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Hallmark Christmas Movies Kept Me Sane
When an antibiotic pushed me off the deep end, saccharine holiday romances were my unlikely tether to “reality.”
In 2015, I ended up like many millennials: “stuck” under my parents’ roof. I’d spent 2012–2014 trying and failing repeatedly to execute DIY overseas moves, and now I was home to figure out my next steps. I was in rural southeastern Pennsylvania, with no money and no car—nowhere to go and no means to leave—but being an involuntary shut-in didn’t didn’t break me; ever the happy loner, I fell into a bookish routine. Instead, the “real” fun began just before the holidays. That’s when I was prescribed an antibiotic* for a common female health problem. Just a 3-day course. Of mega-doses.
And oh. my. God.
Almost immediately, I became an ever-trembling, ever-terrified mess.
Yes, I’d read that “psychosis” was a possible side effect in the leaflet of contraindications, but I wasn’t too concerned; I had no history of psychiatric disorder, and the risk supposedly stemmed from a drug interaction that didn’t pertain to me. Of course, I learned later that the leaflet skirted the truth (the drug is documented in medical literature as triggering neuropsychiatric complications all by itself) and that I wasn’t the only person in my…
