My thought is I know my body better than any doctor. And there is no one size fits all approach! I have much more pressing health issues. I’ve never had any ill effects from taking clonazepam. I have never had to stop driving. In fact when we lived in Rochester, MN I frequently drove alone to my parents in Pittsburgh and then on to Baltimore to spend time with my daughter and her husband and their infant daughter. I took care of their 14 month old daughter for 2 weeks while they were on their honeymoon. I moved to Pittsburgh to take care of my parents. I drove to Baltimore often. Then we moved from Minnesota to Vermont. My daughter graduated and they moved to Boston. I did the 3 hour drive from Vermont to Boston regularly. My daughter and her husband had no qualms about leaving their daughter in my care.
I only had problems when after several surgeries my CFS got worse. During the pandemic, I developed digestive problems but seeing a doctor was impossible. I also developed agoraphobia. None of the health issues that I have had were caused by clonazepam.
So why fix something that’s not broken?
When we moved to Vermont, I couldn’t find a psychiatrist to manage my medications. It was a psychiatrist in San Jose who put me on clonazepam for panic attacks. In Minnesota I had a psychiatrist at Mayo who managed my medications. She increased my dosage. While in Pittsburgh I again had a psychiatrist who managed my medications. So not being able to have a psychiatrist in Vermont at the University of Vermont Medical Center meant that a series of Primary Care Doctors just kept renewing my prescription.
So if anyone should take responsibility it isn’t me. It’s the doctors who kept renewing my prescription. And maybe if I had a psychiatrist in Vermont I would have been taken off the medication. But the University of Vermont Medical Center had trouble hiring doctors and then keeping the ones they had. They tried to prevent a group of doctors from establishing a medical center not associated with UVM. I have contacted Sen. Bernie Sanders many times about the state of healthcare in Vermont. He’s been very receptive to my concerns. In my last communication with him I told him that I was leaving Vermont but I still care about the people of Vermont. No drug or illness has affected my ability to communicate effectively. I am a published author and I did the book reviews for the newspaper in Rochester. I worked on a very intense inpatient unit at Methodist Hospital. I was the Unit Secretary on the hematology unit. Then when we moved to San Jose I worked on an oncology/hematology unit at Stanford University Hospital. Taking clonazepam had no effect on the quality of my performance in what many Unit Secretaries considered the toughest one in any hospital. I will fight for what I believe is best for me.
Our healthcare system is broken. It was broken before Covid and Covid made it worse. This is unacceptable in what is supposed to be the greatest country on earth.