Well I’m almost two months into the daily antibiotic experiment “with an n of one” as my ID doc in Pittsburgh says. Is it working? Hard to say. it’s hard not to believe they’re doing something … I seem to feel better, and psychologically I love the fact that I’m taking some action, however uncertain.
So what’s it like day to day? The particular one I’m on can only be taken two hours on either side from food. Not easy for a consummate snacker like myself. Worse, I can’t do start/end of day because it’s very important that I take pro-biotics (sacromyces, in particular) after my antibiotics. So I have to be up for at least 2 hours after I take the antibiotic. I’ve settled on taking them when I wake up/at 3pm and just not snacking between lunch and dinner. Unlike the IV antibiotics I don’t need to provide a litany of advice here — taking antibiotics for a month or two is not all that different from taking antibiotics for a week.
- My teeth turned grey due to the antibiotics…
One reaction that I could do without is that they make my teeth black (not unexpected given that it had happened during the IV treatment as well, and is a commonly known side effect of long term doxycyclin, an antibiotic very similar to the one I’m on). My dentist was kind enough to do a mid-antibiotic cleaning with another planned for after I’m done, and they’re currently back to white (we’ll see how long that lasts!)
At the start, the antibiotics made me feel drunk for hours on end (on day two it lasted 8 hours). After that passed it was an hour or two a day for a while, now
- …and the dentist turned them white again
that’s pretty much behind me. However a different form of dizziness I experienced even before the antibiotics has become more severe: I find that every time I change height (e.g. sit to stand; lie to sit; etc) I feel dizzy and sometimes almost black out. I hold on to the nearest surface and it usually passes very quickly.
