As I have dug through monographs and descriptions on the Internet I have found that they all downplay the side effects of Avalide, the blood pressure medication that I have been taking.

The same can be said of my doctor when it was first prescribed ten years ago.He actually told me that the great thing about this drug was the near complete lack of side effects.

In fact this drug can do some serious and negative things to you.

I’m going to try and detail what I have experienced so that people searching the Internet have a chance to learn from my experiences.

The turning point in all of this was around Christmas, when I found myself broke, frustrated, and feeling like I had lost control of my life.

That’s when I started saying out loud “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m making too many mistakes, I’m dropping the ball, I can’t seem to work.”

Symptom: for months I would get dates wrong when posting notices on web sites. If the event was on Friday I would somehow write Thursday. If it was on the 10th I would write the 11th. Even after I realized that this was happening, and began double and triple checking my work, I would make errors like this.

Symptom: My eyes began to give me problems. I would find that one or the other couldn’t seem to focus, usually while doing computer work or reading.

Symptom: Starting work was difficult. I would be scattered and distracted, bouncing between e-mail, and browsing, and a dozen other things that kept me from starting on work for hours.

Symptom: Maintaining focus became impossible. Beyond five or ten minutes I would need to stop what I was doing, or would get distracted and find it hard to resume.

Symptom: I lost all ability to multi-task, or even to handle two things at once. If there were two competing priorities I would be unable to start on either, or would wind up abandoning one indefinitely. If I was interrupted by a phone call or e-mail I would lose the thread of what I was working on, possibly for an indefinite period.

Symptom: Follow through became impossible. Leads on jobs would come in but would never be followed up. These kind of things just seemed to be insurmountable, impossible. Creating new leads or chasing new business was beyond consideration.

Symptom: Dandruff! really, a large scaly patch on my head that didn’t respond to shampoos and just kept being itchy and dandruffy. The Doctor described it as Seborrheic Dermatitis, but did not attribute it to the Avalide.

Symptom: Everything was last minute because I could never start jobs until they couldn’t be put off any longer.

Symptom: Dizziness when standing suddenly, or sometimes when running.

Symptom: Difficulties when running. I couldn’t find a comfortable pace and maintain it. After a few minutes I would drop back to a walk because my legs bothered me. Climbing stairs – the ones in Hamilton go 200 to 300 steps up the Niagara Escarpment – beam nearly impossible.

Symptom: Imagine a long slow shot in a movie, panning over the landscape, caressing every detail of light, shadow and texture. Like a long, slow breath, taken in during yoga or meditation. That’s how my mind feels usually.

Now think of the worst TV commercial or music video, chopped into a thousand edits, frame to frame to frame, frenetic and non-linear, forcing you to scramble to keep track of what was happening.

Since sometime last year my brain has been like that music video. A choppy, fractured experience that follows no discernible path from A to B. Following a conversation, or a movie, or my own thoughts became impossible. Instead I was surrounded by pieces of broken glass and mirror, each reflecting a different piece of information or experience, none of them necessarily connected.

Taken together these symptoms made it nearly impossible to work, leading to slow spiral into declining productivity and declining income. The stress that followed may have been from that, or from the medicine – who knows. I know that on one hand I was aware that I was slipping, but on the other it just didn’t seem worth the trouble to try and counter that dynamic.

The other noteable and maybe frightening thing about this was that no-one noticed it. Even the people closest to me (except for one person) missed it, except to chock it up to stress or overwork. No-one on the outside could see what I was feeling, and until near the end I was in the middle of it and couldn’t tell that something was very wrong.

Now, after three weeks of reduced medication – I’m chopping off one third of each pill – my head is clear, my vision and scalp are back to normal, and I have literally done more work than in the last three months.

ALL of the symptoms above are gone.

I’m not a doctor, but I can add two plus two.

Following up on an earlier post here. Today Wonkette reports on an Al-Jazeera article, referring to a Democracy Now interview with Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi blogger and architect, who said he has obtained a copy of the new Iraqi oil law.

As Wonkette so politely puts it,

“The draft law regulating Iraq’s liberated oil industry was kindly written by the Bush Administration working with the major U.S. and European oil companies. A leaked and translated version shows that long-suffering corporations like Exxon-Mobil will keep as much as 75% of the oil revenues.”

(graphic stolen from courtesy Wonkette)

In his Hear 2.0 blog Mark Ramsay has great post about how the 14 to 29 age group is “unsellable” in radio. He ends with the comment:

“Habits acquired while young are lasting.”

