This Post Brought to You By…Um…Uh…I Have No Idea

So I started taking a drug for my fibromyalgia. Yes, that drug, the one that’s in those commercials these days. At my rheumatologist’s recommendation, I worked up the dose from 50 mg to 125 mg over a period of 6 weeks. I couldn’t really tell if it was working for the pain (it waxes and wanes day to day – it’s the big flares that flatten me out of nowhere that are the worst) and I seemed to be tolerating the side effects well enough (some swelling, a bit of morning shakiness), so we upped the dose to 150, with the intention of taking it to 200 for a few months to see if it made a difference in the frequency and severity of my big pain flares.
Two days later, I had a very scary experience. I could NOT get up out of bed. My brain did not focus. My mom was having surgery and I needed to drive (and park) in downtown Seattle for her appointments. I was very late, and very freaked out. I had to keep blinking my eyes open and willing myself to concentrate. I felt like it was 3am after a long cross-state drive and I was trying to do just a few more miles. But it was 10 am. And I’d had plenty of sleep. I have never thought so hard about driving and parking and walking in my life.
I thought maybe it had just been a freak reaction of the Lyrica compounded with the couple few many capirinhas I’d had the night before, but the next day was even worse. I had the same staying-awake-after-taking-a-sleeping-pill-feeling, but instead of wearing off at about 2, it lasted until 4:30. And even scarier than being a danger to myself, all of Seattle, and my children by driving my mini-van? Was not being able to write. I sat at my computer, and what was in my brain was not what I typed. What was in my head, I could not put the right words to. I typed and backspaced and typed and backspaced and typed and backspaced and FREAKED THE HELL OUT.
At that point, I knew I could not take this drug any more. I did the customary paranoid Google search and found out that Lyrica was trying to kill me. Of course, according to the internet, my tap water is trying to kill me too. And, orange juice causes three-headed newts with purple glowing tails to grow OUT OF YOUR EAR. But this Lyrica? It can be some scary stuff. Turns out I’d been having more side-effects at the lower doses than I realized – like having conversations with my sister-in-law that I don’t even remember.
My doctor’s office said that I could stop it altogether, assuring me that I was not on a large enough dose (!) nor had I been on it long enough for it to cause the Google-proven brain damage by going cold turkey. Or I could taper it over a week if I wanted to. That night I took a half-dose and slept from 7:15 pm till 8:45 am. I tapered one more day and then said, “forget it

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 2:07 PM and is filed under Fibromyalgia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.