Posted by pinksharkmark on March 11, 1999 at 15:18:26:
I see a lot of comments here on restricting Imitrex use to two hits every 24 hours, be it tablet, spray, or injector. I have never been able to do that! If the pain hits, I pop a tablet, regardless of how long it has been since the last one. I have never tried the injectors, since they are WAYYYYY expensive and I have no medical coverage at all... I must pay full pop for everything I use. I find the nasal spray doesn't act any faster for me than the tablets do, and they seem to wear off faster. At the peak of my cycle I will get 3 or 4 CHs per day, evenly spaced apart.
My question is... what bad side effects are there gonna be to exceeding the "two per 24 hours" guidelines... apart from the hit to the bank account, of course.
For this latest cycle I have been trying Zomig tablets, from Zeneca. They are a type of triptan... zolmitriptan. The literature packaged with them says not to exceed 4 dosages per 24 hours.... maybe because the dosage is so much lower than with sumatriptan (Imitrex). The Zomig tablets are only 2.5 mg., vs 100 mg. for the Imitrex. My experience with them is that they seem to work every bit as well as the Imitrex tablets... maybe even a little faster relief than Imitrex, and they seem to last about 8 hours as opposed to about 6 hours for the Imitrex, although that may be due to variations within the cycle. Also, they are a little bit cheaper than Imitrex... not a lot, but some.
For the first time since I started getting these monsters about 15 years ago, I have started a prednisone/sansert combination to abort the cycle... nasty side-effects, but I THINK it seems to be working... I started the meds five days ago, and now my CHs are down to one per day... about 8 am. Of course, this cycle started mid-January, so by my past experience it was overdue to start easing off anyway, but I just thought I'd pass it on in case it helps anyone else. I tried drinking 8 oz of water every half hour for a couple of days, too, at the same time I started the meds... so maybe that helped. The frustrating thing, as most of you know, is that there is no way of knowing for sure at this late stage in the cycle whether it was the water, the prednisone, the sansert, or just the natural end to the cycle that has given me the relief... I guess if I had tried all this back in mid-January it would have had more evidentiary value.
I also found an opioid analogue called Ultram (tramadol hydrochloride) that is apparently not on the US Govt's narcotic schedule, unlike Demerol or morphine sulfate, yet the literature I have seen on it suggests that it is roughly equivalent to demerol in painkilling. For those of you who have Docs that are nervous about prescribing the strong narcotics and want to go this route, I found that I was able to substitute it for Imitrex with success about 50 per cent of the time. Even when the pain did break through, it seemed somehow less important.... more distant or depersonalized... more bearable, in short. Sort of at the level of what I refer to as a "normal person" headache. Chortle.
Anyway... I started this post asking about the possible side-effects of Imitrex "over-dosing".... any comments from anyone, pro or con?