On a personal note….
So about a week and a half ago I became very dizzy. So very dizzy that the world went round and round and round and I held on for dear life to the table. I live alone. I pass out, nobody knows. Except the pets. And in desperation they might eat my dead body.
Because we know these things. But I came this close to dying from that Vertigo attack. I don’t know how but my life was this close to ending. After the vertigo stopped I vomited projectile, vicious and…well luckly I pulled a drawer out of a nearby dresser and threw up within.
Now there’s a prior account of this dizziiness stuff.
Back in June of 2018 I was on the blood thinner Coumadine. Some of you probably heard of it. Coumadine thins your blood, is not too expensive….BUT…you gotta get tested once a month. I don’t know why the test but you gotta fall between 2.3 and 2.5 or something like that.
I was forever failing and had to adjust the Coumadine and come back more often for tests.
Meanwhile in June I had an appointment with my General Practitioner. Part of my semi-annual appointments has me taking a blood test to test my sugar levels, etc. At about that same time I experienced another horrible vertigo attack.
Bear in mind that the dizziness does not stop with me close to dying. If I survive, the dizziness lasts for over a week. I cannot bend over, hell I can’t even sleep lying down for dizzy spells about to kill me.
And nobody told me the Coumadine, if I fail whatever that test was, would result in dizzy spells.
So my GP has my blood tested for sugar et al. She calls me up special.
“Pat, dear Lord. Did you know you are very anemic?”
Well no I did not know this. I was dealing with dizzy spells and failing the Coumadine test but I’ve never been anemic in my life. Meanwhile I have no fingernails, my hair is falling out and I am constantly tired.
GP tells me to take an Iron pill once a day along with a Vitamin B12. Which I do and then it gets better.
“You need to eat more green vegetables and get your strength back,” the GP told me.
Which was the worst thing she could have told me, read on.
So I decide the hell with this Coumadine and I was getting suspicious about those dizzy spells. I tell my Cardio guy to switch me to Eliquis, another more modern blood thinner that does not require those awful monthly tests. Eliquis is very expensive but considering the cost of those tests, which I was taking every other week at this point….I thought it a good idea.
You are warned, as many of you might know, that eating green vegetables while on blood thinners is risky. Nobody told me about dizzy spells or whatnot but eating spinach is evidently some kind of crime.
Cardio guy thinks my switching to Eliquis was a good idea. “And you never have to worry about eating spinach,” he says with a laugh as I’d been joking about it.
Now I don’t eat that much green stuff, no more than anybody else. But I was suspicious of those constant failing Coumadine tests and the dizziness was about to kill me.
So around September of last year I begin Eliquis and hurray! No more weekly tests.
Two weeks ago came that dizzy spell that damn near killed me.
I had eaten some asparagus prior to that, not all that much, but my suspicions were up.
Took me a week to get over those dizzy spells. Had to change the cat litter by picking up the pan and putting it on a table since I could not bend down. And because my GP has suggested those Iron and B12 pills, I began taking them and boom, I felt better right away.
So I wrote a long and crazy letter to my Cardio guy, AND my GP, and told them I am in danger of death for these blood thinners. The Cardio guy told me I had no worry about green stuff while my GP is telling me to eat more.
Cardio guy, who relented to my somewhat sarcastic email, had nurse call me. This coming Friday I will see him in his office but I cannot live with the Vertigo.
Your health is in your hands. The doctors get busy and all mixed up and I’ll never know why the Cardio guy told me don’t worry about eating green stuff with Eliquis. Evidently he got bad information on that.
Or maybe blood thinners are not for me? Or maybe I should stop eating ANY green stuff; maybe I am especially sensitive to turning my blood pink.
Indeed, my blood was a very pretty color of pink.
Sorry to take up time but who knows, when you get old you begin to need blood thinners.
DO NOT EAT ANY SPINACH NO MATTER WHAT THEY TELL YOU!
Will keep you all posted and wish me luck.
They use to say the condition is iron poor tired blood
In addition to the b12 and iron tab, here is a list of iron rich foods.
I too had anemia and am now much improved
peas
molasses
liver
potatoes
oysters
fish
egg yolks
soy besnd tofu
pine nuts, pea nuts almonds
beef good cuts
whole grain oatmeal
beans
That number is called INR. It is a measurement of how thin/thick your blood is. The thicker (lower number) your blood is the more risk for stroke. The thinner (higher number) your blood is the more risk for bleeding.
Green vegetables have vitamin K. Vitamin K affects the blood thinner medication. It is the vitamin K you have to watch.
Beef is good. My husband is also anemic and red meat (beef) helps.
Take good care of yourself, Fishtalk! We all love reading your posts, you are such a character, but now even the people like me who read this Sunday thread and have the wits to keep silent are worried about you. Could you maybe at least make a pact with a close, reliable friend and set up a habit of briefly calling (or even just ringing) or e-mailing or texting each other at a certain agreed upon time each day,just in case there is a health crisis and you or that friend can’t reach the phone?
Eeeeeee-yewwwww1!!!
That right there will kill you .
Thank you so very much-you may well have just saved my wife’s life! She was on warfarin and is now on Xarelto-and has also been having severe dizzy spells-which the quacks can’t seem to figure out. So bad that she fell and broke her wrist on Dec. 15 and then had another spell, fell again, rebroke it and is now facing surgery on it next Friday.
What makes things worse is her cardio very nearly killed her two years ago before he realized she could not tolerate Amiodarone! After 3 hospital stays in which the hospital quacks refuse to even notify him, I took her to the hospital he practices at and got the problem resolved.