Hi All,
Thursday night I was put on Topiramate (50mg working up to 200 mg eventually) for epilepsy (and bonus benefit migraine control - I have both.)
After 2 days on 50 mg of Topiramate I noticed some slight discomfort in my eyes like they were dry, achy, and a little light sensitive. My eye history is that I am extremely myopic and had a torn retina years ago, because the retina is stretched very thin. I'm on on Restasis for dry eye, so maybe the Topiramate is just drying me out a bit and I'm really sensitive to it. I was already about 20/30 vision wise so I'm not sure if my vision got blurrier in the past couple of days but I think it did; admitedly, this is possibly psycho-somatic, but eyes aren't anything to mess around with. I'm really worried because of all the warnings with this drug so I called the oncall last night who said many patients get eye "discomfort" and live with it. This is NOT what I've read. Eye "pain" or "discomfort" or "blurring" were a "call dr. immediately".
The other symptoms I'm having are racing speech (which I can live with), easy to get out of breath, and intermittent racing and irregular heart beat followed by chest pain. Note that I'm in excellent shape (have had a tread-mill test, etc), so I know it was the drug causing this.
The oncall said if I wanted to go off it (though he didn't seem all that concerned stating that the drug manufacturers are just "covering their butt") I had to reduce to 25 mg for a couple of days, even though I started on 50. I am doing that.
So... my question to the group is: Has anyone else experienced the dry/achy eye and not really had it be problematic and had it go away? I'm thinking of continuing the going off the drug, seeing how my vision seems next week, then maybe trying it again, but starting at an even lower dose to begin with, while under the supervision of my ophthamologist. Also, does the cardiac stuff subside for most people eventually?
Peace,
K
