Trying to Put out a Fire with Gasoline

Medications represent a fine line between feeling better and feeling much much worse, with the lone bright spot being – you feel worse for different reasons than the original one that got you on the medication in the first place. So technically, yes they work, but sometimes you question whether the benefit outweighs the negatives.

The jury is still out. I did a bit of checking – what I found made me feel not unlike Geraldo Rivera in his heyday or as if I should see if I can’t get some of the 60 Minutes gang together and just see what the heck is going on out there. Check out some of these facts;

Accidental death from prescription drugs, even when they are correctly given, is now the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.

and this from a respected doctor in the States – The worst thing that can happen to you when you take a legal drug is not that it won’t work, but that you might drop dead, Fried Says. “The next worse is that your body is permanently damaged.”A little further down the list of drug-induced disasters is that you fall into that seemingly endless “cascade of prescribing” where you need a half-dozen strong drugs to undo the side effects of the first one, and then a lot of time to recover from the effects of all of them…

I couldn’t find any stats for Canada but in America, legal, prescribed drugs are an 195 Billion dollars a year industry… that’s U.S. only. ADEs (adverse drug effects) account for 210,000 deaths per year in the U.S.A.

Ok OK enough already – I get it – Just say No kids….

Well, unfortunately I’ve fallen into the category where I’m now being prescribed a number of drugs to try and counteract the effect of all the other drugs I’ve been taking. It’s not like taking those were a picnic, there were side effects up the wazoo – sometimes literally. Over time you get used to the effects and that becomes your new normal.

Some of the things I’ve come through have been weird, like the inability to taste, for a couple of months awhile ago, I couldn’t for the life of me taste anything, everything tasted like some kind of even less tasty Oatmeal. There has been strange coloured pee, well – it doesn’t matter the list is so long as to completely exhaust several batteries on my laptop.

I told you that to tell you this… When I was scheduled to see the endocrinologist, the secretary made the next available appointment – August 29th. To her credit, when I explained the situation she squeezed me in – a month and a half early – thank you madam.

So I saw him and no lie, he was with me for a total of less than 3 minutes. He basically said classic toxicosis from Amiodarone poisoning. Since in most cases the side effects from Amiodarone are permanent, he has me on 2 new drugs trying to counteract the permanent damage. One of the drugs, whose name escapes me… mimics a cold, 24 hours a day, sore throat, stuffy nose, itch watery eyes, and low-grade fever or headache and “stomach irregularities” if you get my drift – BUT and this is the funny part – you need to monitor these effects carefully because if they become too severe, you can be in big trouble…. HAHAHAHAHAH well Ok who’s to judge how much is too much? Me? Because if so, than any of this crap is too much.

A side bonus is that it also interacts with Warfarin, so – recently being somewhat stabilized, with minimal bleeding lately – that will all go in the dumper – until we can get the dosages correct, pretty much guaranteed some weird bleeding is again in my immediate future.

If neither of these new drugs work, then the last resort is to go on prednisone… which, if you will recall during the whole Myasthenia darkness, they wanted to put me on it, but I fought it. Supposedly there is a whole world of hurt you can expect when dealing with prednisone on its own, never mind in conjunction with a cocktail of other drugs as well.

I swear, it’s almost comical.

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Anyways I tried to ask him a couple of questions and he just said “no time” he had other patients waiting, he squeezed me in as a favor to the cardiologist to help facilitate the pacemaker surgery. So that was that and I walked out with two new prescriptions at $180 for a month, on top of the other $650.

Here’s the thing, clearly, they are trying to break me.

I can’t let them win. It’s not that I’m so amazing or inspirational, more like too stupid to know when to give up already.

Anyways, not very funny today. But sometimes, that’s life.

I am excited because we have advanced tickets to see the Midnight Harry Potter show with the kids tomorrow night…. it should be awesome.

Have a Great Day