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MEDICAL TIMELINE
by Morley Leonard Evans © 2002

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SUMMARY:

NOTE: See the attached Medical Timeline for a graphic representation of what is essentially a simple story.

From examining the evidence it seems clear enough that I was the unwitting victim of a “double blind” medical experiment that spanned ten years, including one repeat of the experiment. I would like to report today that I am completely symptom free, but I cannot. All of my troubles could have easily been avoided had the doctor who prescribed Zocor withdrawn the medication when I reported problems. Instead, he ignored my complaints, breezily assured me there were no side effects — “Just take it and forget about it” — while he doubled the dose and prescribed a second drug. By this, a pattern was set.

Symptoms immediately appeared with Zocor, the first statin drug, and receded when it was discontinued six years later. These symptoms reappeared with Lipitor, the second statin drug, and receded when that was discontinued. At no time did anyone, none of the doctors, nor I, the patient, associate the symptoms I suffered with a statin drug. More than a year after the experiment had ended, I was provided — by CBS News in fact — with a clue as to the probable cause of my ten years of suffering. A compilation and analysis of the evidence supports the hypothesis that statin drugs, while they may be fine for some people, do not agree with me.


DETAILS:

In January 1992, Dr. John N. Alport prescribed Zocor after he said a blood test had indicated hypercholesterolemia. At first he gave me “free samples” since Zocor is expensive. Dr. Alport did not associate with Zocor the severe flu-like symptoms I experienced for the first two months I took Zocor. Instead he thought it was “probably the flu.” I had never experienced such extreme pain (in my muscles and joints). I found temporary relief by taking three very hot baths each day, morning, noon and night. After I had recovered somewhat, Dr. Alport doubled the dosage of Zocor and added a prescription for Elavil, “an old antidepressant that is being prescribed again these days to relieve pain.” Otherwise Dr. Alport ignored my repeated complaints for the next four years: I would complain about my problems and Dr. Alport would shrug. He took only one blood test during that time, to eliminate the possibility that I might have arthritis, and possibly to confirm to himself what seemed to be his underlying diagnosis, hypochondria. I responded to my deteriorating condition by doing less and less. I dutifully took my Zocor every night before going to bed, never suspecting it could be the problem.

In the summer of 1995, my mother, who, like Dr. Alport, also didn’t think there was anything much wrong with me — except laziness — decided I should assist a carpenter for two weeks repairing her beach cottage. With this fairly mild exercise, I was immediately plunged into the same extreme pain I had experienced in January 1992. I had a hot bath when I returned home after a day’s work and a hot bath each morning when I rose before going back to the cottage. When this ordeal was finally over, a friend suggested I see Dr. Stewart McMillan who, she said, had helped her chronic pain. After a consultation, Dr. Stewart McMillan diagnosed me with “fibromyalgia” for which he prescribed Naproxin and Elavil. When my condition worsened, Dr. Stewart McMillan doubled the dosages. Dr. Stewart McMillan was offended when I told him I was worse than I had been before. Then, after three months of living like a Zombie I decided Dr. Stewart McMillan didn’t know what he was doing and I discontinued his nostrums, never to see him again. I continued to take Zocor every night before going to bed.

With my few options exhausted, I returned to Dr. Alport who decided that I might have “fibromyalgia” after all, except, he cautioned, “fibromyalgia is a “controversial diagnosis” which most physicians think only describes an imaginary disease. Nevertheless, Dr. Alport decided he would be a good sport about the whole matter and humour me by referring me to some specialists. Dr. Alport sent me to a sports medicine and physiotherapy clinic for the “tennis elbow” I had somehow picked up while hammering nails into the cottage the summer just past. Eleven months later he referred me to Dr. McDougall, a rheumatologist. I was in such extreme pain the day I went to my appointment I could hardly walk, but that didn’t persuade Dr. McDougall that there might be something wrong with me — and if there was it certainly wasn’t arthritis. (What afflicted my throbbing swollen hands? I asked. He shrugged with a blank look. Dr. McDougall was interested in the psoriasis under my fingernails, however, and he showed this to his colleague whom he had invited to my examination.) Dr. McDougall wrote a prescription for Voltarin SR, which I had told Dr. Alport was helping my brother who has psoriatic arthritis. Voltarin SR provided blessed relief from my pain, but it was no cure, so seven months later Dr. Alport sent me back to physiotherapy. Two months after that Dr. Alport referred me to a psychologist for a second opinion so he could prescribe Dexedrine “without fear of being charged for dispensing a restricted drug,” Dr. Alport told me. The physiotherapy helped. I stopped taking the Dexedrine after only one day. Dr. Alport was disappointed when I told him I had thrown the Dexadrine into the garbage. He thought I should have given it to him because, “Somebody could use it.” I continued taking Zocor every night before going to bed and I took the other drugs that had been prescribed to relieve my pain, help me sleep, treat depression, ease my itching skin, settle my indigestion, and on and on. I was managing my disability from within my deteriorating and steadily shrinking Kafkaesque life. Each night when I got into bed, I felt as if I was dying. I continued to take my Zocor.

