Quite a few years back I was having a big problem with eczema and it was driving me crazy. I went to see a doctor about it. This was around the time when doctors were prescribing prednisone for everything as if it were a wonder drug. Well as it turns out, prednisone is a steroid. I didn’t know that at the time. I knew nothing about steroids.
My imagined physical and mental changes.
The doctor prescribed 150 mg per day, which by today’s standards is enormous and dangerous. I read the warnings given to me by the pharmacist. It said that side effects could be that the person taking it could experience “physical and mental changes.” That was all I was told. I thought that was a bit of a vague description and my imagination started picturing these strange mental and physical changes.
I pictured myself morphing into a deranged flesh eating hump-back troll with a limp. The picture to the left was similar to what I was imagining. Then I laughed at how silly that was. I asked the pharmacist what that meant exactly, but he did not know.
I guess I will find out, I thought.
I began taking the pills at 150 mg per day. They were amazing. Within a few days, my rash was gone and I was feeling like superwoman.
The first thing I noticed was that I had no more aches and pains anywhere, no matter what kind of hard work or physical activity I was engaged in. Second, I worked non-stop from morning to dark doing hard physical labor in the yard and garden. I was annoyed when the sun went down because I had to stop working for lack of light. Normally, before the medication, I was a couch potato.
Bare in mind that I was 56 years old, I don’t like physical labor, and did not like working outdoors.
My appetite increased and I ravenously ate three very large meals a day. As much as I was working I expected to lose some weight, but the calories I consumed kept me the same weight.
My work:
During that two weeks I built a boarder around my herb garden with cinder blocks, hauling them by hand, and I also built some steps to a back door using bricks which I simply buried in the dirt. I was down on my hands and knees digging in the mud.
I build an archway leading to my cantaloupe patch out of tree limbs, tying them together with bailing twine. Then I thought I needed a small pond so I got a shovel and dug a hole. I lined it with plastic trash bags and filled it with water. That was my pond. It was not good for much except attracting mosquitoes.
After dark, I developed a strange interest in flower arranging. I dug out all the silk flowers I could find that were lying around in bags that we had been using for graves on memorial day. I started arranging them in vases. But that was not enough. I wanted real flowers.
This is probably what I looked like.
This is the strangest part. I only had some orange lilies in my yard and I wanted a variety of flowers. So I would get up at 5:00 a.m. and put on a gray wig and get on my bicycle and go riding down alleys looking for flowers to pick out of people’s back yards and from bushes hanging over the fence. After I got enough flowers, I would come home and put them in vases all over my house and my mother’s house.
I actually thought I was developing a new interest in flower arranging. At the time, I did not attribute this behavior to the pills I was taking..
After the two weeks were up, I learned how dangerous taking this much prednisone was. I was told that I should go off of it gradually. I was out of the pills so I had to go off of it cold turkey. As soon as I did, the skin rash came back and I got real sick. I was in a lot of pain and suffering from a very bad cold and flu and maybe a bit of pneumonia. I was sick in bed for two months, hardly able to move the whole time.
After I recovered from all of that I was no longer the slightest bit interested in flower arranging or working outside or on the garden. It was not until I returned to normal that I realized that these were the side effects and these were the “physical and mental” changes.
Physically I had felt like super woman. Mentally, I wanted to arrange flowers. Other mental changes were that I could not stand looking at a pile of clutter. I spent every waking moment picking up clutter and became a obsessive about neatly arranging things.
There are a lot more side effects with these steroids. They can destroy your immune system, and they can cause your bones to turn brittle. You can burn yourself out or have a heart attack as a result of using these drugs.
If it were not for the dangerous and strange side effects, this would have felt like a miracle drug. I can see why some people get addicted to it. I felt like super woman while taking them, but they almost killed me. I thought I would never get out of bed. I was sick for a month and dragging around from another month.
The moral to this story is don’t take steroids and if you have to take a small amount for some medical reason, get informed of the risks. If they can change how you think, that could spell a one-way trip down a wrong path. Be aware of the risks and use with them caution.