantix on an empty stomach. I'm always kinda gassy so I'm not too sure about that. No to constipation or vomiting (yay!)

Sleep disturbance though...

"You may have trouble sleeping, vivid, unusual, or strange dreams while taking CHANTIX. "

There's a bit of an understatement. Within the last 3 days I've had 2 very vivid, hypersexual dreams. The hypersexual part would be cool if they weren't in situations that were highly embarassing/anxiety ridden.

Dream #1 aka The La Mer incident

I had this dream over the weekend on Friday night. In my dream I got busted by my girlfriend for rubbing one out. In typical dream fashion, my girlfriend wasn't my real girlfriend, just some generic girlfriend entity that was pissed at me.

I'm sure that there is some sort of generic catch all Freudian analysis for my dream. Guilt over unresolved issues with getting caught by my mother while at a young age blah blah blah. However this rationale doesn't necessarily apply since in the dream, my girlfriend wasn't pissed at me because I was rubbing one out.

The reason I was getting yelled at was because in lubing myself up for my one on one, I inadvertantly used my girlfriend's very expensive facial cream ($300 a bottle! Gadzooks!)

So in my dream, I'm sitting down with my pants around my ankles, with my hands and penis covered in white, fragrant lube. Getting screamed at. Ugh.

Dream #2: Why oh why did I do that?

While I got a good laugh out of dream #1, my second dream (last night) had some comical notes to it, but just really stressed me out.

In dream #2, my girlfriend (my real girlfriend this time) was not around for some reason, and I ended up getting wasted and hooking up with a rather unappealing specimen of the female persuasion (refer to Matt Dillion in There's Something About Mary: "Was Mary a big girl when you were in high school.... like a deuce, deuce and a half"

So in the aftermath of my coital episode, I was CONSUMED by guilt. "Why oh why did I do that! I'm so fucking stupid, how am I gonna tell her... will she find out? Of course she'll find out. I'm fucked. WAHHHHHH!!!"

And then I woke up to the sound of my alarm. Not very restful sleep, unfortunately.

Also a plug for the greatest of women (besides my mother of course) Nancy Zam, who is the hottest, coolest, sweetest, sexiest girlfriend ever. Seriously. She rocks, and fortnightly, I offer up live chicken sacrifice to Baron Samedi for granting me the black magic hoodoo to make her mine.

Summary:

Too early to tell if Chantix is working out in the quitting smoking category. However, I have gotten the double barrel in terms of undesirable side effects. I guess I can count my blessings that I haven't gotten horribly depressed or suicidal, but jesus man, I've experienced everything BUT.

Still, I'll stick with it for a month or two if it works as advertised. I should be completely off the cigarettes by May 15. Check this space for updates.

Until then, keep the high priced lube away from me!

Cheers,

-Shim

An ever growing personal addiction

So folks,

I have a problem. I'm addicted to all of the media coverage of the 2008 Democratic Primary, and I'm consuming an alarming amount of internet bandwidth to slate my thirst for news/spin/commentary/etc...

At first, it started innocently enough: I've been a loyal NYTimes reader for quite some time, but after the whole Judith Miller thing, the Duke lacrosse thing, and the unholiest of unholies - Times Select, I started branching out and reading the Washington Post. The Post (owned by the same company as the NY Times) piqued my interest in it's extensive election coverage (much better than the Times), so I kept reading on and reading on.

To my dismay, I found that the Times and the Post couldn't keep up with my insatiable thirst for spin on Reverend Wright, sniper fire in Bosnia, and the pros and cons of wearing a US Flag lapel pin, so I dug deeper: Wonkette, The Huffington Post, DailyKos, Politico, The Carpetbagger Report, Talking Points Memo. Add the fact that I'm a really fast reader into the mix, and I was horrified to discover that I devoured ALL of the daily content from these web sites BEFORE 9 AM every day.

Eeek!

But even throughout all of this, I kept reassuring myself: "Shim, you don't have a problem. You just like to stay up on politics, which is a good thing, right? You're doing your patriotic duty, even though you're spending an inordinate amount of time watching Obama girl, the McCain girls (truly a horrifying set of vids, trust me), and random Clintonista/Obamite rants by unknown supporters on YouTube.

This whole house of cards came crashing down on me earlier today. No, not even when I found myself clicking through the Fox News website to see what the conservative spin on the Democratic primary was. Not even then.

It was when I was reading through the archive of Ann Coulter's blog that I had to walk away from the computer, go to the bathroom, and take a good, long hard look at myself in the mirror.

Seriously, Ann Coulter? Really? Have things gotten that bad?

Yes. I mean honestly, the last 2 weeks of coverage were worse than having your heroin dealer go out of town for a 3 week vacation in Mexico. I was lying in bed, shivering with cold sweats under the blanket, ranting "The Zogby, Gallup and Quinnepac polls are all a sham! The numbers don't add up! AAAAAAAAHHHH!"

What's a man to do? After PA, I got 2 MORE WEEKS until Indiana and North Carolina! I might need to check into Crossroads, or Betty Ford or some sort of shit like that, and the most pathetic part of it all is that I'll probably have to make up an addiction of some sort. Heads for crack, tails for heroin?

Call it!

-Shim