When meds make you lose your mind

To everyone who's ever felt out of it or stupid while taking a brain-altering drug: this short but poignant New York Times article by Judith Warner is wonderful! I responded to the article with this long letter (which initially started as a short comment). Links throughout lead you to relevant blog entries.

Dear Judith,

I confided in a friend a few weeks back about how stupid and out of it I felt while on my preventive drug (Zonegran) for around 1.5 years. He forwarded me this article this morning--I'm so glad it was published in such a large forum!

I joked a lot about the potential side effects ("difficulty word-finding," "cognitive impairment") when I first started popping Zonegran, but I never thought I'd actually be one of the patients affected. My cognitive impairment didn't kick in until a few months into drug treatment--and the patient leaflet said that all the cognitive side effects are usually here and gone after the first six weeks of treatment. I decided I was just getting stupid. For the first time, I wasn't in school or doing academic reading. I couldn't work a 9-5 job because of my migraine attacks. Maybe I just lost my brain.

Madge (commenter above), it seems you're admonishing Judith for not having said something sooner to her doctor or pharmacist. It seems to me that Judith took action pretty quickly. As for me, I was embarrassed about the side effects and not even sure if they were side effects from Zonegran--maybe they were just side effects of life, the new and not-so-improved Janet. I'd always prided myself on my writing and thinking ability and suddenly that was disappearing. This phenomenon is so strange, so unfamiliar, and so hard to pinpoint that it's not easy to see that it's connected to a drug you started months ago. I didn't say anything to my doctor or pharmacist about it until months later.

Someone named "cla" commented before me about how busy doctors are today, how perhaps we patients should adjust our expectations instead of expecting doctors to be at our beck and call (I'm paraphrasing here--hope I've not taken any liberties, cla). This is b.s.! I KNOW that doctors are overwhelmed with insurance claims, paperwork, bureaucracy, and five visits a day from drug company peddlers who overwhelm them with ads and sample medications. I think that cognitive side effects should be treated as seriously as physical side effects, that doctors should be honest and up front with patients. Migraine disease is so much more than a series of episodes (which may or may not involve a headache)--it's a disorder that affects your ability to function, your ability to have a so-called "normal" life, your ability to enjoy what you have without being worried about the next attack. If doctors are focused entirely on how the body is affected (if they're focused on that at all and not distracted by their bureaucratic duties) and not focused on how the patient and her life are altered due to the disease (or drugs given to treat the disease), those doctors need some lessons in patient-doctor communication. They need to learn more about migraine's ins and outs and realize that, just because the clinical trials didn't reveal a prevalence of a certain side effect, LOTS of people are losing their minds, their selves, while on certain prescription meds.

After over a year and a half on Zonegran, I finally weaned myself off (with doctor's straightforward assistance and little care as to why). I still don't feel as smart as I used to. I still have trouble finding the words that used to come so easily to me--but I have to have the faith that this will come back to me. That I've taken brain-altering drugs and it might just take awhile for the firing synapses to resume their old speed.

In closing, thanks for this article. Thank you so much.

tired of being tired

I'm so tired all the time. I've a sneaking suspicion this has to do with the weather, as pollen has permeated every breath I take for a couple of months now. When I'm not in the Georgia air, I am traveling--and traveling makes me tired, too.

When I first started taking Petadolex and rid myself of Zonegran, I was happily shocked at the energy boost I felt. "Wow," thought I, "turns out it's not normal to want to take a nap ALL THE TIME." I wanted to do things; I cleaned the house without complaint while blasting music or This American Life (my life's blood).

But recently I've become tired again. In the last week, I've attempted to go to bed at the same time each night and rise at the same time each morning. Maybe I'm getting too much sleep at once? (In a week I've not yet avoided my obnoxious pattern of waking up in the 3-5 AM range--grr.) I get up and at 'em and have even been getting exercise recently. Seems like the new me would be ready and rarin' to go.

But no. I just want to close my eyes. Is it working on the computer? Maybe, but not being on the computer doesn't guarantee wakefulness. Instead of my long walks resulting in an energy boost, I want to curl my sweaty self up on the couch and doze off for awhile. Driving makes me tired. Reading makes me tired. Walking makes me tired. Immobility makes me tired.

What to do?

Oh! One more thing. Maybe this nugget is my savior, the piece of the puzzle that will soon right itself and make it so I can live energetically again. I cut out caffeine completely about two weeks ago. I had cut down a lot and was only having caffeinated coffee when headachey or (in one case) slightly hungover. But after one cup I'd switch to decaf (a la my parents).

