PART
XII:
CAN
THIS REALLY BE HAPPENING TO ME?
91.THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT IN SEVERE REACTIONS
You were a young active person,
lead a healthy life, and ate healthy. You had a good job and were a brilliant
professional. Your family is lovely. You merely had a minor health problem like
a sinus infection, a sore throat, a urinary tract infection or a suspected or
actual prostatitis. You trusted your medical system and you were prescribed a
quinolone antibiotic. Finally, you have had a severe reaction.
Now you cannot play any sport,
not even playful wrestling with your children. You have cognition problems that
disrupt or stress your career. You can hardly sleep. Your vision is constantly
bothering you, reminding you all day long that you are ill. You feel constant,
intense and strange pains, you cannot sit in any comfortable position, you have
problems getting in and out of the car, and you resemble an 80- year old man.
You have to watch what you eat carefully, so you are barely able to attend
social events anymore. For months on end your symptoms get worse by the day.
Some nights you cry in solitude.
You have little understanding and/or compassion from your loved ones because
you still look normal on the outside. It is 3 years since you got hit and your
youngest child does not know what you were like before the floxing because he
was too young; he only knows you as a permanently ill father that cannot even
eat normally. Perhaps your co-workers think that you are exaggerating or
pretending that you are ill. Your doctors are not willing to listen to you
correlating your problems and symptoms to a fluoroquinolone antibiotic. After a
year or so, your symptoms have gotten worse, but surprisingly all of your
acquaintances, friends and relatives give up sympathizing with your situation
because it is lasting so long, so you start to feel more alone. Many suggest,
or tell you boldly, that your problems are all in your mind.
Most tests are negative so you
remain undiagnosed. All severe cases reveal abnormalities in neurological
studies but they are attributed to physical compressions for instance and they
offer you a surgical release that you know won’t fix anything. Nothing seems to
help with your recovery. Nobody seems to have any knowledge about your
disorders. You spend enormous sums of money and time on doctors and palliative
therapies. Your daily life is a constant struggle against your illness, and you
cannot release yourself from your daily obligations because nobody acknowledges
your chemically altered state, and so you become stretched to the limit.
After the first stage, in which
you just fight for mere physiological and psychological survival, one day you
find yourself staring at people just getting out of the car, sitting in awkward
positions, walking up stairs, walking normally, eating normal food in a good
restaurant, planning to trek, bike, travel or play, and dream of a day in which
you will also do it as effortless and so unaware of doing so as you did before
the floxing.
|
Note: Try to seek help from loved ones and caring doctors.
You will need it. |
You are going to need some help,
either from a professional, your family, from friends or from support groups.
But it is very difficult for a non-floxed person, even a loving and caring one,
to truly grasp the magnitude of your chronic suffering from a quinolone
antibiotic. This is not a matter of weeks or months, but of many years. After 2 or 3 years you cannot remember any
longer how it was like to feel physically normal. You become increasingly weary
and long for a normal life. You are scared about the permanent injuries you
seem to be facing, and above all you do not know what lies ahead in terms of
limitations and deterioration. Your mental drive sometimes falters and you are
overwhelmed by the floxing in every way. Depression will linger. Suicidal
thoughts are not uncommon, but in most cases, they are short lived or
insufficiently based, although repetitive. Some floxed persons have taken their
lives.
Be prepared for very distressing
and disheartening states of mind and body and be determined to keep moving
forward. Stay positive as much as possible. Time is your only real friend in
this unequal and unfair fight. Mild and intermediate floxings usually have a
happy end. After a severe floxing it is
unlikely that you will recover your former self entirely. And after realizing
it you will have to admit it and then restructure your life because of it.
92.IT IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD
As a result of the intoxication,
you may have actually suffered mental damage. These cases are not treated in
this paper. We are assuming that you have been lucky enough that your brain has
withstood the treatment with the quinolones, so most likely, your mental status
will have suffered but your mental integrity will be untouched except for those
initial alterations very common in the acute phase: depersonalization, crying
episodes, brain fog, memory loss, confused thinking, inability to focus and
concentrate and having cluttered, racing or abstract thoughts, panic attacks and
the like.
On the other hand, if you have
suffered a strong reaction and if you were healthy before, you know perfectly
well what are your symptoms and you do not need help to identify them or to
asses the limitations that they impose on your life. You might also be
frightened by the unknown evolution of your injuries, and be a little depressed
by your overall current situation.
Many people that surround you
will perceive this sadness, that is humanly natural, and perhaps one of your
doctors suggest that you should pay a visit to a psychiatrist. In principle, a
good psychiatrist can be very helpful. But an arrogant and ignorant
psychiatrist can cause you a lot of harm.
From a floxing point of view,
many psychiatrists are incompetent: because they do not have any notion or
knowledge about toxicity of quinolones and are not inclined to study these new
situations posed by patients. It is totally unacceptable that psychiatrists are
uneducated in regards to and know virtually nothing about the high potential of
brain damage that all quinolones can cause. With extreme frequency, the
fluoroquinolones cause mental alterations that can last from a few weeks up to
permanent damage.
Anyhow, regardless of the
ignorance of your physician, you have to be honest with your psychiatrist. So,
while answering his questions, you will probably at some point tell him that:
You are having a reaction to an antibiotic and
you are ill since long ago, that symptoms do not seem to abate but sometimes
they even increase; that you have cycling of symptoms. [INCOMPETENT
INTERPRETATION: long illness, strange illness, weird theory about antibiotics,
worsening after stopping the treatment while everybody knows that all reactions
start to clear after the drug is discontinued, cycling linked to mood changes].
