Dangers of medications

I miss writing—writing about fun and interesting things-not about health or politics. Last week I had a reaction to my medications. It took me about 3 days to get back to earth so to say and another 2 days to get back to clear thought. I’m still dealing with some of the side effects.

 

Dilantin is a quirky medicine. It has a very narrow therapeutic threshold (I’ve written about this before) and causes several side effects but my problems have always been that it doesn’t play nicely with other medicines. This is why in the past that I took very few medications with Dilantin. I like to know what to expect before it happens but that isn’t always the case—I need to up my game because the pharmacists and doctors haven’t been paying attention.

 

One medication that I take for my stomach and colon (let’s call it med A) increases the effects of another medication I am taking for my urticaria (let’s call that one med B).

So we have med A increasing the effects of med B which in turn increases the effects of Dilantin causing a very dangerous mixture. The effects are minimal as long as the dosages are small but when they are increased it becomes scary because I didn’t know what was going on. I can’t even think when it happens as in draw conclusions.

 

Anyway, I’m better. I can actually walk and not fall down and I’m not sleeping for 48+ hours at a time. I rearranged my dosage times and left off one of the urticaria doses. It’s working so far. I had to give up driving for a while until this settles down. We will wait and see.

 

Sometimes we don’t know how our bodies will react to certain medications given that each of us is different. Often we play the game of trial and error until something happens. In my lifetime, I have had at least 4 overdoses and at least 2 underdoses-that is what I can recall at this moment. These were not my fault as in there was nothing I could do to prevent them. The overdoses usually happened because an increase of medication. Sometimes it is hit and miss and misses can have consequences. With the underdoses-we can have changes in the way our bodies metabolize so we have to closely monitor what is happening which usually results in blood tests but they aren’t as simple as checking for blood sugar.

 

I hope to write about something that is more fun next time. Happy Gardening! 🙂