Two weeks after I began taking Mounjaro, I had lost 11 pounds. Since I’d started injecting this godsend of a drug, the numbers on my scale responded by ticking down a pound or so a day. I couldn’t have been happier. (You can read about how damn happy I was right here in Part 1.) I knew there was something wrong with my body and Mounjaro was fixing it.
By the third Saturday in a row, when I pulled my box of magic drugs out of the refrigerator and pressed the injector pen to my stomach for my weekly dose, I was hopeful that I was on my way to another seven days of losing even more weight. I’d already learned not to be bothered by the almost instant metallic taste in my mouth that came after the jab. I vaguely looked into this side effect, but couldn’t find anything that even mentioned it—and it went away within a half hour, so it wasn’t a huge nuisance.
I’d also gotten more used to the hunger pattern I fell into after I took the drug. I would have to force myself to eat the day of the injection and the day after. No matter how small or delicate the meal—a scrambled egg, slices of apple, some grilled chicken—it felt like trying to eat when you know you’re about to lose your lunch. It’s just not happening. My first pangs of hunger wouldn’t return until Thursday, five days after the shot. For you science nerds following along: The half-life of tirzepatide (the main ingredient in Mounjaro) is five days, so this makes perfect sense. I was blithely fascinated to not feel hunger at all for five days.
As someone who has raised other human beings and is acutely aware of the need for nutrition to sustain life, this fascination was tinged with a bit of, “yeah, but you need to eat to live.” Rationally, I knew it was unhealthy not to eat, or to eat so very little. Was this just what being on a weight-loss drug was like? I pored over article after article about people’s experiences taking Mounjaro and Ozempic and they were all fairly positive. I assumed this lack of any desire to eat was what I was supposed to be feeling.
On Sunday, about two and a half miles into my regular five-mile walk through the early fall green of Prospect Park, I felt suddenly depleted, the way you would if you’d overextended yourself. The long, strong muscles of my thighs started to quiver like I’d just gotten off a leg press machine after heaving up 400 lbs. I could feel where the muscles connected to the tendons, then connected to my pelvis. I walked my shaky body home, refilled my 24-oz water bottle and drank it down with purpose. I plucked a fig bar out of the cabinet and hoped the sugar would kick in quickly. This seemed to do the job. In an hour or so, I was feeling better. But that unexplained weakness felt ominous and left me on edge.
My concern about not eating was growing. I feared that if I couldn’t manage a real meal soon, the bone-deep weakness would return. I suggested Impossible burger sliders and fries to my family for dinner that night, thinking that if it was something fun and indulgent I’d be able to overcome my inability to eat. I slowly sautéed rings of onion into golden-brown delicacies, the scent filling the apartment. I tossed the fries into the convection oven to get extra crispy. I sliced open Martin’s potato dinner rolls and toasted them to perfection.
My efforts produced an Instagram-worthy platter of sliders with pickles and perfectly caramelized onions perched on top. But when I took a bite of mine, I couldn’t eat it. I tried to swallow and nearly failed. It didn’t taste bad, but the unconscious process that naturally happens when one chews and swallows felt like it had been short-circuited. My body—my brain—was physically rejecting food.
Tears of frustration filled my eyes. I knew my body needed food, but I couldn’t make it happen. It went so far beyond just fullness. It felt more like my esophagus was a pipe whose destination was my stomach, and a pipe-sized ball was lodged firmly between the two. Nothing was getting past it.
My daughter noticed my distress and asked what was wrong. I whimpered, “I really want to eat and I just can’t.” She gently rubbed my back in circles, just like I’ve done for her every time she’s been sick to her stomach. I felt so very stupid for doing this to myself. As the plates were cleared, I scraped my uneaten food into the garbage, hopeful that I would have some room in my gut tomorrow.
When morning came, I managed a very abbreviated walk. I decided that I was likely getting dehydrated and that I should drive to the grocery store for some Gatorade. I called my friend Beatrice and asked if she wanted to come. Having a car for groceries is a luxury in the city, so I couched the offer in that premise. But I also very much didn’t want to be alone. I was ashamed to ask for help or admit that this thing I had done to myself was having such a bad effect.
As I walked downstairs to the car, I felt that same deep muscle weakness again, but this time I thought I was going to pass out. My whole body was shaking. I made it to the car and in what was probably a very bad decision, drove to Beatrice’s house. When she got in, I told her what was happening.
“You want me to drive?” she offered. I stupidly declined. Readers: Nothing bad happened, but I regret this. Don’t do this.
In the store, I leaned on the shopping cart for support, unable to walk without it. I thought I’d snap out of it as soon as I got some electrolytes in me. I popped open an orange bottle of Gatorade right in the middle of the store and drank as much of its cold saltiness as I could. I wasn’t feeling better. I felt sick without being sick, as if some vital life force was draining out of me.
Beatrice drove us back, got me into my apartment, and tucked me in bed. When she left me to rest after I insisted I would be OK, I called my doctor to see if I needed to go to the hospital. It felt like a distinct possibility.
“What’s going on?” he asked in his sweet, gentle tone. I explained how I was feeling.