Some or all of the tests they have done on you
are clean: your blood tests, the MRIs, and so on. [INCOMPETENT INTERPRETATION:
this patient has clearly invented and is imagining his ailments; had he any
real problem, it would clearly show up on his tests].
Some people around you no longer sympathize with
your situation because you look fine on the outside, so you do not talk much
about it any longer. [INCOMPETENT INTERPRETATION: normal persons that live with
him have got fed up of his rarities]
Some other doctors think you have fibromyalgia
or nothing at all. [INCOMPETENT INTERPRETATION: I am right and this patient has
become obsessive about an imaginary severe illness].
You follow a carefully selected diet, avoiding
aggravating foods and foods that may contain quinolones [INCOMPETENT
INTERPRETATION: clearly you see quinolones in every corner that are lying in
wait for you]
So, your psychiatrist may
conclude that you:
Are suffering a paranoid delusion of the somatic
type, that is to say, that you harbor false beliefs about your body - for
example that a physical illness exists (your intoxication) when it does not-.
That your delusion lasts for more than one month
(you have been believing for months or years, in fact since you discovered it, that
cipro or levaquin is the cause and the sole cause of your miseries).
You exhibit negative symptoms, for instance:
o
the inability to enjoy activities as much as
before
o
low energy -lack of drive-
o
lack of interest in life, low motivation
o
lack of interest to socialize with other
(healthy) people as before
o
social isolation- spend most of the day only
with close co-workers or family
Does it all sound familiar to
you? Do those symptoms fit with your situation? Well, bad luck, the above
symptoms are the literal transcription of the full
Some floxed persons have
patiently and humbly confronted the first diagnosis of paranoid delusion handed
to them by their psychiatrists. They argued that if they are cured, all would
be forgotten, and their doctors responded almost invariably that in that case,
they (the patients) would inadvertently look for another obsessive delusion
because it is all in their heads.
If you insist over the issue,
stressing that you believe that you are suffering the bad effects of a
fluoroquinolone antibiotic, it is possible that you give the position to your
psychiatrist to ratify his initial diagnosis. Some of the things that you can,
and must say freely if you believe are that way, but that might reinforce his
conviction that you are suffering a delusion state (paranoid) are:
Certainty (you hold your position with
determination)
Incorrigibility because you do not change your
idea when confronted with proof to the contrary (his educated knowledge about
medicines that he is supposed to have)
You maintain an impossibility (it is patently
untrue that quinolones are benign antibiotics)
Your speech abilities are now impaired, you
forget things or words, and sometimes you are mentally low.
Your wife is a little weary with your situation
because it affects your daily habits and diet
You do not sleep as well as before
In summary, not few floxed persons
have ended up with a diagnosis of paranoid delirium (a sort of schizophrenia)
of the somatic type (the one related to exaggerated thoughts of an illness) and
their doctors have prescribed them some anti-schizophrenic drugs like aripiprazole
(Abilify), clozapine
(Clozaril), ziprasidone
(Geodon), resperidone (Risperdal),
quetiapine (Seroquel),
olanzapine
(Zyprexa).
Your psychiatrist may explain you
that there are several types of brain receptors like noradrenaline, GABA,
dopamine, glutamate, acetylcholine or serotonin, whose alterations can cause
severe psychotic behavior. Your problems were latent ("dormant") up
to now, but now your dopamine receptors have degenerated because you were born
prone to it and there are no other alternatives, your doctor says, and the
medication is the only way out towards your cure.
Those anti-psychotic medications
have many side effects that look very uncompatible with a floxing. They can be
necessary for a true paranoid or delusion disorder but surely not for you.
Think twice before you decide to take them. Looking to the experience of
others, they might make you much worse because they block the dopamine
receptors, or enhance the acetyl cholinergic effects on your brain, be it
through inhibition of acetylcholine metabolism, or by acetylcholine
substitution. If you are sure you have a severe reaction, do not take them
because the first pills consumed of the above mentioned drugs would greatly
damage you, according to absolutely all-previous experiences of other people.
You should only risk taking them if you are sustaining a moderate floxing
And do not be afraid of
reassuring yourself that you are not living in a delusion state, but that you
are a true participant of a real nightmare. In some cases the delusion may be
assumed to be false by the doctor or psychiatrist assessing the belief of the
patient, because it seems to be unlikely or held with excessive conviction.
Psychiatrists rarely have the time or resources to check the validity of a
person’s claims leading to some true beliefs to be erroneously classified as
delusional. In other words, that when psychiatrists meet strange cases
like yours they can make a mistaken diagnosis.
Note that the diagnoses of
delusions are based on the subjective understanding of a particular psychiatrist,
who may not know enough about the issue that might make a belief otherwise
interpretable. So, if you are diagnosed as suffering a paranoid delusion,
probably it is your doctor's fault because he/she knows nothing about the
floxing syndrome.
93.THE TRUE BIOLOGICAL DAMAGE TO YOUR BRAIN
The neurotransmitters more affected by your intoxication are not the dopamine receptors as many psychiatrists tell their floxed patients, but the GABA (Gamma-aminobutyric acid) and cholinergic ones. You have learned in previous sections that in humans, GABA acts at inhibitory synapses in the brain and