Now I'm clean, kids. I'M CLEAN! But I'm tired. The boost that caffeine provides is brief, I know, so having a cup of joe is not the solution.

I ingest six BILLION* pills of riboflavin (B2) each day and take my multivitamin in the morning. I have been eating breakfast, including delicious fruit smoothies and chock-full-o-goodness juices and snacks.

What gives? Does anyone see something obvious happening that would explain my sleepiness, my laziness? Am I missing the obvious or am I doomed to a sleepy existence forever!?

* or so it seems

a note to those who are considering Zonegran

I was just on MyMigraineConnection.com, perusing articles and looking up information on Zonegran withdrawal symptoms. To my chagrin, there's a general lack of specificity when it comes to lists of withdrawal symptoms. As the drug is prescribed off-label for Migraines (it's an epilepsy treatment), the medical websites all tend to point out that one should exercise caution while weaning off Zonegran due to increased risk of seizure and "other side effects--talk to your doctor."

So far my withdrawal process has been a lot easier than I'd expected. I'm halfway through and am sure my happiness with daily life has a great deal to do with my increased energy (a combination of getting off the energy-zapping Zonegran and getting all that B2 in my vitamins and my Petadolex, as I have mentioned before). Today I really took a turn for the worse, however, and hope hope hope it was just for one day.

Last night I went downtown with friends for a low-key night of chatting and carousing. Around 9:30 I decided to walk home, feeling a headache coming on. It was such a low-grade pain that I figured getting into bed early with a book and some chamomile tea would heal me right up. Boy, was I wrong. A raging Migraine headache took over within an hour of my arrival home. My stomach felt swirly but I was too nauseated to fetch a wastebasket to use as my emergency receptacle should I become sick to my stomach. (Luckily I didn't end up needing this option in the first place.)

This morning I woke up in a foul mood. A gray mood. A gray mood with fiery, jagged edges that caused me to lash out at everything from my boyfriend (who was suffering from a Migraine himself) to the dishes in the sink to the broom to my neglected plants. I. WAS. EXTRAORDINARILY. ANGRY. AND. BITTER. For no known reason. The closest I've come to such unreasonable anger would be in times of PMS, but I just finished my period, and this mood was far more sour and impossible to climb out of than any routine PMS funk.

What was I going through today? I see that agitation and irritability are side effects of Zonegran withdrawal; they can also accompany some people's postdrome stage, though feeling anger at this stage is infrequent for me.

In my rather fruitless search for Zonegran withdrawal symptoms, I did find a few pages on MyMigraineConnection.com on which people solicited the advice of others who may've tried Zonegran--what's our opinion of the drug as a Migraine treatment?

Here's my response. For those of you who read my blog frequently, you'll see nothing new. But it felt good to put it on paper--er, screen.

I have been on Zonegran for 22 months. The frequency, severity, and duration of my Migraine attacks decreased overall, but I still had super-duper Migraine months (especially during hot Augusts or stressful holiday times, for example) and was relying on my acute medication, Relpax, just as much as ever.

For me, the side effects of Zonegran far outweighed the positive. My doctor mentioned the possibility of some side effects, but both he and the drug literature mentioned that the effects would probably go away within 4-6 weeks. This was not the case for me. I lost a LOT of weight and the more bothersome side effects--memory loss, difficulty word-finding, near-constant fatigue, and simply a general feeling of dumbness!--were harder to pin down and took longer to emerge. I thought I was going nuts until I found a whole community of people out there who'd had the same things going on in their brains.

I'm now going through the withdrawal process and will be off Zonegran in three weeks. Petadolex is my new herbal drug of choice, and thus far it's working well!

happy days are here again

I don't know to what I owe this good fortune, but I have been feeling really well. Even when I have had a Migraine attack in the past month or so, its effects haven't lingered for days as they usually do. It's a strange and unfamiliar feeling, this sense of health and well being even one day after an attack. Usually I feel groggy and lethargic.

Is it the fact that I'm going off the Zonegran, a happy change I've documented numerous times on this blog? Is it that I'm anticipating a career change (though one marked with lots of stress that's far in the distance anyway)? Is it that I have Petadolex running through my system at all times, the butterbur and the extra B2 doing their work to make me feel well and energetic? As it is, I already take 400mg of B2 a day (that's over 23,000 times the RDA). There are 200mg in each Petadolex pill, so at 3 Petadolex capsules a day that means I'm having 1000mg of B2 each day! That probably has a lot to do with it, eh?

