My psych, who is a lovely crusty old dame of about 70ish, gave me some meds and said “Take these if you have an anxiety attack or insomnia; but if you have to take them at work you’ll need to go home. They’ll knock you out.”
Yeah.
I’m beginning to believe she’s a mistress of understatement.
As in, I took it at 11PM one night, thinking it was supposed to be back out of my system in about 8-9 hours. I had my alarm set for 8. I wanted to get up and do work on the commissions in my oh-so-copious free time. Instead I was woken by my husband at 10 AM, who had to *shake me to get me to wake up*, and for the rest of the day I felt like someone had slipped me a ‘lude. Hard to get anything done when that happens. The only upside was that I had a ton of weird and vivid dreams. As it was, I spent all day in an utter fog, feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all.
Guess it’ll be the last time I mess with that. Being a fibromyte means that my sleep is a touchy and special thing. I need a specific type of sleep, and a certain length of sleep — and if I don’t get it, life is difficult and sad until I do.
Medicines have always hit me oddly. They gave me morphine in the emergency room once; I still don’t understand why some people take it for fun. It acid etched my veins before it knocked me unconscious. Thinking back I can still feel that awful sensation, in arteries I didn’t even realize I had. It was a frissioning boiling feeling, a very uncomfortable trip.
Percocet, however, has been a godsend for me. It’s the only thing that really cuts through the pain, with no side effects that I’ve been able to notice it. I can use it sparingly because it is effective. I don’t have to stack eight or twelve or even 16 ibuprophen and do some unknown amount of damage to my innards.
The biggest medication to affect me was Metformin. I was put on it because there was a possibility at the time that I had Poly-Cystic Ovarian Disease, or PCOD. My general practitioner let me know that there was a severe side effect called lactic acidosis but it was so rare that the likelihood of me getting it would be very small.
A week later I went back to my doc with a complaint of acute chest pain and all over muscle soreness. I asked my doc if there was a possibility of this being the rare side effect. They gave the answer of “Oh no, it’s much worse than this.”
Two months later and they were right — it *was* much worse!
Lactic acidosis is part of what happens to the body during the process of rigor mortis; in a way I was living and dead all at once. (A very novel feeling, but I do not suggest it to others.) It felt like my lungs and chest were turning to stone and set on fire and wrapped tightly in barbed wire at the same time. My muscles hurt all over; I was taking four and five percocet a day just to sit upright. But a day after stopping the Metformin, the symptoms began to fade and in four days they were gone.
Lactic acidosis has a hilarious fatality rate; I feel that I came very close to dying because of several misdiagnoses of the situation, and numerous doctors who failed to listen to me and my appraisal of my symptoms. Later that year I got a tattoo because of this experience — a human heart wrapped tight with barbed wire, with phoenix-wings of flame shooting from it. It got it out of my head and on to my skin, where I didn’t have to think about it so often.
Ever had a medication give you a higher effect than you were told it would, or a horrific side effect that causes you harm?
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At the moment, I can’t think of a medication that’s surprised me with its effect on me — but if sugar is a drug, then perhaps this is apropos:
Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond relieved my PMS. Instantly, as if I were in some kind of 1950s television commercial.
It was about twelve years ago. I was having the worst attack of hormonal emotional meltdown I’d ever had, crying uncontrollably, and the knowledge that I was in a public place did nothing to stem the flow. A friend drove me to where I was going, and we stopped at a convenience store along the way, and I purchased The Ice Cream.
Vanilla Swiss Almond. Some kind of alchemical elixir, that day. Was it the sugar, the dairy, the salt, the protein, or the combination?
Heck, maybe I’m all wrong. Maybe I had a glass of water at the same time, and stopped being dehydrated from crying, and that did the trick. I’m pretty sure it was the ice cream, though.
I resist the urge to indulge in this remedy very often. The long-term side effects of over-use could be…problematic. I save it for emergencies.