NEVER rule out the rare

Monday I felt much more like myself. I managed to have lunch with my grandmother, take a quick run into Walmart, take a short walk with my father, and eat all my meals. I even managed to sit long enough to complete an entire blog! Because everything was going so well, Mike and I decided to go out for a tea and a drive in the evening. While we were out, something completely unexpected happened.

It started with my lips puckering. I thought, ‘This is kind of annoying.’ But after about 10 minutes it became worse. Now, it felt as though I was having muscle spasms in my jaw and tongue, and my teeth were clenching together. The first thing I thought was that maybe I was taking a panick attack. I had heard people say that you feel as though you can’t breathe and are going to die when a bad attack hits. Was this a panick attack? After allowing another 10 minutes or so to pass while I tried to calm myself down, I decided that this symptom did not seem normal. I told Mike to take me to the ER right away.

We drove to the Glace Bay ER and found it to be closed (don’t even get me started on this)! My mother, who was at the hospital waiting when we arrived, then drove us out to the ER in Sydney—at the hospital where I had mostly everything done thus far. After a painstaking 30 minute drive to the second hospital, I barged through the emergency doors and demanded to see a doctor. By this time, I was very panicky—I felt shaky, restless, and nervous. I was panicky for a good reason, however. I couldn’t breathe! As every minute went by I felt my throat closing over more, my teeth were now grinding together. It felt exactly as if someone was choking me. I even wondered if I might be taking some sort of seizure at this point.

The nurse made me go through the regular registration stuff, which took another 15 minutes or so, and then she led me into a room to wait for a doctor. A nurse came in and gave me oxygen, but she said that my oxygen levels appeared to be normal. She then administered an IV in my arm because she said the doctor would likely want to give me something for whatever was causing me the distress. I waited another 30-40 minutes by the time a doctor came.

After explaining everything to him, the doctor concluded that one of the anti-nausea medications (likely Stemetil) was causing this effect. He said it is a rare side effect, but does happen—people feel their mouth and jaw muscles pulling and the throat swells out, making it hard to breathe. He said he would give me a dose of Benadryl for the allergic reaction and some anti-swelling steroids through the intravenous, and he gave me an Adavan to calm me down.

After about 5 minutes, I was finally able to breathe, but my body was full of tremors, likely due to the stress it had gone through. They laid a warm blanket over me and after about 20 minutes I was feeling back to normal. When I arrived back home I read the pamphlet given to me about Stemetil. It recorded 3 categories of side-effects: more common, less common, and rare. This is what I read under the ‘Rare Side Effects’ category:
Jaw, neck, and back muscle spasms; constant uncontrolled movement of the tongue, face, mouth, or jaw; sore throat, fever, weakness; trouble swallowing; tremors, drooling; slow jerky movements. STOP taking this medication and contact your doctor IMMEDIATELY if you have any of these symptoms.

Looks like I again made the category of “rare.” I would never want to go through this again and, as you can probably guess, a new form of anti-nausea medication is most definitely needed to be prescribed.