In May of 1998, my sister drove me to see a doctor in Wakaw, a little Saskatchewan town of 2,000 people about four hours north of Regina. An acquaintance had told me the town’s one doctor had cured his chronic pain with a controversial treatment the doctor called “prolotherapy”. My acquaintance emphatically urged me to make the trip to see Dr. Cenaiko. Once there I learned from the doctor that he had successfully treated about 75 percent of the hundreds of patients he had seen over the years with rheumatoid symptoms. All the while the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons had steadfastly opposed what Dr. Cenaiko was doing. Yet the town had a hospital as well as the doctor’s clinic and the townsfolk thought enough of the doctor to dedicate a park to him. I decided to take a chance. The day after my examination and consultation I had my treatment which involved a small injection of a sterile glucose solution into the ligaments at several hundred sites in my neck, upper back, shoulders, chest, ankles, feet, wrists, hands and fingers. The procedure was very painful, despite Demerol, but I had been warned to expect this. The purpose of the injections was to create inflammation that would initiate the “healing cascade” which would cause the body to repair itself and cure what had been causing the initial complaint. Dr. Cenaiko had advised me to discontinue all the medication I had been taking, especially anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers. I would have to patiently wait for nature to take its course, he said. And suffer. I followed the doctor’s advise and stopped taking all medication, including Zocor, since, at that point, cholesterol was the least of my worries. Seven months later after a slow recovery from excruciating pain as severe as it had been in the worst of times, I had gradually improved to the point where I was able to return to the gym to resume the program of walking and stretching that I had begun at physiotherapy. Although I was considerably better physically, my mind was pretty dim. When I saw him, Dr. McDougall was unimpressed when I demonstrated how much my condition had improved without drugs. He was more interested in “catching” Dr. Cenaiko and shutting down his practice. 

From May 1998, when I had my prolotherapy treatment, to February 2000, I enjoyed steady physical improvement in as much as I increasingly suffered less pain and stiffness. My mind however remained sluggish and I hadn’t been able to earn a dime in years. My most serious problem was financial. I tried to make a claim on the small disability insurance policy I had paid into for years and also tried to make a claim on a government disability program. Dr. Alport was less than no help. Then after searching for another doctor, I finally returned to the Broad Street Clinic where I discovered Dr. Annandale had taken over Dr. Alport’s practice. (Dr. Alport was still in the clinic, but he was not seeing his patients anymore.) Dr. Annandale unsuccessfully tried to help with my insurance claim. Then in February 2000 he decided I needed a test for cholesterolemia and then talked me into taking “free samples” of Lipitor. He gave me a big bag full. Soon my symptoms were returning. As a possible cause, Lipitor never crossed my mind. I suspected a food supplement I had started taking at the same time. Maybe my prolotherapy treatment needed reinforcement, I thought.

Meanwhile, after having waited for years, I finally got an appointment to see Dr. Sridhar in the “Sleep Disorders Clinic” at the Regina General Hospital. Dr. Annandale had arranged the appointment and I hoped I would finally find some relief from the insomnia I had suffered for years. I gave Dr. Sridhar a list of all the medication I was taking and made a point of mentioning Lipitor which I had recently begun. The doctor laughed. A good humoured man was he. I left with nothing.

Back at the ranch, Dr. Annandale mocked my complaints of renewed pain, dismissing them by saying I was “terribly unfit.” (Dr. Annandale is a mountaineer, don’t you know.) “Plantar fasciitis is what you have,” the doctor said with complete confidence. He recommended Dr. Scholl's shoe inserts for my foot pain. After discontinuing the food supplement without having any improvement, and after I had started with a new idea from Dr. Annandale — Andriol, an anabolic steroid — I returned to Wakaw, and to something that had worked, for my third prolotherapy treatment. (I had had a second treatment in September 1998 without incident). This third treatment went well enough, for something inherently unpleasant. On the return trip, my driver persuaded me to stop at Colonsay, another small town, to have something to eat at the truck stop. There I got food poisoning from an egg salad sandwich and then, having my driver stop the car about every fifteen minutes so I could roll out onto the shoulder, I vomited for the next two hours. It was grim. The last thing I remember was getting out of the car on my driveway and staggering to the house. The next thing I remember weeks later was coming out of a coma in a hospital bed.  “Hours of vomiting is more than enough to break something, if it is already weak,” Dr. De La Ray Nel, the gastroenterologist, told me when I saw him several months later. Dr. Annandale was amazed — stunned in fact — when I told him. So much for his theory that spinal osmosis created by Dr. Cenaiko had caused my stroke.

