Monday, July 27, 2009

See all blog posts True Health Confession: "I Overdosed on Cold Medicine"

Today, we hear from a Vitamin G reader who shares her embarrassing--and kind of frightening--story of accidentally OD'ing on cold medicine. Her message to us all: "Don't try this at home."

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Vitamin G reader "Jennifer" (who's too shy to share her real name), says she usually refrains from taking cold medicine, but last month, when a summer cold came on strong, she was desperate for relief, so she reached for the only thing she had in the medicine cabinet: her daughter's Children's Benadryl.

"There were no dosage instructions for adults on the label," she writes, "so I just doubled the amount that a 12-year-old kid would take. I thought it sounded reasonable."

Not so much. About a half-hour later, while she was talking on the phone to a friend, she says she started to feel funny. "My head suddenly seemed foggy, and I felt really sluggish. Then all of a sudden, I was having trouble putting sentences together. It was like I couldn't talk! My mouth felt like Jell-O."

It was about 9:30 p.m., she explains, so at first she thought she was just tired. "But when I hung up the phone, I stood up and almost fell over," she writes. "My husband helped me to bed and asked me how much medicine I had taken. As my eyes were closing, we figured out that I'd overdosed, but not to the extent that he needed to call an ambulance or anything."

Jennifer says she passed out in bed, and when she woke up the next morning, she felt sick and had a killer headache. "I felt like I was hungover," she continues. "It was awful. It wasn't until the afternoon that I finally started feeling somewhat normal again. Such an embarrassing mistake I'll never make again!"

Lesson for us all: Be uber-careful with over-the-counter meds. If you don't know or don't understand the dosage instructions, don't play doc and try to make something up--call yours instead, or the 1-800 number on the box. The extra 5 minutes could save you a lot of headache (literally) and maybe even your life.

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