The great thing about Petadolex is that even if it's working due to a placebo effect, it's still making me feel good. And you don't need a prescription to get it, either, which makes me feel more powerful somehow. (No driving three miles late at night to dish out hundreds of bucks for a drug that pharmaceutical companies could make much less expensive if they only chose to.)

This entry is self-serving and rather pointless in most ways, but I would like to preserve it just to have a little snapshot of how great I feel. I wish the same for you.

In other news, this month's headache blog carnival posts in a few hours' time! I'll put a link to it here. (My entry was written last week, but there'll be MANY other people's I'm interested in reading.)

nine day streak!

I went nine days with no serious (i.e., meriting a Relpax) Migraine headache! I had a day last week when I felt a little achey and so drank lots of water and went to bed earlier than usual; I awoke feeling great.

My Migraine that interrupted the streak was a predictable one, the one that almost always accompanies my period. As I mentioned many a post ago, my week-long Migraine attack that used to come along with every single period got nipped in the bud, probably because of a Frova + Naproxen preventive plan I went on for a few months. (It got too expensive to do each month, but my doctor's guess was right: I, like many other women, had the happy circumstance of the drug regimen stopping a many-year-long problem, transforming a 7- or 8-day Migraine into a one - or two-day one.) Anywho. This month's amazing streak was only interrupted by a menstrual Migraine Friday night, and it wasn't a bad one; it took double the Relpax to get rid of it, but the pain was far from unbearable.

Overall, I'm thrilled with the idea of my body soon being free of Zonegran. I was giddy with excitement when picking up my last pills at the pharmacy last week--surely I struck the pharmacists as slightly crazed and goofy. Who cares? I'm going off a mind-altering chemical I've been ingesting for 22 months. Yeehaw!

goodbye Zonegran, hello Petadolex: part 2

Tonight marks the night I'll go down to one 100mg pill of Zonegran a night. Two weeks from now, I'll have a two-week period of having one every other day.

Since early last week or so, I've been taking Petadolex three times a day. The box says it's been used in Europe for over 30 years. Hmmm...

I've not had a Migraine episode in eight days!!! What a glorious streak. Last week I did have two back to back with no obvious triggers--I'm not sure if that was related to my withdrawal or not.

So far the withdrawal process hasn't been too rough. I was thinking I would have some rough side effects. Granted, I have four plus weeks until my body gets used to not having Zonegran screwing with my brain chemistry, so who knows what'll happen next.

Fingers crossed!

facebook group!

Hi guys,

For those of you out there who don't go looking at all the comments on this here blog, you may not know that there's a facebook group page for the Migraine Research Foundation. Heck, you may not know that the Migraine Research Foundation exists in the first place!

The people in the group have been reading my blog. Maybe I should:

1. Write more, and
2. Go ahead and out myself.

But first I have to call my neurologist. He was supposed to call in a prescription refill for Zonegran yesterday and didn't, so I ended up with some loaner pills from the pharmacist. How kind.

Why am I asking for more Zonegran after all these months of saying I'm going off of it? Well, I have to keep taking it and then slowly wean myself off. As soon as I hit the "publish post" button, I'm calling my neurologist and leaving a message describing why I want to stop the drug, how long I've been on it (though you'd think they could look at the chart and see...?), and how much. That way they can help advise me as to the best way to slowly stop taking it. Yippee!

prescription drug prices are out of CONTROL

Let's just talk about how zonisamide, the generic form of Zonegran, costs me $25.00 for a month's supply at my local Kroger pharmacy. I think the regular price is $35.00 but they gave me a lower price to keep me from leaving. That's 90 pills for $25. Pretty nice, eh? (The brand-name drug is way more, as I'm sure you could guess.)

As I've mentioned before, I have no insurance, so all prices mentioned here are what one must pay if she has no health plan and no prescription coverage.

I was out of town for Thanksgiving and didn't have enough medication to last me the whole time. I figured I'd have my neurologist call my prescription into a Florida pharmacy near my parents' house for the sake of convenience. Walgreens was the closest place--heck, there are about 83 within five square miles of their subdivision. Ridiculous. The same exact number of the same pills (same generic drug manufacturer, mind you) had an unbelievable price tag: approximately $130 (give or take a few bucks) for 90 days. No, they don't match prices. (Kroger and other leading and not-so-leading drugstores do.)