I agree. Especially the radio habit.

I started out listening to radio in my teens at a time when small town radio was locally owned and locally programmed.

In Kelowna BC, around the time that I was in Grade Eight, that meant Bob Gourlay’s “Crystal Sound Barrier” show every week night from 7 to 9 pm.

My classmates and I ignored the country music shows, the easy listening music, the gardening call in show, but we were tuned in every single night to hear what would be played.

Instead of trying to build one large homogeneous audience CKOV radio served probably a dozen distinct groups with shows that each had loyal followings.

I’ll wager that the teenagers that tuned into CKOV’s two hours of rock and roll in the early seventies are still radio listeners. And that thanks to Bob they have really wide ranging tastes in music.

Twenty years later radio was flying towards lowest common denominator programming, and the kids who were listening to Nirvana and Sonic Youth sure weren’t finding anything on commercial radio that interested them. Heck, neither was I.

Some of them turned to college and community radio – my niche – and some to the Internet, downloading, and iPods.

From an early age they learned to get their music and entertainment from everywhere but commercial radio.

Now of course the boomer and post boomer population is aging, and a whole generation has grown up ignoring radio as irrelevant, or as something that their parents or grandparents listened to.

Instead of looking at the next ratings book, the commercial radio industry has to start looking a decade or more down the road, at who they will need as an audience, and at the niche that they can fill.

Five stations all playing variations on Classic Rock isn’t going to do it, as are the multiples of Lite Music for your office.

(You have to love the Internet – where’s Bob Gourlay now? Still doing radio, and selling real estate in Mallorca!)

(As if to prove my point, I just saw, for the unpteenth time, a horrid commercial for some forgettable radio station that shows two naked, yellow paint covered fat middle aged guys smashing out of an egg to the tune of “Born to be Wild.” It’s really disturbing and I still don’t recall what station they’re advertising, but apparently these are the new Morning Crew.)

Unintended consequences.

Cutting back on Avalide has also solved the dermatitis that was plaguing one half of my head.

Yes, my dandruff is disappearing, without Head OR Shoulders.

Further to my previous post, today I went running with Ursula the Wonder Pup. We were out for an hour and half on the rail trail that runs through the Chedoke park here in Hamilton, out to the hydro towers that overlook Highway 403 and back.

It was a glorious sunny winter day, the trail covered with hard packed snow which is lovely to run on.

More important was how I felt while running. For the first time in many months I could settle into a comfortable pace and maintain it at length. Gone were the moments of dizziness, and the feeling of tiredness that used to plague my legs and calves.

Even though some of this could be my imagination, I feel that the quality of the experience has returned to what it was two years ago when I began to run.

I’ve been measuring my blood pressure several times each day and so far I see nothing to concern me. If anything I still seem to run lower than normal.

My best guess is that I’ll stay at 2/3 of a pill each day for another week or so, and then see if I can reduce to a half pill.

I thought that I was going mad.

For months I just never seemed to be able to finish projects. I would forget things. I would make mistakes.

I would have incredible difficulty getting started to work. I would be distracted, unable to focus, unable to keep on one job at a time.

Simple tasks seemed to become complex. I always seemed to be dragging things out to deadline, frantically rushing to finish them good enough to get by.

I knew that something was wrong, but couldn’t grasp what it might be. It was intangible, less about symptoms than about a general uneasiness, a feeling that something just wasn’t right.

Or more to the point, that a lot of things should have been easy for me now were difficult, and that I should have been able to juggle enough projects to keep busy, keep the money coming in, and do that with considerable success.

Finally in the months leading up to Christmas I found that I almost couldn’t even start new projects. I struggled just to keep up with basic work. At the same time I began to have dizzy spells, and began to have problems with my eyesight.

I began to get frustrated, anxious, and a bit scared.

In February I made it in to see a doctor. An appointment for January, rescheduled. Because of the horrible lack of doctors in Hamilton it had taken two years to find this one, and there was really little choice.

All of my blood tests were fine, a quick physical found no real problems. In all respects I was quite healthy.

Still I described the symptoms, the problems that I was having. The confusion, the lack of focus, the dizziness when standing up.

Could this be tied to my high blood pressure? Could it be that I was being over medicated and suffering low blood pressure?

I had been on Avalide, a product of Bristol-Myers Squibb, for ten years, through nearly as many doctors. I had also lost some thirty pounds, was eating healthy, and was now getting lots of good aerobic exercise. It was not inconceivable that it was time for an adjustment to the medication.

