I went to the doctor last Thursday with symptoms of a urinary tract infection, and sure enough, that’s what I had. Fortunately, it was caught very early, and he prescribed me 10 days of Bactrim (filled with generic sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim). I’ve taken it before without any problems, but THIS time, I felt miserable all weekend (dizziness, depression, loss of appetite, and more) and even though I’m a pharmacist, I had no idea it could cause this many side effects all at once! :eek:
I know how important it is to finish antibiotics, but this time, I’m going to take the risk of it recurring and finish them if I do. :rolleyes: I felt 100 times worse on that medication than I did before! Many doctors order 3 days’ worth anyway, so I hope I’m covered. Honestly, I felt fully recovered the very next day.
While we’re on this subject, I believe that a lot of people who think they have fibromyalgia actually have muscle destruction (rhabdomyolysis) from statin anti-cholesterol drugs, a class that I think is massively overused.
Anyone else have similar stories about this or other drugs?
I was prescribed Bactrim once, for what turned out to be nothing - but the Urgent Care doctor thought it might be a UTI. I took one dose, and about 6 hours later, was hit with the most intense nausea I’ve felt in my adult life. As someone with a deep-seated fear of nausea/vomiting, I was essentially paralyzed with anxiety, afraid to move for fear of setting off my stomach, for hours.
I did not take the second dose, and called the physician back the next day and got him to call in something else. But I was traumatized by the nausea and couldn’t eat normally for several days. It was hell, and I will not take Bactrim again.
I’ve taken it before. I didn’t get any of the side effects you guys are describing, just the standard “stomach upset and low-grade diarrhea after 5 days” I get with any antibiotic. But I tried taking one dose with some slightly warmish water and it started dissolving on my tongue before I could swallow. That just about made me hurl–Christ on a cracker, there is no excuse for anything to ever taste that incredibly nasty.
Another counterpoint: Bactrim was a goddamned miracle drug for me each time I had a UTI. On the other hand, erythromycin made me puke every damned time.
I know a lady who says that Cipro is the greatest drug ever invented, at least for her. She had a Pseudomonas infection of the ear canal that could only be treated symptomatically for several years, and then she was put on Cipro when it was released onto the market and it completely cleared up in a matter of hours! It was painful enough that at one point, she contemplated suicide, so she was very happy when this was relieved.
My brother had horrible GI reactions to erythromycin too, so you’re not alone.
I had to take Biaxin a couple years ago for a sinus infection that was heading into chronic status. That wasn’t fun either, but it DID wipe out that infection. It hasn’t recurred, anyway. But I gained weight on it, because I was eating constantly to stave off the horrible taste that came from the INSIDE of my tongue; that’s the only way I can describe it.
While, just the same, one can also find any number of really ugly horror stories about the adverse reactions that some people have to drugs of the flurorquinolone class, of which Cipro is one. These drugs are sometimes cause severe neurological damage, either peripheral or central, which may be of debilitating severity and typically irreversible – and can happen suddenly after just one dose of the drug.
See the book Bitter Pills by Stephen Fried. His wife was prescribed Floxin (ofloxacin) for a UTI. After the first dose, she became disoriented and delerious, and never recovered.
You can find umpteen similar horror stories of severe “neurological compromise” (as it is euphemistically called), and many other severe adverse reactions. Doctors invariably pooh-pooh this, saying that such reactions are rare, but I’m not so sure of that. More importantly, such reactions, when they do happen, seem to be debilitating and irreversible – and sometimes without warning, occurring after just one dose – and these factors should weigh heavily against there use.
SWMBO has taken Bactrim successfully in the past. However, the last time she got it, she broke out in a rash which the doc immediately name a “Bactrim rash”. Apparently, she has now become sensitized to sulfa drugs and they are on her no-no list.
Bactrim is of the devil. When I took it, I got palpitations, dizziness, loss of appetite, vivid crazy nightmares, and vomiting. No nausea, just vomiting (which nearly led to a big mess because I had no warning that I was about to puke and barely made it to the bathroom).
Then I broke out in a hideous blotchy head-to-toe rash and hives that made me look like a boiled lobster. It was on literally every skin surface. I went back to the doctor, who first of all expressed some astonishment that I’d been intelligent enough to stop taking the drug when I noticed the hives () and then looked at my stomach and went “Wow! This is the worst one I’ve ever seen, I wish I had a med student in here!” Comforting, right?
It then turned out, after a look at the notes on the front page of my chart, that I’d had a previous identical reaction at age 3 that the doctor who initially prescribed it had missed. I didn’t remember it, because I was 3. “Oh, you should never have been given this.” Well, thanks! So I got sent away with orders to take Zyrtec for the hives and never take sulfa drugs again.
The irony: the first doctor wanted to prescribe Augmentin but went with Bactrim because I’m allergic to amoxicillin. That worked out well!
Several years ago I had scraped my shin and wound up with a serious infection. My doctor prescribed an oral antibiotic, whose name I can’t remember. It had the side effect of intense itching all over my body, except for my head, hands and feet. The itching was so intense that I wound up scratching off the hair follicles on both of my forearms; they don’t grow back.
This happened to me as well, and Bactrim is the only drug I’ve ever taken that caused that reaction. And it took a few days, so at first I was baffled when my feet began itching. A couple of days after that, red rash all over my body.
Avelox did weird shit to me as well, but it was more of a dizzy/spacey/lightheaded feeling after each time I took it. I managed to finish that one, unlike Bactrim.
