Hi, I'm marks320

After prostatectomy three and a half years ago, I experienced all of the symptoms of pudendal neuralgia. Primary Care Physician prescribed gabapentin, my urologist switched me to Lyrica after a month or two due to its lesser chance of negatively affecting my incontinence. I had to increase the daily dose to 600 mg before getting adequate relief of my awful symptoms. At this dosage, I basically became a zombie. Memory losses, difficulty completing thoughts and sentences, confusion, etc. After a year, I decided to attempt to taper to a lesser dosage. I didn't do much research and tapered too quickly, I later discovered, but managed to get down to 150 mg over the course of several awful weeks. After a year at 150 mg, I again decided to see if the nerve symptoms would return at a lower dosage, so I tapered again, much more gradually, and got down to 50 mg/day. Over the course of these years, I was prescribed several different antidepressants- Effexor, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Prozac. Each time I immediately experienced intolerable side effects and had to quit, never making it beyond six weeks, once having to quit after only one week. After the last attempt at antidepressants, I started to suspect the Lyrica was at least partially responsible for the antidepressant side effects and might have always been mostly responsible for my depression. So I decided to, once again, try to taper or quit entirely. Unfortunately, I was down to the lowest dosage capsules, 25 mg twice a day. My primary care physician suggested Lyrica was fairly easy to taper off of and recommended taking one 25 mg dose for two weeks, then quitting entirely. I knew from experience that would be brutal. I have not yet looked into a compounding pharmacy or asked for switching my prescription to the liquid form. Since I resorted in the past to opening capsules and visually reducing the dose to taper and being successful, I'm in the process of repeating that process. I have reduced each capsule's contents by approximately 1/3 and intend to hold for at least a week, I'm currently on the third day with tolerable side effects. I hope to further reduce by about 1/3 of the remaining dosage, holding for at least one week, until I'm down to approximately 5 mg, at which point I intend to quit entirely. Time will tell what the results will be, I'm hoping my nerve discomfort remains tolerable with a very minimal or no dose at all.