Life after Lipitor
In my last post I described the effects of three years of Lipitor on my memory. This event has changed how I think, what I do, how I work. Unfortunately it has caused me to find barriers that are self-created.
My mother was poorly educated but very intelligent. She taught me to accept my limitations, but not to invent them.
The limitations imposed by struggling to retain vital information for longer than minutes has made me completely re-define my life. Now I discover the limitation was imposed by a drug. The manufacturers of that drug were aware of the problem. They state that they have 145,000,000 YEARS of patient usage from which they gather data. That means that Cholesterol patients have been taking Lipitor for a combined total of 145 Million patient-years.
If two percent of patients are suffering memory loss that is a total of 2,900,000 years of misery and suffering spread across patients taking Lipitor.
• That is 38,666 lifetimes.
• That is 116,000 people taking Lipitor from age 50 to age 75.
• That is 290,000 people taking it for 10 years.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are victims of a simple statistic - only two percent have memory problems. A percentage too small to worry about.
• I am one of the two percent and I resent the three years that have been taken from me.
• I resent a growing business that has been reduced to a shadow of its former self by my inability to move it forward.
• I resent the personal trauma I have suffered believing I was incapable of performing any longer at a sustained level that I have maintained for decades.
• I resent the loss of confidence in my abilities that I now have to re-establish.
• I resent the sleepless hours at night worrying about the result of my descent into Dementia or Alzheimer's on my family.
I am ANGRY.
Fortunately I know I will rise above this and move on, but the damage will take some time to repair.
Images from Flickr by D Sharon Pruitt, pink sherbet photography and Caseywest.
My mother was poorly educated but very intelligent. She taught me to accept my limitations, but not to invent them.
If two percent of patients are suffering memory loss that is a total of 2,900,000 years of misery and suffering spread across patients taking Lipitor.
• That is 38,666 lifetimes.
• That is 116,000 people taking Lipitor from age 50 to age 75.
• That is 290,000 people taking it for 10 years.
• I am one of the two percent and I resent the three years that have been taken from me.
• I resent a growing business that has been reduced to a shadow of its former self by my inability to move it forward.
• I resent the personal trauma I have suffered believing I was incapable of performing any longer at a sustained level that I have maintained for decades.
• I resent the loss of confidence in my abilities that I now have to re-establish.
• I resent the sleepless hours at night worrying about the result of my descent into Dementia or Alzheimer's on my family.
I am ANGRY.
Images from Flickr by D Sharon Pruitt, pink sherbet photography and Caseywest.
Thank you Phil your blog on Lipitor was very enlightening. Doctors have just put me on 40mg Lipitor however my sister told me to research it as she had heard there were problems. I have only been taking it for three days and have ceased immediately.
ReplyDeleteIt was interesting that on the packet issued to me by the hospital on discharge there is a warning not to eat grapefruit or grapefruit products! That set the alarm bells ringing as well. We have our own grapefruit tree and love them.
Thanks again
Pat