I regularly take over-the-counter sleeping pills. I have a lot of trouble falling asleep, even when I’m tired, and if I wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, it takes me forever to fall back asleep. So, pills.
Wednesday night, as I was getting ready for bed, I opened my medicine cabinet, took out my bottle of sleeping pills, and removed the cap. As I was shaking the sleeping pill into my hand, my eyes were caught by a bottle of ibuprofen tablets. That caused an abrupt disconnect between my brain and my hands, and somehow my hands decided I was taking ibuprofen, not a sleeping pill, and the next thing I knew I’d popped two sleeping pills into my mouth.
Fortunately, just as I was raising the glass of water to my lips to wash the pills down, I registered that something didn’t feel right in my mouth – my ibuprofen tablets are, well, hard, dry tablets, whereas my sleeping pills are actually small “gel” things. That’s when I realized I’d nearly swallowed a double-dose of sedatives. P’tui! I spit one out and swallowed the correct dose.
I had a mishap not long ago. I was taking a cholesterol medication tablet and it went down my trachea instead of down my esophagus. After about ten minutes of hacking, I fortunately managed to cough it up. Most of it. I was still coughing up small bits of it a half hour later, but fortunately I didn’t get any into my lungs.
OTC sleeping pills are actually antihistamines. The worse that can happen to you by taking 2 is they would keep you awake. If they are 25 mg diphenhydramine they are about 1/2 the adult dose for an allergic reaction. If they are 50 mg, the common reascion is jitteriness.
For most people, the effect is more placebo than anything else.
Ah, good to know. That might explain why I’ve always been able to more or less “dismiss” the effects of a sleeping pill when, after taking one, I realize I need to stay awake to get something done (no driving, though!)
The pills I’m using right now are 50mg diphenhydramine (Safeway store-brand knockoffs of the NyQuil gel sleeping pills). I’ve also used the Costco Kirkland pills, which have a different active ingredient that I can’t remember right now.
I’d actually gotten into the habit of using the liquid NyQuil cold medicine as a sleep aid because it worked so much faster than little dry sleeping pills like Unisom. Vick’s must have noticed people were doing this, because I recently noticed they were making a liquid sleep-aid (maybe they’ve been doing that for a long time, but I only discovered it recently) and corresponding gel pills.
I’ve never seen those in 50mg doses, normally they come in 25mg and tell you to take 2. It’s typically 25mg for allergies, 50mg for sleeping.
I’ve taken 75 or even 100mg on days I KNOW I’m not going to be able to fall asleep on my own (for example, if I’ve taken Vicodin for some reason, that stuff keeps me pretty wired). As others said, you weren’t going to OD, assuming no other issues to worry about.
Also, a lot of people will take 2 Tylenol PM, because they can’t sleep AND take 2 dyphenhydramine based sleeping pills or benadryls not knowing that Tylenol PM is the same thing. They survive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told people that if you’re not in pain, just take two Benadryls, might as well just take the sleeping part of the Tylenol PM without taking the Tylenol. It’s probably cheaper too.
I had an interesting close call about 2 weeks ago I almost started a thread about. My wife made me star gooseberry tea for a headache; a little later I took an isordil sublingual; later still I stood up. … Whoooo! Low blood pressure(??) I thought I was a goner. I lay down, wife asked if I wanted more star gooseberry tea which I hadn’t connected to the sensation. I said “Yes … wait, I’ll drink some water first.”
While drinking the water I recalled that the symptoms were similar to (but worse than) the time I had isordil a few days after a small dose of sildenafil. Using Google, I found some ambiguous comments about remedies in the same Phyllanthus genus as star gooseberry being dangerous for heart patients. (I thought about starting an IMHO thread: “I’ve learned something about Phyllanthus – is it well known?”)
Had I gone ahead and drunk some more star gooseberry tea, it might have been MUCH worse than a double dose of sedative.