Beautiful Choir Day…a Temporary Respite

So yesterday was the kick-off for the new season of singing, with the annual all-day Choir Workshop. Not quite all day for us amateurs — just 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., plus a potluck in the evening. But the choir director then spends the rest of his afternoon with the professional singers. He must be ready to fall face-first into the sack by the end of the day!

At any rate, it was great to see everyone again,  great fun, and as usual another wonderful learning experience. We’re singing a gorgeous Requiem by a living composer named Vernon Williams. It is amazingly beautiful. There are, as yet, no recordings of it, so I can’t share somebody’s YouTube rendition here. But this will be an Evensong performance, and so it’s possible that our director will record it.

One of the many discoveries that come one’s way when singing with a group like this is the fact that modern composers have about given up on writing cacophonies that scare audiences out of a concert hall. Truth to tell, even after several years on the chamber music society’s board, I never imagined I would say I actually like a piece of contemporary music. But lo! These days I can say I like quite a few of them.

I felt a great deal better when I left the church’s campus. A day with friendly people goes a long way to brighten your outlook. It must be said that even though one’s pets are cute, sweet, and all that, there are limits to the company of dogs.

As usual, though, the day could not pass without being haunted by the present nightmare.

I’m driving home — about a five-minute journey — and suddenly I can’t see the street signs!

Holy shit. I’m seeing double, and I can’t see to drive safely.

Sometimes I get ocular migraines, and once one presented itself as severe double vision. Once. The eye doctor speculated that migraine was the least of the possibilities: in fact he thought it was an early symptom of MS.

Double vision occurs in MS when the muscles of the left and right eyes cannot coordinate to make them work together to create a single image. But when I put my hand over my right eye, I was still seeing double through the left eye. Not MS.

Migraine?

I keep driving, even though it’s breathtakingly dangerous, because I don’t have my purse & flip-phone with me. Even if I did, there’s really no one I can call other than 911, and I DON’T want to go through  THAT again. By the time I reach the turn into the ’hood, it’s starting to clear up, so I make it to the house without killing myself or anyone else. Thank God.

That it passes so quickly suggests it’s not a migraine: it usually takes at least 20 or 30 minutes for an ocular migraine to start to clear up, and ocular migraine has aftereffects, not least of which is a headache or sense of disorientation. Neither of those are present.

And by the time I reach the house, another thought has occurred:

Not MS.
Not migraine…
Cipro??????

 So after I let the dogs out I fire up the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest and look up Cipro, the antibiotic Dr. P put me on when I complained about swelling and redness.

Holy shit is an understatement. This is a powerful, dangerous drug whose manufacturer specifically states it should not be given to people over 60.

And yes. One of its (lesser…) side-effects is double vision.

Call the Mayo’s after-hours line.  Get a young resident who decides to give me a penicillin-derived drug, despite my supposed (but unproven) allergy to penicillin.

Although few drugs sit well with me, the penicillin connection remains vague. When I was a young thing, I told a doctor I had never had measles (rubella). He didn’t believe it, so he had a titre test done, and yea, verily, it showed I had never had rubella. Then awhile later for some reason I was put on penicillin. A rash developed. But so did the entire array of rubella symptoms. In my late 20s or early 30s, I was very sick. But the doctor, as doctors did back in the good old days, patted me on my pretty little head and announced it couldn’t be rubella, it must be a reaction to the penicillin.

Couple years later, we decided to get pregnant. When I went off the pill, I had another titre test, and yea verily it showed I’d had rubella.

So I may not be allergic to penicillin at all. But on the other hand, anything’s possible.

The pharmacist says to lay off the drugs until tomorrow morning. Don’t take any Cipro, but don’t take any of the new stuff tonight, either.

So I’m laying there in the bed, just freaking exhausted but can NOT get to sleep (the insomnia’s  been back, too, though at the time it doesn’t occur to me that insomnia could be anything other than “not surprising,” under the circumstances). My ears are ringing. Ringing like an alarm clock is going off somewhere.

I’ve had tinnitus in the past. It is exceptionally unpleasant, and one especially unpleasant aspect of tinnitus is that it can go on forever. For some people it’s a permanent condition, and it can cause (or at least be associated with) hearing loss.

Now I think…hmmmmmm….

