Posted by lymom3 on March 16, 2007, at 10:42:36
In reply to Re: Weight gain again...for Lymom3, posted by Sandra62 on March 16, 2007, at 8:01:50
Like I said, this was just me and maybe not typical of everyone but that drug hits your temporal lobe hard. First, finding the correct dosage is huge. Too much or too little and you are worse off than if you took nothing. At 50mg I cried all day long. Bumped it up to 100mg and it was probably the most level headed I've been in my life.
Then my hair started falling out...in clumps. I had major gall bladder problems. Massive night sweats, insomnia and extremely tired and legarthic, chronic diarrhea and massive peripheral edema. The case of the stupids is fairly common...where you can't come up with words that you know or get your sentences jumbled. That's why they call it "dopamax" or "stupimax".
These bad side effects didn't start until about 6 weeks into taking Topamax so at first it didn't seem to be med related. So I had blood tests for diabetes, thyroid, electrolites, HIV, anything they could think of. I had ultrasounds of my whole abdomen, chest xrays, stress test. They could find nothing at all out of the ordinary.
At that point I talked to my pdoc and I weaned down and discontinued the Topamax and all symptoms went away. I had my mood problems back again and am now on Lamictal but all the other symptoms rectified themselves with the exception of the insomnia. I have just now found Seroquel that helps me sleep like a baby...I couldn't be more pleased with that.
Like I said, there are lots of people that do well on this medication and one horror story shouldn't deter you from trying it, but if you do get bizarre side effects that you might not normally attribute to meds, just keep track of them. The gall bladder pain that I had was unbearable. That got me to the ER once because I had never felt anything like that before. I never even dreamed that an anti seizure med could possibly be the culprit.
So, you know your body better than anyone; just note anything odd and make sure you talk to your pdoc about it..
poster:lymom3
thread:741331
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070314/msgs/741582.html