Originally Posted by
BaneTheBrawler
so, i shit you not, i am going through withdrawal from my goddamn anti-diarrhea medicine (loperamide).
i started a new treatment (Remicade) on the 15th, and a few days later my guts went into SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING mode, which is extremely painful, as my flora never get the memo and keep turning food into gas. I figured this was due to the new drug changing the tempo of my guts to a more normal pace, it having previously been insanely fast. Before I started taking the loperamide, I would occasionally pass undigested food as quickly as ~30 minutes after eating it. With the loperamide (at the maximum recommended dose), I managed to bring that frenetic pace down to a scale of hours, which made doing things like leaving the house possible. Very much a good thing. With the Remicade, this seems to have become my new normal, though really it's far too early to tell. And, as I will explain, there are other factors at work. Being the smart fellow that I am, I figured that having my normal adjusted, and then taking the loperamide on top of that new normal, was probably the cause of my sudden shut-down. So, being the veteran Crohnie that I am, I decided to stop taking my loperamide. It's an Over The Counter (OTC) medication, and I and my parents have been taking it (my parents somewhat intermittently) without incident for a long time, so shouldn't be too problematic, right?
FUCKING WRONG, SHITHEAD
Turns out it's an opiate-derived drug, which probably explains why it works so well for me: opioids put my guts into immediate shutdown mode. Now, as you may know, Opioids are fucking strong, and addictive, and cause withdrawal when you stop taking them. Opioids include such venerable painkillers as vicodin, tramadol, and mothafuckin morphine. Now, Loperamide isn't a fully-fledged opioid. It's a derivative. But it has a lot of similar effects, and apparently, if you take absolutely insane amounts, you can actually get high on it. I mean it about insane: The blogs I was reading were talking about 80 pills a day. THAT'S MORE THAN A WHOLE BOTTLE. Unless you get a scrip. The largest bottle I've seen OTC contained 72 pills and came in a two-pack, and cost like 30 bucks. Shit would add up, especially since, as I discovered, it fucking sucks to stop.
So, anyway, I stopped taking the loperamide on the 17th, and by the 19th I'd started to see some strange symptoms. I was getting hot/cold flashes. I was getting jittery, unable to sit still. It was becoming hard to focus. Sleep became nearly impossible, coming but a few hours at a time. The gas was slow to disperse, as it always is, which made things even more unpleasant. I would wake in agony, as fresh gas had been manufactured and gotten stuck, and I would go sit on the toilet and try to pass as much as I could. Often quite a lot, but never quite all. I finally took to my usual message boards to find out if anyone else had experienced anything like this, and learned all the shit I described above.
The gas has mostly passed now, and the lack of focus seems to have faded, but I'm still jittery/restless as all fuck and getting temperature swings. Still hard to sleep. Very unpleasant, but better than the gas. I considered going back on it and tapering down, but didn't want to risk another bout of constipation. By far the worse symptom. So I'm riding this shit out cold turkey, and kicking myself for not fucking doing the goddamn legwork like i usually do. i got too comfortable with my meds, didn't take them seriously enough, and now I pay the price.
Fortunately, I wasn't anywhere near the dosages the addict bloggers talked about (i usually stayed within the recommended daily limit, and never took more than two pills in less than 3 hours) so the symptoms don't seem to be as severe as they talk about. And I don't think they'll last as long; As I said, I'm already improving somewhat. But still; lesson learned. Don't ever get too comfy with your medication. Not ever.
Update: no sleep at all last night. Getting hard to focus again, just from lack of sleep. almost shit myself. twice. there are other potential culprits for the constipation, so i may end up going back on loperamide (at a lower dose, because i'm definitely still operating at a slower speed) here soon. we'll see