“Are you throwing up?”
“No,” I responded.
“Well that’s what we worry about in case it’s pancreatitis. Sounds like you’re doing the right thing by resting and drinking lots of fluids. You’re OK.”
I was decidedly not OK. But I let him assuage my fears and hoped that it was just taking my body longer to recover from dehydration (my self-diagnosis) than I thought it would. I canceled work I had to do and gave in to being sick for the rest of the day.
As I lay in my bed in the middle of the afternoon, unable to walk to my kitchen without support, I began to count down the hours until Thursday; half-life day. It was Monday. If I could just hang on until Thursday, I told myself, I would make it. I tucked this thought away and sipped on my chalky protein shake as often as I could. It would be days before I finished it.
That afternoon, Beatrice texted me to check in and ask the name of the drug I was taking. She was talking to a personal trainer who was seeing a lot of bodybuilders on these weight-loss drugs—and many of them were experiencing stomach paralysis. Their bodies were unable to move food through their digestive tract. It sounded exactly like what was happening to me. Google quickly informed me that if it wasn’t managed properly, it could last for the rest of your life.
I was sufficiently terrified. In my bed that afternoon I decided I was done with Mounjaro—whether I had stomach paralysis or not. This wasn’t the way I wanted to live after all. I kicked myself for being so bothered by my weight that I would choose to do something so life-altering.
The next morning I woke up feeling no better. My kids got themselves ready and off to the train, letting me sleep in. I rested and made myself sip at the cornucopia of drinks on my nightstand. I thanked the stars that I was one day closer to half-life day. But somewhere in the haze of the early afternoon I started to have difficulty breathing. Oh shit, I thought. This is bad.
It was time to see a doctor. I live a mile away from my local ER but knew I couldn’t make it there by myself. I debated calling an ambulance—but I was in a gap month between insurance and this was going to cost me enough even if I got myself there. I decided an Uber would have to do.
I texted Beatrice, “I’m going to the ER. I just wanted to tell someone.”
“Do you want me to meet you?”
“Yes,” I responded weakly.
This is a friend I’ve known for nearly 30 years. The last time I’d asked for her to come to me was the night my husband moved out without warning. I thought I might murder someone that night if I was left alone. This was the second time. I felt like if I was alone, I might pass out and not wake up again.
We arrived at a jam-packed ER where the intake person didn’t seem concerned at all with the initial description of my symptoms. Babies were coughing, unmasked, with what sounded like whooping cough. Crying patients were yelling about not being called in after four hours of waiting. We ditched the dystopia of the ER for an urgent care in hopes of getting seen sooner. There, I was quickly shown into a room. My blood pressure was high, as was my pulse. I told the doctor I was having trouble breathing and had extreme muscle fatigue. The doctor believed he knew what the problem was: COVID. The fact that I didn’t ask him to show me his medical license right then and there was only because I felt like life itself was draining from me.
“It’s not COVID,” I said.
When the test came back negative, I suggested perhaps we could do some blood work even though he insisted that the only thing “we worry about” with injectable weight-loss drugs is pancreatitis—and since I wasn’t vomiting, it wasn’t that. No mention of stomach or intestinal paralysis, hypoglycemia, or any of the other serious side effects that are possible with Mounjaro.
He told me I wasn’t dehydrated. I’d been concerned I was seriously so, and might need an IV infusion. Maybe all the fluids I’d forced down over the last 24 hours had helped? He stated matter-of-factly that there was “nothing wrong” with me. I walked back out of the urgent care into the strong afternoon sun feeling truly on my own but kinda, sorta reassured that apparently I wasn’t actively dying.
As I slowly made my way home by foot—one Uber ride a day was expensive enough—I considered how stupidly cavalier I had been in thinking a once-a-week injection was so easy. I didn’t weigh the fact that after it was in me, there was no way to get it out other than to wait. That was my only recourse now. Two more days until half-life day.
When I got home, my daughter was back from school. She didn’t know where I had been (I hadn’t wanted to scare her by texting that I was headed to the hospital) but had seen what I’d abandoned in the kitchen when I left: a small plate of dried-out scrambled eggs, barely touched, and a piece of wheat toast with exactly one bite taken out of it.
“This is the saddest plate I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“Yeah, pretty pathetic,” I responded, hugging her. “Hopefully I’ll be feeling better soon.”
If I wanted to feel like me again, I couldn’t be on Mounjaro. T-minus two days, I thought to myself.
“You’ve got to stop taking that stupid drug,” she said.
“I will, baby,” I said, wishing I could will it out of my body at that very moment.
“I will.”
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Postscript: Lili followed up with the fallout of coming off Mounjaro in: A Month of Mounjaro, Part 3: Well, Shit. You can also read Part 1: Holy Shit, I Love This right now.
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Lili Zarghami lives with her teenagers in Brooklyn. She’s been writing for and providing editorial direction at women’s websites like Redbook, HGTV, Better Homes & Gardens and more since the turn of the century. She can remember the addresses of all the places she was a latchkey kid but has no idea what her email password is.
