Posted by Squiggles on November 24, 2006, at 12:26:40
I'm coming around from what appeared
to be a bad interaction between lithium
and red wine sulphites. I don't drink
often-- a glass of *white* wine mostly,
or a beer once a month or two with a meal.. It rarely bothers me.This time it did - badly; the
strange thing is that I had a glass of the
same wine about a week before. The only
added variable i can think of is that the
bottle was open and therefore aged, and the
circumstances included stress the second time.As usual, when there is an imbalance for whatever
reason (forgetting a pill, a lithium cap), it takes about 40 days to stabilize. Thirty to
forty days of agonizing head pain, to which I have attached names because it has now become a familiar sensation: "the axe headache", "the electric eels", "the clusters of pain", the "top head crush" etc. These being continuous, adjustment is difficult and quite debilitating.The pain also reaches its peaks in seemingly cyclical periods of the 24 hr. cycle -- whether this is due to the drugs, or an endongenous bipolar state, i don't know. I wish I knew what was going on.
I found that to ease this pain, there is only one thing that works-- XANAX (why?); NOT aspirin, and NSAIDs are contraindicated.
Presumably, from what i read the lithium must have gone down NOT up with the sulphites in the wine. Some other side effects of this were:
- extreme sensitivity to stress; the whole cycle can begin again with a trigger
- increased libido
- strange taste in mouth - bitter or metallic
- swollen, painful breasts
- vertigo
- breathing difficulty - chest pain
- tingling hands
- cognitive difficulties
- backpain
- less thirst than commonly on lithium
These are just some i can remember. I am now
recovering. These symptoms are similar to the one i had when i withdrew from clonazepam some 5 years ago. Mercifully, while those were protracted, these lithium fluctuations take about 40 days. But this is not withdrawal; simply a drop in the lithium soup, as far as i know.Squiggles
poster:Squiggles
thread:706696
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20061123/msgs/706696.html