Rare Side Effects May Include Spontaneous Combustion

Do you pay attention to commercials?  For the most part, I don’t.  In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I love my DVR so much, because I can just buzz past all the ads and return to regularly-scheduled programming.  There are some very funny ads out there, but generally commercials have gotten so outlandish that I can’t even relate.

For example, I’ve never been awoken to a happy family reunion in my kitchen because someone made coffee.  Frankly, if I woke up to the smell of crappy coffee brewing and my husband was in bed beside me, I would huddle under the covers and call 911.  Also my husband and I have never had a conversation (or anything else for that matter) on a hilltop while soaking in bathtubs.  There is no scenario in the realm of my imagination in which either one of us would ever need to hike, bathe and talk so urgently that we would haul two bathtubs up a hill to take a bubble bath, hold hands, and chitchat. 

That being said, there are times when I probably should have paid closer attention to commercials.  In my first blog post, I referred to some of my past weird health issues.  Unfortunately, there have been quite a few over the past couple of years.  As a good friend once told me, “Your health issues are not only educational but they’re also hilarious.”  I don’t know about the hilarious part, but I’ve certainly learned a lot from my ailments.  You can decide for yourself.

About two years ago, I woke up on a Sunday morning to discover that my right arm had swollen up to twice its normal size.  When I dragged myself and my arm out to the kitchen and asked my husband if he noticed anything strange about me (loaded question), he immediately rushed me to the emergency clinic around the corner.  They took one look at me, said they didn’t know what was wrong, and sent us to the ER.  It’s always reassuring when the quack at the Doc in the Box can’t even come up with a plausible theory.

At the ER, the nurses and doctors were equally perplexed.   A multitude of possible illness/injury/terminal disease theories were tossed around, including a suggestion that I was having an aneurysm.  At a loss for what to do with me, they resolved to run every test in the book until they got to the bottom of it.  Come Hell or high deductible, they would leave no stone unturned until I was cured.  Before I knew it, I was whisked away to the lab where they sapped me of all my blood and wheeled into radiology for a Doppler scan of my arm. 

Thankfully, the Doppler did not show a clot, but that left the doctors even more confused.  The blood tests showed that I had extremely high levels of a protein that indicated muscle breakdown – a protein that can clog your kidneys and cause them to fail.  They immediately put me on a saline drip to try to flush the protein out of me and they drew blood periodically to test whether the levels were dropping.  The best theory available was I had overdone it at the gym and torn my tricep, which was causing the swelling and muscle breakdown.

After several hours in the hospital, the doctors felt confident that I could go home and heal without any further ado.  Or so they thought.  The next morning I woke up with both a swollen arm and a swollen hip.  I once again asked my husband a loaded question: does my rearend look big?  I could see the fear in his eyes.  He didn’t want to respond.  Finally, he conceded that my left hip looked larger than the right one.  Weird.  I didn’t know a muscle tear could spread nor did I know I could have half an applebottom.

This latest development confused the doctors even more.  What would cause swelling and pain in my arm and my hip?  Obviously it was not a muscle tear after all.  After going to four different doctors, one finally arrived at a theory that made sense.  I had taken Levaquin following a minor surgical procedure (another story) and it has a “rare side effect” of causing tendon rupture, tendonitis, and ligament damage.   At least I had some answers, but there was no solution.  Nothing I could do would flush the medication out of my system.  I researched as much as I could and found out that tendon issues could happen up to six months after I finished taking the antibiotics.

In the end, I had tendonitis in my elbow, hip, and knee and a tendon in my hand ruptured.  I was a walking time bomb.  And, if there’s ever another anthrax scare, I will have a tough decision to make.  Will I take a Z-Pack and risk exploding or try to fight anthrax homeopathically?

It was only after my personal experience with the supposed rare side effects of Levaquin that I started to see ads for ambulance-chasing lawyers suing the pharmaceutical company that makes this medication.  Seems I am not the only one out there who had a few tendons explode after being prescribed this drug.  Maybe I didn't pay attention to the commercials before this episode, because they didn't pertain to me...or at least I didn't think so.  I would love to say that my experience has made me pay closer attention to commercials, but it hasn't.  Honestly, I don’t want to see foreshadowing of what might happen to me next.  I prefer to be surprised.  And how can I possibly educate my friends through my own ailments if I am armed in advance with information to avoid such debacles?  It is probably better for everyone for me to just learn as I go.