clonazapan memory loss issues

[gskhaladon]

Hi!

My name is Paul and I am writing about my gf Michelle.

She has NO short term memory at all. Its like 50 first dates other than she has long term memories, she knows me, her son, her ex, her family, but the day before never existed.

In her mind its still early summer before she had two epileptic seizures in the same day. She is a lifelong tonic/clonic epileptic.

At the time of the seizures, she had been seizure free for 3 1/2 years. Due to 100s of falls in her life @ 6'1 (6'4+ in heels) she has a great deal of musculo/skeletal issues, nerve damage in her right wrist, and a nuerostimulator to control the pain in her ankles. She has been diagnosed with chronic regional pain syndrome.

So, in June she was on paxil 2.5mg, birth control, Tylenol PM, and 200mg of zonegran (on 16 years for seizures).

She had a minor surgery to replace the nuerostim in her spine for the ankle pain.

They gave her a muscle relaxer flexaril which led too..

She had two seizures and sprained her ankle during one. We think the flexaril caused the seizures as she has a sensitivity to nuerotin based drugs.

They added a short course of tiazadine, and then switched over to 0.5mg clonazapan 2x daily.

She ended up in the hospital with fluid in her lungs and had a thoracodomy and 2 chest tubes.

During recovery she was on 5mg oxycodone as needed, tapering off as August wore on.

Come mid August, she was physically doing better when we decided to go on vacation and after checking with her PCP and her neurologist I let her drive a bit and she nearly killed us. I got her off the road ASAP, and later I questioned her and she didn't remember driving at all. I'm like OMG, what? Backtracked and apparently she wasn't processing anything from short to long term memory. For the last two months she was mostly bed ridden from two surgeries, two seizures and fucked up on the oxycodone and sleeping a lot so I never asked questions like 'so what about that movie we saw last night', but mostly, are you hungry/cold/hot/need meds/etc?

So what is the prognosis for being able to process short term memory again? She has been off for 33 days and nothing has changed.

The doctors seem to know nothing about this. They have her seeing a 2nd neurologist, a clinical psychiatrist, a nuero-psychologist, and she had a CAT scan on Friday.

This is really scary, she's a bright 38 year old woman who basically spends the day in bed watching mindless TV because she cannot process memories. She does what I ask for chores and help around the house, but she cannot drive, work, or help in her own care, remember to take her medications etc.

Oh she is only on the paxil, birth control, and zonegran now. I also got her off the Tylenol PM and switched her to melotonin.

HELP!

~Paul

 

[Keif' Richards]

It's too bad you haven't gotten any other responses yet. I'm gonna try to help out here, but Benzodiazepines are not really my forte. I've used them extensively at various points in my life, sometimes to get fucked up, but mostly to deal with withdrawal from Opioids. I've never really taken them long-term, so keep that in mind.

First off, Benzodiazepines are well-known for their ability to cause anterograde amnesia. What this means basically, is that from the point that the Benzodiazepines begin working, you won't be able to form new memories. The thing is though, that this usually is a symptom of Benzodiazepine intoxication; taking too much to the point of being fucked up. It shouldn't be happening at the dosage of .5mg, unless the person is very sensitive to Benzodiazepines.

The main point though, is that now she's off the Clonazepam (Klonopin). If someone was a chronic user of Clonazepam, a Benzo with a fairly long half-life and duration of effect, you might expect some residual effects for up to a few days as your body metabolizes the drug. 33 days is really quite a while and as I stated previously, 1mg/day of Clonazepam is not an excessive dosage. I wouldn't expect residual effects for a significant amount of time.

If she is still having memory issues and isn't improving, then I definitely think the Clonazepam is not the culprit in her memory loss. There must be something else going on and I feel that only her Doctors will be able to provide you with meaningful information. I wish you luck and I hope it all works out. I'm gonna leave this open. Someone else might have some more valuable information.

 

[gskhaladon]

It's too bad you haven't gotten any other responses yet. I'm gonna try to help out here, but Benzodiazepines are not really my forte. I've used them extensively at various points in my life, sometimes to get fucked up, but mostly to deal with withdrawal from Opioids. I've never really taken them long-term, so keep that in mind.

First off, Benzodiazepines are well-known for their ability to cause anterograde amnesia. What this means basically, is that from the point that the Benzodiazepines begin working, you won't be able to form new memories. The thing is though, that this usually is a symptom of Benzodiazepine intoxication; taking too much to the point of being fucked up. It shouldn't be happening at the dosage of .5mg, unless the person is very sensitive to Benzodiazepines.

The main point though, is that now she's off the Clonazepam (Klonopin). If someone was a chronic user of Clonazepam, a Benzo with a fairly long half-life and duration of effect, you might expect some residual effects for up to a few days as your body metabolizes the drug. 33 days is really quite a while and as I stated previously, 1mg/day of Clonazepam is not an excessive dosage. I wouldn't expect residual effects for a significant amount of time.

If she is still having memory issues and isn't improving, then I definitely think the Clonazepam is not the culprit in her memory loss. There must be something else going on and I feel that only her Doctors will be able to provide you with meaningful information. I wish you luck and I hope it all works out. I'm gonna leave this open. Someone else might have some more valuable information.

Thanks for the reply.

I talked to Michelle some this morning and we went looking in her journal, and back in July she wrote she was having trouble with her memory. She didn't tell me about it then, OR I wrote it off to the oxycodone and everything else going on.