I have read “Bitter Pills” (actually owned it at one time) and the drug it’s mostly about, Floxin, is rarely used orally or IV any more. It’s available as Ocuflox eye drops and Floxin Otic, for ears. That book was SCARY. I’m actually allergic to Cipro, and have also heard the stories about tendon damage when it’s used long-term, which is rarely done except in people with cystic fibrosis. Fluoroquinolones are a major factor in the dramatically increased life expectancy for CF patients in recent years; it fights pseudomonas in the lungs, which is the biggest killer in people with CF.
In the late 1990s, there was a fluoroquinolone antibiotic called Trovan, and when it first came out, I worked at an HMO clinic and we dispensed a LOT of it. And the majority of the people for whom it was prescribed couldn’t tolerate it, because it penetrates the blood-brain barrier, and made people extremely dizzy. It was eventually banned for outpatient use, and then taken off the market altogether because of the number of people who developed liver failure from the IV formulation.
I was hospitalized for three days a few summers ago as a result of a Bactrim allergy. It absolutely wrecked my immune system. My white blood cell counts were so low they did a bone marrow biopsy (because they thought I might have leukemia), and I had no less than four different doctors ask me, in different ways, if I might have had sexual relations with another man (because they thought I might have AIDS).
I also had a 10 day course. I didn’t have any symptoms until over a week after I started taking it, and the symptoms I did have (headache, body ache, fever) were all consistent with the flu until day 10, when I developed the rash. So it didn’t even occur to me that it could be a drug reaction I started improving as soon as I stopped taking the meds.
About 10 years back I fractured a rib during a fall and my Doc gave me a script for some painkillers to let me sleep. I can’t remember what it was but a few hours after I took it I woke up with horrible bouts of nausea.
If I lay down it felt like the bed was spinning and I had bad motion sickness (to quote Arthur Dent : “It’s rather unpleasantly like being drunk.”).
If I stood up to get rid of the spinning sensation I would feel horribly sick and like I needed to throw up - dry heaving with a busted rib is no fun
Opiate painkillers don’t work right on me. I was given Vicodin (or, more likely, generic equivalent) for some dental work when I was in my 20s. It made me hot, clumsy, itchy in places I didn’t know I had, and queasy. I started sobbing for no reason. Not like “oh, there’s a puppy on TV!” and then I burst into tears – I was fine one moment, and the next I had my face buried in a pillow, sobbing hysterically. It was incredibly strange and very alarming. I went back to the dentist and was given Percocet instead, and the exact same thing happened. Since neither did a damn thing for the pain, I flushed the lot of them, called back to ask how much Aleve I could really take if it was just going to be for a few days, and lived on that and frozen GoGurt pops until my mouth healed up. I recall watching a bootleg copy of “Let It Be” several times, on the theory that I should be in the company of people as miserable as I was.
The worst experience I’ve ever had with antibiotics was as a teenager, when I discovered the hard way that anything ending in -cycline would make me toss my cookies 45 minutes after taking it. You could set your watch by it. A dermatologist tried putting me on it for acne; he eventually gave up and gave me something I could slap on my face instead of swallow, and it worked fine.
I take bactrim fairly regularly. Every time it cures the UTI, but makes me dizzy, lethargic and if I don’t drink enough water I get excruciating backaches.
I took cipro once. I could drive while on it, it made me so dizzy.
Avelox is one of those fluoroquinolone drugs (moxifloxacin), of which I ranted several posts above, and of which nearwildheaven more-or-less agreed with me. These drugs do neurological damage. And as nearwildheaven pointed out, they cross the blood-brain barrier – so they can do their dirty work there too.
(In fact, if you get a bacterial infection in your brain, there are rather few drugs that will actually get into your brain where they can do any good, and fluoroquinolones are among those few. Hopefully, though, it won’t rot out your whole Central Nervous System and tranform you permanently into a drooling imbecile.)
The really serious danger is that the neurological adverse reactions to these drugs can be, not only really nasty, but permanent and irreversible.
As nearwildheaven mentions, these drugs are also implicated in connective tissue damage, which can lead to ruptured tendons, even long after using these medications.
ETA: As both nearwildheaven and I noted, the book Bitter Pills deals mostly about Floxin (ofloxacin), the pill that trashed the author’s wife. As I understand it, this is the same compound as Levaquin (levofloxacin), but the racemic mixture. (That is, a mixture of the left-handed and right-handed molecules.) Whereas levofloxacin is the purified levo molecule. Allegedly, according to one source I read, that supposedly makes it safer.
I have not heard the horror stories about levofloxacin as I have about ofloxacin. I’m guessing that dextrofloxacin is what causes most of the problems.
We used tons of IV Levaquin (levofloxacin) in the hospital. People usually tolerated it quite well, but then again, they usually received just a few doses before they improved enough to be discharged, or switched to something else as the case may be.
p.s. When I was a teenager, I got an ear infection (and even though I didn’t have kids, I totally understand why babies get so fussy when they have them) and had an antibiotic capsule break open in my mouth. You know that scene in “Big” where Tom Hanks eats IIRC caviar and scrapes it off his tongue? That’s exactly what I did.
One of my old co-workers, whose kids are/were in their late 30s (one of them died a few years ago ) said that he had to administer a since-discontinued antibiotic called Prostaphlin. It smelled good but tasted dreadful (he tried it and said it had a horrible metallic aftertaste) and he had to wrestle that child to the floor to get them to take it, because his wife wasn’t strong enough to do it. :eek:
But I gained weight on it, because I was eating constantly to stave off the horrible taste that came from the INSIDE of my tongue; that’s the only way I can describe it.
) and then looked at my stomach and went “Wow! This is the worst one I’ve ever seen, I wish I had a med student in here!” Comforting, right?