I wish you could keep in mind the front effects of statins, which is to save lives and the awful suffering caused by strokes and heart disease.
Well, to be fair to statins....
There has just been a piece on the BBC News about statins, and how they are wrongly blamed for many side effects.
I have been off them for months now, during which time, the weird episodes I was blaming statins for, gradually diminished in severity, so that sort of confirmed it was the statins - except, in the early hours of Thursday, I suffered another quite severe episode. I'm logging the incidents, and logged this one, in my attempts to work out what is causing them.
Since stopping the statins, they substituted ezetimibe, which coincided with my suffering knee and elbow joint pains, but only on waking - so bad, that the joints were seized up, on waking. The doc, advised me to also stop the ezetimibe two weeks ago, since when the pain has eased, but not completely cleared, so today, the doc has suggested restarting it, and wants me in for a face to face. Once 'unseized', my joints are fine, no pain at all.
The doc, the hospital, 111, etc., all seem as puzzled as I am by these episodes. For instance, this was what happened during the most recent episode....
I'd had a bit of a stressful, frustrating day, and I had got up unusually early. I retired to bed at 10pm, still quite restless. For the entire day, my hand had felt bruised and sore, as if I had thumped something hard, but I hadn't, and no sign of bruising. Very tired, but restless, at midnight, I felt an episode coming on - my arms felt very weak and heavy, so I got up, which seems to be the precursor to such an episode.
Having got up, I spent the next couple of hours, unable to settle to sit, lay down, work out whether I was too warm, or too cold, a feeling of intense doom, but with no physical pain anywhere, just the weak arms. They both felt like the do when you've had an injection, but much worse than that. When it diminished, I decided to make my way to bed, but as it often does, it immediately struck again, so I got back up. I eventually dozed off in the chair, then curled up to sleep properly on the settee for an hour. All back to normal, I finally went to bed around 4am.