And the scary part: if there’s an unfortunate side effect for you, you’re not getting away from it for half a year. It apparently happens with the injectable long term psychiatric drugs that someone just gets stuck suffering for months on end if that particular drug does not agree with their system.
Yuuuup. We try to give them by mouth first to check for those kinds of things, but sometimes
they’re just missed. I came in one week and got my same patient back and they’d had EPS for the almost entire time I’d been gone and nobody noticed because (aside from the drug being the lowest risk antipsychotic for EPS) the patient was complaining their teeth hurt and nobody made the connection it was because the EPS had been making them grind them! I only checked because I’ve had EPS before so cogwheeling is like the first thing I check for (after the big stuff like heart attacks and strokes obvs) for any complaint involving the head neck or arms. (I’ve heard everything from “my tongue feels too big” to “I’m blinking too much” to “the aliens implanted a chip in my neck” and “my arms have gone numb” that all presented with cogwheeling and were cured by benadryl or benztropine!) If I hadn’t by chance had that one weird professional quirk and also been assigned to that specific patient no one would have known.
Sometimes the horrible side effect drug is the only thing that stops them from throwing literal fucking haymakers multiple times a day, so you just pile on more meds to try to control the side effects and… pray. No joke, farm kids on meth are hell. All that strength and not a lick of sense or reason left.
And the scary part: if there’s an unfortunate side effect for you, you’re not getting away from it for half a year. It apparently happens with the injectable long term psychiatric drugs that someone just gets stuck suffering for months on end if that particular drug does not agree with their system.
Yuuuup. We try to give them by mouth first to check for those kinds of things, but sometimes
they’re just missed. I came in one week and got my same patient back and they’d had EPS for the almost entire time I’d been gone and nobody noticed because (aside from the drug being the lowest risk antipsychotic for EPS) the patient was complaining their teeth hurt and nobody made the connection it was because the EPS had been making them grind them! I only checked because I’ve had EPS before so cogwheeling is like the first thing I check for (after the big stuff like heart attacks and strokes obvs) for any complaint involving the head neck or arms. (I’ve heard everything from “my tongue feels too big” to “I’m blinking too much” to “the aliens implanted a chip in my neck” and “my arms have gone numb” that all presented with cogwheeling and were cured by benadryl or benztropine!) If I hadn’t by chance had that one weird professional quirk and also been assigned to that specific patient no one would have known.
Sometimes the horrible side effect drug is the only thing that stops them from throwing literal fucking haymakers multiple times a day, so you just pile on more meds to try to control the side effects and… pray. No joke, farm kids on meth are hell. All that strength and not a lick of sense or reason left.