Out of the sack and back to the laptop.

Cipro…Google Advanced Search Settings: Reading Level: Show Only Advanced Results.

This strategy tends to winnow out the woo-woo and the bullshit, leaving you with a better shot at finding actual science. And what should it bring up but a hair-raising product description from the FDA.

Cipro has a black-box warning: it causes tendon tears. It should not be prescribed to people over 60 (I’m pushing hard at 70), it should not be prescribed to people who have had tendon problems (about 20 years ago I ruptured a tendon when I fell, hiking in the bottom of Aravaipa Canyon. The resulting surgery and months of physical therapy were NOT fun). Tendon tears can occur months after one quits taking Cipro.

• Physical exercise — including, according to a victim writing at another site, something as mild as playing charades in your living room! — can cause tendon tears.

• You should not take Cipro if you are given lidocaine (the Mayo injects lidocaine at the point where they insert the IV for surgery…which is supposed to happen a week from tomorrow!!!).

• You should not consume anything containing caffeine (including chocolate, coffee, or tea — I live on iced tea during the summer!)

• It makes you sick at your stomach, but you cannot take antacids while you’re on it.

• It can make you dizzy (ah! so there’s the explanation for THAT!) and you should not drive while taking Cipro.

• It can cause trouble sleeping (which would be why I’m awake in the middle of the night digging through the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest…).

• It causes rapid heartbeat (huh. Here I thought it was just a recurrence of the anxiety attacks).

• Chances of dangerous heart rhythm changes are higher among older adults.

• Cipro can lead to C. difficile. SDXB’s ex-wife died on her living-room floor from a C. difficile infection. You should call your quack immediately if you experience vision changes, tachycardia, and a host of other exciting phenomena.

Drop your search parameters back to the Low-Brow Prole level and do a search for Cipro + tinnitus or Cipro + ringing ears. And hooooleeeeee shit! You get rafts and rafts and rafts of furious posts by people who have been permanently harmed by this drug. I’ve never seen so many anguished, angry posts by so many people — there are entire sites  devoted to rants about Cipro. More than one of them. Even the staid Wall Street Journal got into the act, in its low-key way (wouldn’t want to offend Big Pharma, corporations being people with feelings, after all). And an array of ambulance chasers  is soliciting victims to file lawsuits.

So widespread are the negative reactions that there’s even a slang term for the syndrome: “floxing,” after the drug’s generic name, ciprofloxacin.

What on EARTH would possess a doctor to prescribe such a thing?

• She certainly knows I’m over 60.
• I’ve told her I walk a mile or two a day.
• I’ve told her I have to do physical therapy exercises to keep back pain under control.
• I’ve complained about not being able to use the pool because it’s a key part of my exercise program.
• When asked, I told her that I had ruptured a tendon in the past.
• She knows I have constant back pain, and with the share of IQ points she owns, she might be expected to figure out that I have chronic Achilles tendonitis because of the chronic sciatica.
• She knows I live alone and have no one to help me.
• She knows a fair amount of physical exertion is required to maintain my home, yard, and dogs.
• She knows I have to drive my car to get food in the house.
• And I volunteered that in my experience if a drug has a rare or weird side effect, I’m gonna get it.

Of course the latter whinge is going to be discounted. But the fact still remains that the FDA and the manufacturer state the drug should not be prescribed to elderly people, that the stuff can cause tendon rupture with little or no provocation, that it causes dizziness, sleep disturbances, vision disturbances, tinnitus, cardiac arrhythmias, and on and on…and many of these effects are permanent!

The swelling and inflammation have gone down considerably, quite possibly as a result of the Cipro. I’m sure not taking any more of that, though.

So should I switch to the cephalexin? Highly problematic. The package insert says, ALL CAPS, do not take if you’ve ever had an allergic reaction to penicillin. Well…was that an allergic reaction? To decide, I have to take a leap of faith or non-faith in the accuracy of a guess made by a physician some 40 years ago.

Honestly. I wish I’d known, at the outset, that an encapsulated papillary carcinoma is NOT cancer, that a number of experts urge the term “carcinoma” be removed from the term for DCIS, and that a large and growing school of medical thought believes the best course of action for these things is watch-and-wait. If I’d had any idea, I would not have allowed anyone to cut me open.

Too late now.