26 August - Clomipramine side effects?

I hope our happiness at getting the clomipramine will not turn out to be short-lived.

I slept reasonably well but had a bit of a headache in the middle of the night. Took paracetamol. Early in the morning around 5.30-6am I awoke with my mucles feeling a bit tense, especially across my stomach, and feeling slightly sick. After a while I got up, or rather sat up, and felt very woozy indeed. I was lolling around like a very drunk person. After a while the feeling passed. I lay down and rested with some deep breathing until I heard Olga getting up. She checked my blood pressure with the machine we have got and said it was normal but a bit lower than usual for me.

I didn't have much appetite for breakfast this morning but began to feel better after tea, coffee and porridge. Right now (9am) I'm feeling pretty much back to how I have been feeling on other mornings. But at the time it was not a pleasant experience.

We don't know if it was the clomipramine that caused this - after all, I had only taken one tablet before going to bed the night before - but it will be easy enough to check. If you Google "clomipramine blood pressure" you will find that clomipramine can cause low blood pressure and some people may be hypersensitive to it and experience low blood pressure shortly after taking it. I don't know if I am one of those people, but one time a few years ago about half an hour after my GP gave me an injection for something else, I blacked out in a concert in Cockermouth and ended up in Whitehaven hospital after a fast ride in an ambulance. No-one found an explanation for why it happened. So perhaps I am hypersensitive to certain drugs.

It would be rather a blow if, having suffered almost none of the side effects of the treatment I have been receiving so far, I am unable to take this Clomipramine on which we had pinned our hopes. We will just have to wait and then try it again in a couple of days to see if what I felt this morning was just coincidence, a one-off.

Watch this space.