This is my first post in Chronic Pain. I am posting for my husband who just had a terrible reaction with gabapentin last week. He was on a very small dose for two years (100mg a day). It wasn't doing anything for his pain so they had me move it up gradually over a few weeks. When we hit 900mg he became very aggressive and we pulled it back to 600mg and then he became someone he 'wasn't', very aggressive, violent, wanted to commit suicide, etc.....all the horrible things you can imagine. My husband has peripheral nerve damage pain (I guess) in his feet from an accident 50 years ago. He also has cancer and COPD. Generally he feels awful but he doesn't have nerve damage from cancer because they can't identify his cancer type (he has cancer of unknown primary). His cancer is not being treated and is not growing. It's a very difficult and frustrating situation because it's been almost impossible to treat.
I thought that his decline in health might be improved if the doctors could help him with the pain. We have the COPD in pretty good shape and we monitor the cancer activity on a regular basis, waiting for answers. Well..........gabapentin was a horror. Now they want him to use Cymbalta instead of the Celexa he's been using for anxiety and depression for many years without incident. And what about this Ketamine? Does anyone have any insight on that? I don't want to put my husband or our family through another 'gabapentin' incident and risk my husband taking his life. The doctors won't prescribe narcotics due to the COPD and keep offering these drugs that alter brain chemistry. That seems sketchy to me at best but????? If anyone can offer some support, I'd appreciate it. I am going back to the doctors today and hope to get some clarification but they aren't even taking responsibility for the gabapentin being a bad idea, so........I'm losing hope they can or will help. (p.s. I am unfortunately pretty saavy with medical nonsense as I've had breast cancer twice, my husband has been seriously ill for several years and I just had a horrible experience of sepsis this last fall.........but it's still hard to get any respect or support from our doctors. We're with Kaiser so our choices are limited with doctors, sigh).

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