About 20 years ago: Used metoprolol (forgot the dose) to control blood pressure. No problems for about 6 months. Then, I began to feel shaky and jittery. This started mild and got progressively worse. I didn’t associate it with the metoprolol because I had already used it about 6 months with no bad effects.
I also began to have some cognitive problems. One evening, driving home after dark, I parked in an unlighted spot outside the post office, and discovered that in the dark, I couldn’t remember how to open the car door from the inside! More particularly, the door had one of those recessed handles on the inside, and I couldn’t remember where it was. I felt all around the door and couldn’t find it.
I was both alarmed and fascinated. I knew exactly how to open the door another way (roll down the window, reach out, and open it from the outside), but I refused to do that for a while. I took it as a challenge to figure out how to open that door! I realized that this was a “mechanical memory” failure (whatever may be the proper term for that). I wondered if my “left brain” would know how to open the right-side door even if my “right brain” couldn’t remember how to open the left-side door – so I reached across the seat with my right hand and tried that. Fail.
I don’t remember if I ever thought to turn on the inside light, or if I did but refused to try it. Eventually, I gave up and reached out the window. Next day, I called the doctor.
When I went to the doctor, I had to park about a block away. Walking to the office, I felt so weak and wobbly that I felt like I was going to literally collapse in a heap on the sidewalk at any moment. I didn’t, but I told the doctor that.
He took me off the metoprolol (cold-turkey, IIRC) and told me that it could take a week or two for it to get all out of my system. Be that as it may, I felt 50% better in 24 hours and 90% better in another 24 hours.
I had been having sporadic symptomatic palpitations (like, several times a day) for years which I never mentioned to a doctor. A few years after the above events, I began having them frequently – like every 30 seconds, for about six weeks. Saw cardiologist; wore monitor all day for a week; got diagnosed as Premature Atrial Contractions (PAC); cardiologist put me on atenolol.
On the fourth day of atenolol, in a staff meeting at work, I suddenly felt faint. I went back to my office and lay down on the floor and fainted. I’m not aware of ever having fainted before that (and only once since). I have no idea really if the atenolol did that, but I suspected (and still suspect) that it did. I quit using the atenolol. The PAC’s subsided anyway, although I still have them sporadically. Various doctors have told me that they’re nothing to worry about as long as they are infrequent. Now I have a note in my medical record to not use any beta blockers.
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