I
don't write about personal stuff online. Sharing details of my life with
the world isn't my bag, baby. But I'm making an exception here because
it might be important for someone who might stumble upon this post. More
on that in a minute.
About a month ago, my mother started
acting a little goofy. Just small things, but over the course of a few
days they added up to a pattern. You've all probably
heard that a urinary tract infection can cause clouded thinking,
slurred speech, etc. We hadn't. She was put on the antibiotic
Ciprofloxacin. Way down the list of side effects is a long list of
psychiatric side effects. My mom got the works: hallucinations, anxiety,
depression, depersonalization...a half dozen more. She basically went
nuts. She was hospitalized for two weeks. Nearly every doctor was
worthless. Some, in fact, made her worse. They began looking for stuff
it wasn't, and a lumbar puncture left her unable to walk and she wound
up with pneumonia. The reason for her sudden behavior change was simple
to us, because we did the research. She had gone from common UTI
symptoms and then took six hits of acid.
I'll be writing a lot
more about this at some point in the future, because the details will
appall you, but I'm writing this Reader's Digest version now because
maybe somebody out there right now -- this very morning -- is going
through what we went through this past month.
For nearly a
month, my mother has had something people online very accurately refer
to as "brain fog." She'd answer questions, but she wasn't all there. On a
good day, half her brain was with us, but the other half was somewhere
beyond Neptune. Thank God during this time we met two people whose
mothers had the exact same reaction to Cipro. They told us the fog would
last about a month and that it'd take two months for it to completely
clear. No doctor told us this. On Thursday, my mom's head began to
clear. This was 25 days after her last Ciprofloxacin pill. By Thursday
night, she was maybe 90% herself again. We were worried that she'd drop
back into the fog the next day, because that can and may yet happen. She
didn't, and she hasn't, and she's remained alert and herself since
Thursday. She's smiling again, cracking wise, and she engages in
conversations rather than stares at the wall like a zombie.
Like I said, I'll be writing more about this later on. (You'll
especially love the part about the doctor who casually assured us very
early on Thursday morning -- the very day my mom woke up and finally
broke through the fog -- that she wasn't getting better, that she was in
fact getting worse, and that she'd be dead in six to eight months. I
carry around a list of Cipro's psychiatric side effects in my wallet
now, and when I tried to show them to this moron he wouldn't even read
them.) I'm writing this now because online research was only
semi-helpful. What helped most of all were the two people we met who
told us that the exact same thing happened to their mothers on this drug
and that it would take a month for the brain fog to clear, and another
month to get back to normal.
I don't tell people to share my
posts, but this one might be a good one because who knows? Maybe
somebody on your list or somebody on their list or somebody on somebody
else's list you don't even know is right now going through what we went
through, with unhelpful doctors ignoring documented side effects and
equally unhelpful Internet Web sites that shriek "CIPRO IS POISON!" It's
not. It's medicine that works well for most people. But when it doesn't
work...brother, it don't work. But for those of you out there right now
whose loved ones are in the .1 to 1% who've won this rare, terrible
side-effects lottery: give it a month. As terrible as it is, it does get
better.