During the months following my hospitalization, I learned that the day after I had returned from my prolotherapy treatment in Wakaw my mother and sister had phoned an ambulance. I had been sitting in the La-z-Boy with my eyes open but I was not responding; I was no longer assuring them that I would be all right. At the Regina General Hospital, I was given a CAT scan which indicated I had a subdural hæmatoma. Dr. Buwembo, a neurosurgeon, drilled a hole in my head to drain the bleeding. I slowly recovered. Dr. Cenaiko’s prolotherapy treatment put the diagnosticians at the hospital, and Dr. Annandale, off the track since they began with the assumption that Dr. Cenaiko must have been responsible for whatever was wrong with me. They knew I had a massive infection in my GI tract, a significant fact which they never explained. They treated it. This was complicated by a thrush infection I had contracted in the hospital. They treated that. After three weeks, I was released to the Wascana Rehabilitation Hospital for observation and counselling. Then, after I was released, I began physiotherapy at Wascana as an out patient and I resumed my old physiotherapy regime. After that, I was enroled in a six-month rehabilitation program for disabled persons at the Neil Squire Foundation. I gradually improved.

A clue to explain what had been wrong with me for a decade came the following year, from CBS News on September 5, 2001. While reporting the recall of the statin drug, Baycol, by Bayer Pharmaceutical, CBS reported that “severe muscle pain and weakness” were common problems with this class of drug. I was amazed by what I then read at the Merck and Pfizer websites because I had been told by both Dr. Alport and Dr. Annandale that there were no side effects from statins. In fact, studies were showing they also prevent Alzheimer’s Disease, they had reassured me. The fine print that came with the drugs had to be read with a magnifying glass and it began by warning women not to take the drugs if they are pregnant or if they are breast feeding. It warned people not to take them if they have muscle or liver disease. Tell your doctor if you experience any muscle weakness or pain or if you are pregnant or have liver disease, they said. Wouldn’t one expect one’s doctor to know if one has liver disease or is pregnant? Do the pharmaceutical companies suppose the patient is responsible for instructing the doctor in medicine? No matter: my mind was sufficiently clouded — non compos (mentis) — after only a few days on Zocor that it was impossible to comprehend the legalese and medical mumbojumbo inside the packages. “Doctor knows best, trust him,” they always say.

I did.


CURRENT STATUS:

Two years after my head injury, when I had stopped taking Lipitor, I was better than I had been two years after I had stopped taking Zocor: my mind had become clear again. I still have muscle soreness today which I would call “transient chronic pain” for which I have tried various things with mixed results. (Any pain I now experience is nothing compared to the years of unending torture I endured while I was taking Zocor.) My joints are all right at the moment. Dr. Buwembo referred me to a neurologist who decided after a consultation that I didn’t have peripheral neuropathy. He was sceptical that statin drugs might have anything to do with my problems. My current G.P. decided I should be taking statin drugs, despite early on having said he would have known right away that they were causing my problems if he had known I was taking them. He referred me to the “Lipid Clinic” at the Regina General Hospital where three doctors (a nutritionist, a pharmacist, a medical doctor) and a pretty young girl — a representative from Merck — ganged up to sell me on Zocor! They weren’t interested in what I told them. I am sceptical now about anything these doctors say. Ten years of incompetence, bigotry and depraved indifference is more than enough. They have had their chances which they used over and over to my detriment. I am lucky to have survived this and luckier still to have solved the puzzle. Maybe I'll recover fully, with perseverance and luck. By the Grace of God.

I shall always be thankful for Dr. Cenaiko and Dr. Buwembo who saved my life. Others had better do some serious soul- searching while eating heaping helpings of humble pie: That goes double for Merck and Pfizer (Warner Lambert) with their stupid little pills and billions of dollars.

I thank my sister, Merna, who enabled my escape!

Happily and despite all, I am feeling relatively good at the moment. I may be one of very few people who can truthfully say he feels fifty years younger today than he felt five years ago. Many good things happened to me in the last ten years, things that wouldn’t have happened if the bad things hadn’t been happening. Good people helped. Life is always worth living, whatever one’s life might be like. Life is a divine gift. That was the most important lesson I learned.

There is always something worthwhile to learn.

Morley Evans
this 23rd day of January 2003





SOURCES:

The medical timeline has been compiled and cross-checked using my diary, the records of the physicians who prescribed Zocor and Lipitor, and the database of the Government of Saskatchewan Department of Health. More culpatory evidence was provided by the Canadian Pharmaceutical Association pharmacopoeia and the pharmaceutical companies Merck and Pfizer (Warner Lambert).

 
 

CONTRIBUTIONS:

Do you have your own medical misadventure to share? Send it to be published: misadventure@morleyevans.com. Try to limit your prose to 500 words and please don’t send it as an attachment, use plain text eMail only.


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