Ozempic Makes Me Feel Less Like A Screwup

How the new class of weight loss wonder drugs is treating more than just my appetite.

When you go to a doctor and say, “I read about a miracle drug on social media, and I’d like you to prescribe it to me,” the response is normally not, “Great! Sure thing.” But that is essentially what happened this spring when I asked my general practitioner about Ozempic. I swallowed my fears of being thought of as a drug-seeking hypochondriac with internet worms in my brain, and a few screening questions later, I had a prescription in my hand¹ and a visa to journey to the bleeding edge of medical science.

Now, my doctor did tell me that there were potential side effects, but like many people, I am inured to such warnings and didn’t really take any of them seriously, which makes it my own fault that I was so unprepared for the unfortunate revelation that I experience some of them quite constantly.

A reality of life is that people are understandably a bit loath to talk of bad side effects of medication. It’s one thing to acknowledge that, statistically, SSRIs have sexual side effects, but it’s another thing to talk openly about how Zoloft makes you personally unable to sustain an erection. This is also true of any discussion about weight. Despite decades of literature to the contrary, the idea that all of it boils down to one’s own willpower, or lack thereof, persists. It persists in society. It persists in my mind. So you end up with a very bifurcated discourse, where people will publicly talk about all the good bits of Ozempic but then, in their quiet moments, spend the night reading anonymous Reddit forums to see if other people seem to have grown a tail, too. (This is a joke. I do not have a tail. Please do not put in the newspaper that I have a tail.)

This is bad. We should all be open about this stuff more. It lessens stigmas and brings us all together to bond over our shared imperfection and humanity and the fact that in the end, we’re all just a quarter inch of sediment, you dig?

My Bad Side Effects