IT IS SCANDALOUS. Truly. They do this just for profit, just because they can. If you know of some other reason, then let me know. I doubt that Kroger gets the drugs for a lot cheaper than Walgreens does. I bought a few days' worth instead. I spent $21 and change on enough pills for vacation--that's almost as much as I spend on an entire MONTH when I'm at my home sweet home.

I'm so angry.
Justifiably so, I think.

Figured I'd share my righteous indignation with you all on this fine, overcast Sunday afternoon.

okay, so I'm a wimp

I shouldn't have claimed I was going to stop taking Zonegran. I was going to, I was! But I've wimped out, at least for now. There's the matter of money--I have no insurance and can't afford the $135 it costs to have an appointment with my neurologist, plus the tank of gas it takes to get to and from his office. More significantly, there's the matter of my nervousness, my anxiety. What if my Migraine frequency is on the rise once I go off my daily meds? What if the negative aspects I have interpreted as side effects from the medication are actually just newly acquired sides of my personality? Oh, god!

As you can see, I'm fearful. Nervous. Anxious. And not sure I can live up to the risk of going off my preventive medication even though I've long since decided the negative side effects outweigh the benefits.

Has anyone out there dealt with an issue such as this? Words of wisdom?

my spelling has gone to the dogs

I pride myself on my keen eye for language, my editor's knack for spotting grammatical and punctuation errors in the blink of an eye. Terrible spelling quite literally makes my stomach turn at times, and when people don't know how to make things plural or possessive (or, god forbid, plural-possessive!), I am simply beside myself.

Something else I have always been known for? My memory. It is definitely one of my strengths. I can remember words, faces, places, times, and events quite well.

But all this changed without my quite realizing it. All this changed in the last year or so, the year during which I took Zonegran. I'm still taking it but am finally to the point where I've decided to go off (with my doctor's help, of course, as weaning oneself off any drug like that is not a task to undertake alone!).

"Difficulty word-finding, problems with short-term memory," and "weight loss" were listed as side effects of Zonegran that might effect some but would go away within the first 6 weeks or so. For me, I wasn't terribly effected in the first several weeks. I joked about it at first and wasn't sure if the verbal stumbling I experienced now and again had been worsened by the drug. Not even in the first couple of months did I notice much. Who knows? Maybe there wasn't much to notice at first. For a side effect as elusive as "difficulty word-finding," it's not easy to pinpoint where the problem begins and ends. All I can tell you is that several months ago (which was several months after being on Zonegran), I was talking with my boyfriend and found myself increasingly frustrated with my inability to come up with the simple word I was looking for. That frustration led me to think back to other moments in my recent past when I'd not been able to come up with the words I'd been looking for, when I'd not been as clear in my writing or speech as the Old Me.

When I type, letters come together on the screen to form words I've known how to spell for decades. But suddenly I don't know how to spell things I mastered in third grade. "Is it 'i before e except after c'? Okay, yeah. That looks right." I write letters and find myself scratching out words time and time again, having to rewrite them until I get the spelling right. This is not like Regular Me, Old Me. (The end of that sentence back there? I wrote "write" at first instead of "right." For a perfectionist like me, that's not a mistake I'd make frequently, yet these days I do it daily.)

I could go on and on. I can't vividly recall conversations I've had as I used to, I can't remember how I know someone whose face is ever-so-familiar. A couple months ago, I spent lots of time with one of my best friends who lives in Europe. I expressed my reservations about my brain, about how dumb I've been feeling lately, about how I hoped it was the drug I was on and not me that was screwing with my thoughts and spelling and writing and speech. She revealed to me that she'd noticed a marked change over the course of the last several months. (She saw me when I first got on Zonegran a year prior to this conversation, then again once every few months.) She said if she'd never met me before I'd still come across as smart, but that having known me before and now, I certainly don't come across as intelligent-sounding in my writing and speech.

That really hit home.

I know there are other factors that could be (and probably are) influencing my brain right now. I'm not taking any classes, but that doesn't explain this. I did a more extensive search online for Zonegran and more of its *real* side effects (i.e., what patients say and not necessarily what comes across in clinical trials) and found MANY people who had to quit taking it due to memory loss, inability to spell and write, etc.

I won't even get into the weight it's caused me to lose.

