Floxxed

I was 35 when I had my last child, “my fourth and final installment,” as I like to call him.

I was physically active, fit and healthy right up to the end of pregnancy. I prided myself on my strength - at 40 weeks pregnant I could lift an 80# bale of hay to my shoulders to fill the hay feeder.

Despite having done this several times before, my body didn’t seem to want to cooperate this time around. He had been wedged, head-down, for weeks prior to labor finally starting…at 42.5 weeks of gestation.

After 36 hours of labor, off and on again contractions in a very-much-hoped-for home birth, his stats started dropping and we went in for an emergency c-section.

It was hell. The anesthesiologist tried to administer the epidural eight times, til I was literally screaming in pain, trying to stay hunched over during contractions while he tried to position the needle in my spinal cord. Finally, he was pulled aside and we heard yelling in the other room. Someone else came and succeeded in one try.

That was only the beginning of the difficulties I would face.

My child was born healthy, a surprisingly small 7 pounds, 7 ounces at such a late age.

I didn’t fare as well. I developed an infection at the incision site. After more than 40 days of low level antibiotics, it still wasn’t resolved and I was too unwell to continue nursing my son. Stopping nursing gave the doctor more antibiotic choices to work with, so he prescribed a fluoroquinolone called Levaquin to try to combat this infection that had gone on for three full months by then.

I read the insert and called the nurse, concerned about the side effects. She wasn’t really interested in discussing it with me, essentially told me “Take it or don’t,” and I was too tired and unwell to fight, so I took a several-day regimen.

I was very, very ill. I spent the first year and a half on the couch, barely keeping everything going. I fed the kids, I did the laundry, and I sat on the couch. I don’t remember his first steps, his first word, none of it.

Five months after taking the fluoroquinolone, I was admitted to the hospital with a critically failing gallbladder. Complications ensued, I was in the hospital for nearly a week but was eventually released to continue trying to heal.

Right after he turned one-year old, we moved to the house referenced in Not Another Summer.

I still felt unwell, had very little energy and a persistent brain fog that made life difficult. I developed anxiety, particularly around movement. For example, as a passenger in a car on curvy roads, my eyes could see that we were safe, but my mind was convinced a wreck was imminent. I couldn’t make my brain believe I was safe, so I fought panic in the car, especially on unfamiliar roads. As a result, I stayed close to home for the first few years.

Prior to my son’s birth, I had been a freelance editor. I lost the ability to think that way, and could not keep my editing gigs.

I developed severe food intolerances, feeling like I could hardly eat anything. There was a time when I genuinely felt like with every bite I was killing myself. Food became a thing of terror, because I reacted to so much and couldn’t understand what was going on.

Simple tasks, like combining meal planning, shopping and cooking, became impossible. Ten years later and I still can’t make those three things work together. It’s as if my brain lost the ability to make connections.

This is actually documented in the research - fluoroquinolones rewire neural pathways.

In my own experience, I liken it to all of my knowledge having previously existed in large filing cabinets inside my brain. The antibiotic essentially took those filing cabinets and dumped them on the floor. The information is still there, but it is much, much harder to access. Writing linear articles like this that recount events is extremely exhausting as a result. So is spoken conversation, because I must work so hard to translate the thoughts in my head into proper sentence structure and with everything scrambled, it requires a lot of effort. I find myself withdrawing from situations that require much talking as a result.

Social interactions that were tiring before now demand a toll, as long as two or three days of "recovery" depending on how taxing the event itself was.

In addition to damage consistent with the term “toxic brain injury,” fluoroquinolones also impact GABA function, collagen synthesis, mitochondria repair, detox pathways and virtually every body system. While not everyone reacts strongly, those who do really do.

Some wind up in wheelchairs. Some struggle with chronic pain, severe digestive impairment, suicidal ideations, organ failure, spontaneous tendon rupture—a risk factor for life—and other life-altering side effects. The FDA has issued a black label warning, the highest warning class it has, for these antibiotics.

The community formed from victims of this drug coined a term, “floxxed,” to describe the result of taking the fluoroquinolone class drugs. I was in a large Facebook support group and finally had to turn away. It was too painful to see the stories of people who had it so much worse than me. In fact, I considered myself lucky, even though I’ve lost so much.

I gained exacerbated ADHD, eczema, anxiety, a period of about two years of severe suicidal thoughts despite no outward cause, food intolerances, extreme difficulty accessing information in my brain, sensory sensitivity, photosensitivity, torn ligaments and recurring herniated discs, to name a few. I have balance issues, low energy, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, chemical sensitivities and difficulty finishing sentences. I overreact to foods, having to keep a pretty limited diet in order to avoid inflammation and reactions. I spend more time managing my health than just about any other activity in my life.

That’s not to say I live in misery. I am active as much as I am able, bicycling, swimming, kayaking and going to events with my family regularly. But those activities come at a cost and the toll must be carefully measured. I spend more than my fair share of time sitting down at a desk or a couch still, but the “downtime” is full of productivity, such as writing, business building and endless research.

And because there is no real support or acknowledgement for these issues, it was about two years after the fact that I finally understood what was wrong with me.

I don’t tell you this for you to feel sorry for me, though I hope my story can help bring awareness to the danger of this drug class that is still being prescribed abundantly, but rather to lay more of the framework for the path that unfolded ahead of me. Everything that followed on the heels of this experience came at great cost and effort.

Ten years after the fact, still struggling daily, I want to say this: I do not regret what happened. Because what came after could not have occurred if I had stayed whole.

In the interim, I learned herbal and natural medicine, things I could’ve absolutely used to heal that infection naturally. I took that knowledge and created an entire business, a business focused on empowering people. I have a community of over 40k users learning herbal medicine and how to walk through their fear to the strength on the other side.

I learned the type of staying power one can only get from severe physical impairment. I gained more patience, with myself and with others. And though I’ve always had empathy, my compassion for suffering has been greatly strengthened through this ordeal. Not just for others, but importantly, for the self I held to impossibly high standards before.

I wish I could have the strength and vitality I had before, but if you asked me to decide was the trade off worth it? I’d say yes, absolutely yes.