All that I knew about Avalide was what I had been told by the original doctor – it was new, it combined irbesartan, which relaxes the blood vessels, and a diuretic which caused me to excrete water – pee in other words. It had almost no side effects.

And I would be taking it for the rest of my life because high blood pressure doesn’t go away.

I was really getting distressed. I knew that something was very wrong, but the doctor – in a hurry to get to the next appointment in five minutes – dismissed my concerns and told me to stick with it for another month.

Finally out of frustration and desperation I just stopped taking the pills for several days. That’s a bad thing to do, possibly dangerous, but at the time I just couldn’t see an alternative.

I had to know what would happen if I kicked these things.

Almost immediately my head cleared, my symptoms disappeared, and I could work all day without problems.

I accomplished more quality work in three days than I had in the past two months.

That’s when I actually got on the ‘net and started to do research. A Google of “Avalide” turns up generic drug information sheets – drug company propaganda.

Almost every one had something like this:

The following adverse events were also reported at a rate of 1% or greater, but were as, or more, common in the placebo group: headache, sinus abnormality, cough, URI, pharyngitis, diarrhea, rhinitis, urinary tract infection, rash, anxiety/nervousness, and muscle cramp.

This stuff is so safe that there are more side effects with the placebo than with the real pills.

Avalide is unlikely to produce side effects, and if any do occur they are usually mild and temporary.

Then I tracked own a couple of discussion forums where the discussions were between patients, not drug reps and doctors.

I damn near fell over when I read this:

Since I’ve been on avalide it has caused me to have times of total confusion. I become very disoriented and weird. My face feels sort of numb and my vision is off. It seems that I am seeing outlines of things after I look away from them and my eyes are sensitive to light. I just feel like I am highly doped up and I hate it. … I’ve been dealing with this feeling of pressure in my neck that sometimes interferes with swallowing and digestive motility. It feels like someone has a mild grip on my neck. That is why I changed over to avalide. Are there any BP drugs out there that work and do not cause weird side effects?

The more I looked these message boards, the more I realized that all of the blood pressure medications have significant side effects that they are ruining people’s lives.

For now I’m taking a run at 2/3 of a pill each day, and can see a real improvement. I still seem to have an hour or so in the morning when I’m scrambled, but it’s much, much better than where I was three weeks ago.

I’m not sure where I’m going from here. I’m getting lots of advice on how to fiddle with medications and dosages to find something that will work, and I know that I have to take charge and not rely on the doctors.

Looking back over several years I have to wonder just how many of these side effects were already happening without me knowing it. I can think to episodes that were similar, when I just couldn’t get things together for some reaons.

I always chalked those up to stress, or fatique, or similar issues, not to medication.

Now I’m just trying to get my life back on track, to get my business back to where it should be. Hopefully I can get bills paid at last, and begin making headway.

Lordy, you just can’t make these things up… The US government shipped planeloads of cash to Iraq, and now can’t account for much of it.

By “cash” I mean honest to God US Mint paper currency – the kind with dead Presidents on it.

How much? According to CNN “a total of 363 tons (of cash) were loaded onto military aircraft.”

It is perhaps no surprise that “The special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, said … that $8.8 billion was unaccounted for after being given to the Iraqi ministries.”

UPDATE: Maybe this will help.

“The Royal Canadian Mint: Canada’s official money-maker wants to stamp out a $1-million coin. Coin experts say it would likely be made of gold, be the size of a pizza and be extremely heavy.”

Oooh! who can resist the chance to “run at least the core experiences of Windows Vista?”

Although this came from local computer retailer, I expect that this gobbledygook came directly from Microsoft.

Incidentally, Bill Gates showed up on the Daily Show this week, and was really, really dull.

Ok, I’ll say it.

Selecting a file (or files) and then dragging them to the trash can icon (which of course is hidden in the dock) is neither intuitive nor simple.

In fact it’s a pain in the butt.

I just want to press “Delete” and have things deleted.

UPDATE: 22 comments later (thanks Slashdot) I am still of the opinion that the logical thing is have the key marked “Delete” be the one that you press to delete a file.

Not Cmd-Backspace, not apple+backspace, not Right-click -> ‘Move to trash’, not META-backspace, not Open Apple + Backspace (hmmm quite lack of consistent terminology here) and not adding a button to the Finder toolbar.

I’m at a loss how CMD-Backspace makes it harder to accidentally delete a file compared to pressing a “Delete” key.