So now I shall deal with having to go off of the meds. I don't know where I'll go from here. I don't want to go on more preventive daily medication, but the frequency of my Migraine headaches may call for it. I'm so tired of looking for The Answer. An Answer. I wish it would just go away.

Headache #5 of the month rollin' on in,
The Migraine Girl

have meds, can travel

I'm about to embark on a relatively lengthy trip. It's certainly going to be a taxing one, but one full of fun and surprises and friends and tourism, tourism, tourism. Can't escape that when one goes to Europe.

But I'm nervous. I'm nervous about getting a Migraine when I'm traveling. In the past, my pattern has been that I get a Migraine the day of travel, especially during long car trips or plane rides. This pattern's been broken up a bit in recent years, perhaps because of Zonegran--perhaps not. I can't be sure. Once I'm in a new country, however, I tend to do pretty well for awhile. A few years ago, I lived in Costa Rica for 6 weeks and had one significant Migraine the entire time I was there. The lifestyle, the lack of "regular life" stress, the diet, the routine--all of these things probably contributed to my overall well-being.

I'm hoping this good fortune comes back for the next three weeks of my life as I venture to some European countries. I'll be armed with Relpax and Naproxen, of course, but we know I can't take those more than a couple days in a row due to the ever-looming MOH (medication overuse headache).

Fingers crossed.

Bon voyage (to me!)

wary of taking the meds

Days like today I'm not sure what to do. My Zonegran seems to have worked in many ways, one of which is this: it slows the overall Migraine attack process, often stopping it in its tracks and making one stage of the headache linger for hours until the slight pain goes away, when formerly that stage may've escalated quickly and turned into a really painful headache.

This is problematic in that sometimes, perhaps 20% of the time, the headache does rear its ugly head in the most painful of ways, and it makes up for lost time. All the moments the really severe pain delayed in setting in...

(NOTE FROM OCT. 2007--I STOPPED WRITING THIS 6 MONTHS AGO. NOT SURE WHY NOW. THOUGHT I WOULD HIT "PUBLISH POST" ANYHOW!)

Is it working?

When my loving, good-natured friends and family ask me about my healthcare regimen, I try to remain energetic as I list the things I ingest each day, the activities I try to do to keep the Migraine attacks at bay.

I take 400 mg of Vitamin B2 each day--that's about 23,000 times the recommended daily allowance. Ha! I read a study online linking that daily intake over a long period of time to an overall decrease in Migraine frequency. I started taking the vitamins each day not because of this googled study but because of my neurologist's very strong suggestion--the search is what came after his suggestion.

Along with the B2 is a capsule of Magnesium. 500mg of it, to be exact.

Added to that daily list of fun things to swallow?

• 300 mg of Zonegran/Zonisamide (which is now finally generic, I suppose, for the price went down from $100 for a month's supply to about $40 at my local grocery store pharmacy)
• Omega-3 (fish oil)
• 20 mg Amitriptyline (Elavil), which I was on long ago, got off, and just recently re-started

I go to my massage therapist/cranial sacral therapist whenever I can afford it. Unfortunately, this hasn't been too frequent of late. For my last few appointments, she hasn't done much cranial sacral therapy because my visits have been right after a Migraine headache and she is unwilling to manipulate my cranium at all and possibly trigger another attack. (Thank you, wonderful woman.)

Of course exercise is always recommended, as long as I don't overexert or overheat myself and get a Migraine that way. I definitely don't get as much exercise as I should; this I know.

Minimizing exposure to triggers is something I've gotten quite deft at; managing stress is another lifelong issue I'll never master, but I am coping pretty well (for me).

So back to the subject of this entry. Back to the question that I am always faced with as soon as I tell my friends and family about my lifestyle changes, my new (or old) medications, that new trick I read about in a medical journal:

"So, is it working?"

I feel like I don't know what it is that's doing the trick--or not doing the trick--anymore. I have a so many elements in my life, so many chemicals running through my system. How am I to tell which one is the one that's working? Is it their complicated, complex relationship with one another that does the trick, at least most of the time? If I removed just one of the pills each day, would the whole system come grinding to a halt and leave me in pain, or would I feel even better than I do now?

I am not in a well-controlled scientific study. I cannot aptly determine which medication is the one that's working best for me. Part of me thinks that my body has gotten a bit better on its own over the years and that I could cut out all this expensive treatment and get just as many awful Migraines as I do now--and have just as many gloriously pain-free days as I do now.

