And Then I Learned...

      The long-winded labels on prescription medicines are a kind of miracle of the worst of legal and medical prose.  I'm suggestible enough that I rarely read them unless I need clarification on the pharmacy's instructions on taking the medication: why come down with a bad case of imagination?

      So when I was still feeling awful on Sunday, I was starting to wonder if I had some kind of heart trouble.  I hate that feeling, and worse yet, because of the need for quick reaction to a genuine emergency, nobody in the medical business will waste a second figuring out if it's a genuine problem or only looks like one before sending you off to the ER to get it checked out at considerable expense.  The referring parties don't get a commission; they just don't want to have to deal with your rapidly-cooling corpse, spend time and effort giving you CPR, or explain to your grieving survivors that you had not, in fact, looked all that bad before falling over.  Speed affects outcome and minutes count.

      Thing is, I don't have any survivors who will grieve for long, especially not once the insurance and retirement-account checks arrive, and I have had two perfectly terrifying and costly panic attacks in the last fifteen years that felt (almost) like the real thing.  So I faffed around, feeling awful and putting out cautious feelers for advice, thinking, "If it was that bad, I'd be on the floor already," and -- finally -- read the package insert.

      Yeah, about that.  The super-ibuprofen, not so bad.  The muscle relaxer?  "Irregular heartbeat, anxiety, mental confusion, tingling in extremities," and so on and so forth.  It matched up with how I was feeling and none of them were low-probability.  So I was taking those pills, they were letting me me sleep like a log and then I would wake up to an extended bout of side-effects until it was time to take the pills again, sleeping, waking up to feel awful, over and over, with a break on the night when I just took the pain reliever by itself and kept waking up, heart racing, anxious, with pins and needles in my fingers.

      I did it to myself.  I've been off 'em for about thirty hours now and lo, my disturbing symptoms are gone like a campaign promise.  My back still hurts some -- that's what started all this -- but it's much better than it was and will be better still once I take some plain old OTC acetaminophen.