Side effects of medicines

If you are over 40 or 50, pretty much for sure for most of us you have had to deal with the side effects of medicines. So, if you don't study the side effects of whatever medicines you are about to take basically you could die. Often the doctors and nurses won't tell you for a variety of reasons, especially if you are squeamish or a hypochondriac to begin with.

So, you wind up having to do the research yourself often online. However, often you cannot trust 100% what you read about online either. However, I might trust more people's experiences with taking certain drugs more than anything else (even though everyone's physiology and reactions to medicines are always very individual in the end).

So, trying to be practical about medicines your doctor or nurse recommend is much more difficult than you might think to begin with (IF you actually want to stay alive).

What I'm saying here is that if you aren't also your own doctor then soon you will be dead. Because doctors and nurses have so many patients these days that it is easy for variables to slip by either of them and then you are injured or dead.

For example, for edema I was given spironolactone but if you are a man this might make you less sexually functional than normal which isn't fun. But, if someone had just given me lasix instead this wouldn't have been a problem for me for a couple of years.

Then one day the physician's assistant said to me: "You do know eventually spironolactone is going to go sideways on you?" and I had no idea what she was talking about until one day I realized I wa sort of being paralyzed temporarily by the drug. But I realized I just couldn't take it anymore and stopped. And this almost killed me because my cardiologist cancelled an appointment and I had no idea I could die if I stopped taking a diuretic because of edema. 

To make a long story short my family practitioner saved my life but it took me a month to recover and I missed a trip to Ireland, England and Scotland with my wife and two daughters (which I likely will never be able to repeat because my daughters are now 23 and 30.

So, my point of view Is that I should have been on Lasix and potassium to begin with and then I wouldn't have almost died for a month and missed this trip.

But, a doctors point of view is that Lasix is great but if you aren't taking enough potassium when you are taking Lasix (furosemide) then you will die in a week or two.

This is likely what they would tell you. So, if you take lasix (Furosemide) for edema then if you don't also take a lot of potassium then you are soon dead.

So, you can see how difficult all this can be.

Also, in regard to lisinopril (a blood thinner and ace inhibitor) it has saved my life more than once since 1998 when I had my heart virus. But, it too can go sideways which it did for me around 2014 or 2015 and I had to stop taking it.

Another time I was put on too high a dose of lisinopril going back on it and I was laying on the carpet in my hallway for 5 hours because it was too high a dose and I couldn't even stand up because I was too light headed.

So, trying to get on the right dose of medicines can be life or death too.

So, Good luck to all of you and I hope you are brave enough to try stuff that might keep you alive and hopefully it doesn't kill you before you would have died anyway.

By God's Grace

note: But the other side of all this is I expected to die in 1998 and 1999 and I'm still alive at 71 after having been forced to retire in 1998 or die.

So, medicines are always poison but sometimes that poison can keep you alive to 90 or 100 or beyond if you actually want to live that long. So, Good Luck!