But most of me is pretty sure the medication's helping. That I need the neurologist's words, reassurance, and comfort. That this disease is certainly way bigger than I and that I may never know what it is, exactly that's working--or how well it's working at all.

So my answer to family and friends remains the same. I don't know. I just don't know.
Were this a personal essay, one with sparks of humor and hints of charming self-deprecation, my answer would provide you with an amazing conclusion that would make sense of it all.

But it's just not the case here. I just don't know what's helping, and I'm too scared to take something away to find out if it hurts.

it's been a long time...

I suppose I should address this blog to myself and not to my nonexistent readers. I started it as a tool to help myself and instead of sticking with it, I sort of let it fall by the wayside. No, I definitely let it fall by the wayside. I could chalk it up to the Great Computer Crash of 2006 (read: spilled a whole glass of water on my old laptop) or to lots of travel from May - July that interrupted my writing patterns, but I won't. I had plenty of time to write and didn't use it. I should have made it more of a daily thing and I didn't. And that's that.

From early June until mid-July, I had an amazingly wonderful time in my little old head. (Or, as the case may be, my oddly large head--though I am a thin young lady, I usually have to wear hats in size XL...hmm.) I could count on one hand the number of times I had to take a Relpax pill to take care of a Migraine attack, and my daily headache pain was at a nearly undetectable level. I tried to avoid a feeling of invincibility, but it sure was difficult: I felt GREAT!

Some of this had to do with the stress of school being over and done with. I finished all my course work and comprehensive exams for my Master's degree in early May. Maybe a couple weeks after that my body got used to the new feeling of not having school-related stress. I let go of some dating situations that were causing me grief, and maybe that contributed to my overall feelings of health. I also had had time to get used to the Zonegran, so maybe I was experiencing that wonderful period where my brain was working well with the new medication and getting along quite well with it. There often comes a time when new medicine kicks in, so to speak, and works really well. (Unfortunately, this miraculous period usually has an end.) A few weeks into feeling pretty good, I had the pleasure of beginning a new romantic relationship, one with a great deal more potential than any others I had had in the past several years. The accompanying feelings of euphoria (and the upped levels of serotonin that went along with that giddy beginning) probably helped, as well.

But in late July the pain returned a little bit, here and there. And in August it really made itself known. By late August and early September, I was having a really rough time of it yet again. I've been trying pretty hard not to take Relpax too often (see older entry regarding rebound headaches; also think of how expensive it is to purchase said medicine when your insurance doesn't cover prescription drug costs), and I've been aiming to break the drug cycle in general. This doesn't help the immediate pain, but I think it might help in the long run. (Of course when I feel the pain pass a certain threshold I most certainly do take a Relpax--I'm not going to torture myself when I know there's a way for me to feel better. I'm talking about the moderate levels of Migraine pain, not the severe ones.)

Point is: the pain levels have been fluctuating over the past months. I partly gave up on writing this blog for awhile because I got a bit cocky and figured that perhaps I was getting better at last. I need to realize deep down that CHRONIC PAIN IS A WAY OF LIFE for me. Some days I'll be able to control it better than others.

That's all for now.

"unusual thoughts" a side effect? then what will happen to someone like me who's never had a usual thought?

...especially when you get several of them within a few days of beginning the medicine!!!

Below I've copied a list of side effects for my newest drug, Zonegran. It's an anticonvulsant created to treat epileptic seizures, but it's also used for Migraine patients. Keep your fingers crossed. I, meanwhile, will be suffering from nausea. Ick.
(I've put in bold the side effects I'm feeling, having completed week 1 of treatment.)
"The most common side effects of Zonegran are drowsiness, loss of appetite, dizziness, headache, nausea, and agitation/irritability. These side effects usually occur within the first 4 weeks of therapy."

Luckily, I've not had any of the severe side effects listed below, but the ones in bold crack me up (and frighten me at the same time, of course).

Special Warning(s) with Zonegran:

Some people taking ZONEGRAN can get serious reactions including:

• Skin rash (may be a sign of a dangerous condition)
• Fever, sore throat, sores in your mouth, or bruising easily (may be signs of a blood problem)
• Sudden back pain, abdominal (stomach area) pain, pain when urinating, bloody or dark urine (may be signs of a kidney stone)
• Decreased sweating or a rise in body temperature (especially in patients under 17 years old)
• Depression
• Unusual thoughts
• Speech or language problems
• Drowsiness
• Difficulty concentrating
• Coordination problems