Posted by Ritch on May 1, 2005, at 16:41:07
In reply to Morontin.....anybody using it? (gabapentin), posted by Larry Hoover on May 1, 2005, at 16:18:59
> Gabapentin (Morontin....errr....Neurontin) has got to be the most bizarre med I've ever used. It is beyond bizarre.
>
> Thursday I just wasn't able to focus my mind. Friday, I was at the office, and I had a good day, but when I got home.....total bizarro city....
>
> My eyesight was totally distorted. You know how they pixelate faces on the TV to distort identities....they kind of shimmer, sometimes? Well, all of my peripheral vision went kind of like that, and the closer it was to the center, the worse it became, until there was kind of a ring of intense shimmering distortion, surrounding clear central vision. It was like being in a hallucinatory tunnel. Total time, maybe 45 minutes to an hour. It faded in, and faded out.
>
> Last week I was at the local variety store, and the proprietor (my landlady) asked me, "How are you today?" Standard fare, right? My answer, "I don't know." And I stood there, stunned, for the longest while, until she asked, "Are you OK?". And again I answered, "I don't know." Finally I said, "It must be this new med I'm on for pain", and I walked out without my purchase. When I got outside, the whole world was distorted, like the plane of the horizon was head height instead of feet height. (If you've seen representations of the gravitational distortion of space, it was like that.....I was in a gravity well.) I'm just glad I wasn't in my car at that moment.
>
> I get this sort of "bubbles of the bizarre" ever since I went on this stuff. No two "episodes" are the same. Initially, my vision was pretty distorted, but that settled down soon enough. Yet, I still get these "bubbles". Sometimes they're emotional in content. I don't know what else to call them. Bubbles of the bizarre.
>
> Right now I am totally emotionally flat. Out of nowhere. Another bubble? Who the hell knows.
>
> Apart from that, this stuff makes me stupid. I am constantly amazed at the stupid things I say, write, and do. My short term memory is so defective, I've missed some very important appointments, including a meeting at which I was on the agenda......I'd worked the whole previous day on my presentation, and I simply forgot to go. Ergo, Morontin.
>
> The stuff is miraculous for my neuropathic pain, though. I've only needed oxycodone three times (in six weeks) since I went on it, instead of three times a day prior to it.
>
> Feedback?
>
> Lar
Larry, the weirdest visual effects that I notice when I take it are: 1) A mild case of "night blindness"... difficulty seeing in the dark... do you notice when you walk into a dark area out of the light and you "see" the optic nerve cells firing-creating a white noise of sorts? On Neurontin that is greatly diminished for me. 2) Daylight vision seems to be "windexed".. everything seems "cleaned" and "smoothed" and "sharpened" somehow. Hard to describe. I read something a long time ago about how gabapentin tinkers around with calcium and the optic nerve in some way. Sorry, can't be specific! -- Mitch
poster:Ritch
thread:492394
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050428/msgs/492406.html