Medication side effects

There are things that still are weird to me after 16 years of living in the USA including the advertising of prescription medications on TV and Radio. In Ireland, it is not lawful to advertise prescription-only medications to the general public. That means that we lack the joy of the Erectile Dysfunction commercial while watching football during dinner on a Sunday evening ("Daddy what does 'an erection lasting 4 hours' mean..?"). Also, you don't get a chance to listen to the seemingly unending list of side effects (all sounding far worse than the condition that the medication is supposed to treat). You know what I mean... The commercial for toenail fungus medication which touts suicidal tendencies, all over body rash, limb numbness, toe amputation, and 'in rare cases' death...

Why am I thinking about this right now? Well because I've had a crappy night's sleep and mostly to blame is one of the side effects of my medication to control my blood pressure.

When I was first diagnosed with high blood pressure (just after the incident in Vegas), my doctor called in a prescription for a drug called Metropolol.  After just a few days, my blood pressure was almost always back in the 'normal' range.  A couple of weeks went by and when I diligently checked my blood pressure daily, I noticed that I was still not in the normal range on every read out. I called the cardiologist (by this time we were already going through the various testing etc with the cardiologist so I figured he was the person to make the call) and asked if there was something that could be done.  He just said to start taking 2 pills per day instead of one and that he'd call in a new prescription for the 2x dose (which I picked up later in the day).

Nerdy side note: These pills are absolutely tiny and the new 'double dose' pill was identical in size with just a different number printed on it. It just goes to show how much of the pill, even one as tiny as that, is filler. Doubling the dose had no impact on the size of the pill.

Anyhow, I started the 2x dose right away and within a couple of days, every blood pressure readout was normal! Yay.  I never spent much time reading up on the side effects of the medication, mostly because I didn't want to cause myself to start seeing problems where they really weren't an issue. However, after another couple of weeks on this new dose, I started to notice that it was hard to persuade myself to get out of the bed in the morning. In fact, I wasn't really all that enthusiastic about doing anything. My wife observed my lack of interest (and how hard it was to get me out of bed in the morning) and asked me if I noticed.  This gave me pause to review the side effects of the medication, and sure enough, nested in with 'difficult or labored breathing', 'inability to speak', 'short-term memory loss' and 'troubled breathing' was 'extreme fatigue' and 'lack of interest'...

'Lack of Interest' seemed like a pretty broad side effect and yet it seemed to sum up what my wife had observed.  Clearly this, along with a, now explained, extreme tiredness was not a long term situation with which we were willing to deal. So we decided to bring it up at the next cardiologist visit (a few days later). He was very understanding and immediately called in a prescription for a different medication that would still control my blood pressure, but wouldn't have those side effects. Truthfully, I believe that these drugs react differently with each patient so there is some guesswork associated with finding the pills that have the side effects that are livable with. 

As I picked up the prescription from the pharmacy, the person behind the counter asked if I had ever taken Lisinopril before. I said that I hadn't and they said that the most common side effect was a cough, and that it likely subside over time.  "A cough"  didn't seem too bad given the "not wanting to get out of bed" side effect of the first one so I went along my merry way.  After about a week on the new meds, sure enough, from time to time, I would get a tickling sensation at the back of my throat that caused a dry cough. It would just come on suddenly, and go away as fast. Sometimes the sensation would stay for a couple of minutes, other times it would go away after a drink of water. Annoying, yes but not a show stopper.

This might be too much information, but sometimes while cleaning my ears, I inadvertently poke the cotton swab too far into my ear causing me to cough. Yes, I know that they say very clearly on the outside of the box that they are not meant to be placed into the ear, but isn't that the reason we buy the damn things??  Anyway, I prodded too deeply into my ear last week and I immediately noticed that the sensation that caused me to cough was exactly the same as the medically induced cough. Now I don't know what caused my brain to move to the next step but, later in the day, I had urge to cough (from the medication) and I poked my finger in my ear and the sensation went away with no desire to cough!  Weird huh? Ever since then (where it wouldn't be totally weird to stick your finger in your ear) I've used this method to calm the urge to cough. It's not 100% but together with a drink of water, it seems like an effective way to control it.

Still not clear why this is relevant today at 4:30am on a Sunday? Well for whatever reason, my tickly medically induced cough was a real pain over night. It didn't matter how much water drinking and ear poking I did, it came back quickly. It woke me up several times and made it hard to get back to sleep. Now it seems to have calmed down again I'll hopefully get some sleep but I wanted to share this story with you because it was swirling around my head and I wanted to get it out!