‘FLOXED’ Chronic pain and panic attacks: My son’s journey to cope with the serious side effects of a common antibiotic BY NATHAN BOWE | NBOWE@DLNEWSPAPERS.COM
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nybody else out there know that antibiotics can have serious side effects? I didn’t. I thought they were fine. The more powerful, the better. That’s what I thought. Eight months ago, my son, Jonah, at the age of 24, found out the hard way how wrong I was. He got “floxed” after going to a local seven-day clinic and getting prescribed a Nate Bowe strong antibiotic, levofloxacin, for a bad sinus infection. What followed was months of pain and anxiety like he’d never known before. “Words cannot describe the anxiety it set off,” he told me. “The fear that you’re going to die, the major anxiety about what’s going to happen to you.”
‘The nuclear bomb of antibiotics’
As it turns out, anxiety is one of the serious side effects of levofloxacin, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But there are worse side effects that Jonah managed to avoid: He didn’t go blind. He didn’t end up bedridden. He didn’t rupture a tendon. Unlike the thousands of other people who have shared their stories, desperate for help, on websites and Facebook pages after taking levofloxacin. There’s a whole community of people online who report being floxed, as they call it. The fluoroquinolones toxicity group on Facebook has over 10,000 members, and the Floxie Hope website offers recovery stories, advice for the newly floxed, and tips on finding help. It’s alarming and demoralizing to read posts from people who are in chronic pain, permanently disabled or blind from being floxed, especially when it first happens to you and you don’t know how bad SIDE EFFECTS continued on page 10
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