Don't Forget Your Pills, Grandma!

I forgot to take my medicine last night. It was a rough night and is turning out to be a rougher day.

Typically I take gabapentin in the evening, which works until the next evening. I guess... I don't know the half life.

Okay, I've just done my homework and found that the half life of gabapentin is 5-7 hours. So why am I taking it once per day??? Maybe I should cut the pills in half, take one in the morning and one in the evening.

I've had this blog post in draft for a few hours now. What I planned to say was that I think gabapentin does help me, because after two weeks of sleeping through the night, last night I went to bed at 10:30, feel asleep at 11:30, woke up at 1:15, went back to sleep at 4:30, and woke several times before my alarm went off at 6:40. I couldn't sleep because my thoughts were racing, I was hot, and I felt jumpy, for lack of a better word.

I wasn't dizzy when I woke up, which tells me that the dizziness every morning is probably from the medication. But I had a hard morning with feeling hot (didn't help that the schools I worked at were minimally air conditioned), having the falling-asleep tingles, and being weak and fatigued. Weakness was a significant issue. Around noon, I started having pretty bad haywire-nerve tingles. At 1:00, a killer headache hit. It only took half an hour of that headache, combined with the feeling that I'd be much better off if I tore the skin from my arms, to induce me to take my gabapentin immediately instead of waiting until dinner time. Since I had a headache, I also took ibuprofen.

After half an hour, I suddenly began feeling considerably better. Now it's 2:45, and I'm feeling pretty decent. Don't get me wrong, I'm weak and exhausted. But my headache is gone, I can sit up, and my haywire nerves are calming down. I felt calm, which told me that I was feeling anxious before without realizing it.

However... When I went to google the half life of gabapentin, one of the search choices that popped up was "gabapentin withdrawal." Uh oh. Did I even want to know? Of course! I will see my neurologist next week, so now is the time to consider the questions I might want to ask.

Looks like some people have experienced withdrawal syndromes coming off gabapentin cold turkey. All of the ones I read about had quite a bit going on--most of them had bipolar disorder. Makes me wonder if drug interactions could have contributed. The FDA information on gabapentin indicates that a small percentage of people experienced seizures coming off gabapentin--these were people who had never had seizures before.

Note to self: renew the gabapentin prescription before it runs out.

Second note to self: taper off, not cold turkey.

Third note to self: speak with Dr. Barry about splitting the dose.

I guess I have a drug habit now.