Curiously, she recently (in the last few days) also mentioned she is having trouble picking out the right words to what she means to say and I read somewhere on this forum that is part of the benzo issues.

She is diligent about keeping a journal of what we do and talk about and I've built her a timeline so she can figure out what happened to her in the past few months when she asks yet again why its cold out when its summer. /le sigh.

Just some more info.

 

[Keif' Richards]

First off, Opioids shouldn't be a major contributing factor in memory loss, unless someone is a heavy user, which would also entail being essentially unconscious. I do believe that if it is taken with a Benzodiazepine though, the synergy could contribute to enhanced amnesia. I have to ask, are you fully aware of how much medication she's taking? The answer could be as simple as: she's abusing the Benzos and Opioids. That would be bad, but at least you would know the cause of the problem. These drugs are addictive.

I've had a couple of concussions in my life from playing sports. I had an especially bad one when I was about 10. I lost my memory for almost a week prior to the event and couldn't form new memories for almost a week. They didn't know if I was gonna be permanently fucked up or not, but I came around. My point is that, as you probably know, head injuries can easily cause amnesia. Our heads can only take so many blows.

I wish I had more information and that I could actually help, but the extent of my knowledge pretty much ends at psychoactive drugs. Only your doctors will be able to give you truly useful information at this point. It sounds like a complex problem. But as far as support goes, we're all here for you and will do our best to help you out. I bet a lot us would appreciate an update on her memory. I know I would.

Keep us posted!

 

[gskhaladon]

Hi!

Yah, I am fully aware of all her meds. We're inseparable as a couple, and esp after the seizures, she was bedridden and I filled all the prescriptions and doled out the pills and drove her to all her appointments. She's a trained medical assistant, and was driving daily for Uber as an income source due to her chronic pain which was mostly managed by the nuerostimulator, and in Mass, they are quite stingy with the opioids.

She asked her doctor to taper her off the oxycodone as she didn't want to take it, and just for reference, she doesn't drink alcohol at all.

She only started the clonazipan in mid June and was off by the end of August.

So yah, if she was abusing them, that would be an answer, but no, only as prescribed and even then, would avoid taking them if she wasn't in pain.

She always took the paxil, clonzipan as perscribed, and the zonegran she takes religiously for the seizures and is tested often for the levels in her blood of that.

 

[Keif' Richards]

So it sounds like it would be physically impossible for her to abuse her medications or to buy any on the side. At least that narrows down the possibility and leaves things a little bit less ambiguous. I really hope things improve for your girlfriend and I think it's really great that you're sticking by her and helping out. She's lucky to have you around. We can only hope that your medical team figures out something that can work for her.

When I experienced my concussions and had the amnesia, the only thing that made it better was time. I began getting memories back about 3 days after the concussion itself, but I wasn't fully recovered for weeks. I had missing pieces of my memory that I just couldn't fill in. It sounds like your girlfriend has had significantly more damage don than I have in the past, so maybe she just requires an extra-long amount of time to full regain her memory.

I bet she'll start to recover after a while. People do recover. I don't want to probe you or anything, but what have the doctor's said about her memory? Are they optimistic/do they have any idea at all what might be causing these symptoms?

 

[gskhaladon]

The doctors are lost as in no idea, and they passing the buck back and forth between the PCP and neurologist, so here I am looking for answers.

She is very sensitive to meds for sure. In 2015 they tried her on lyrica for pain and within 3 days she was virtually catatonic. She was off that that day and added to her allergy list.

 

[Johndoedoe.junk]

So when did the memory issues start? I used to be on Gabapentin aka Nuerontin which is an anti-seizure med that is used off label for mood stabilization as well as some types of pain and that gave me pretty bad memory issues. Just wondering if perhaps the seizure meds are a contributing factor.

 

[gskhaladon]

So when did the memory issues start? I used to be on Gabapentin aka Nuerontin which is an anti-seizure med that is used off label for mood stabilization as well as some types of pain and that gave me pretty bad memory issues. Just wondering if perhaps the seizure meds are a contributing factor.

After looking at her journal with her yesterday, I believe the memory issues started in mid-june after the seizures and she was put on clonazipam. She noted she was forgetting things and the whole week seemed to be a blur.

I first noticed it seriously the 3rd week of August. In between those times she spent about six weeks in bed after they drained 3 cups of fluid from her lungs.

~Paul

 

[Agoraphobiaphile]

I feel for you. I also have an epileptic loved one.. Albeit he is a heroin addict and the shit lowers his seizure threshold into full blown grand mal territory on the regular.. Like once a week... And the last one was different and long lasting than usual and really scared me and make me think he had some brain damage..

I've experienced hundreds of these seizures over the past 5 years and have been involved with his neurologists and stuff so basically I have a little anecdotal experience..

N I hope for the best for you but these neurologists don't know SHIT. They do their little scans and tests, throw some meds at you and say see you next month.

This is one man's opinion.. I just have no confidence in neurology at all.

This being said definitely let the doctors know about the memory loss as that is a specific symptom that they could possibly improve upon...

My other suggestion is get her off the paxil. That stuff is garbage. And what does she need an anti depressant/anti panic drug for if she has no memories?

IMO taking away any possible contributor at least to rule it out is a safe bet.