Ok, perhaps I should start by tempering by last post a bit. I am not going to make a claim that all generic drugs are evil. What I will say is that they are not always identical to their brand-name counterparts, regardless of what the drugs companies and the insurance companies might lead you to believe. I’m sure some generic drugs work for some people. But if you have taken Drug X for years and years and are suddenly switched to the generic, be aware that the side effects could be radically different. In theory the therapeutic results should be the same (though I personally will wait for further proof of that before believing it).

So, onto my story.

Sometime in January I went to the doctor for my routine annual exam and was prescribed my usual birth control pill (Ortho Tri-Cyclen). This was all well and good, as I had been taking this particular drug for five-plus years without any problem. However, when I went to drug store, the pharmacist recommended that I substitute the generic version (Tri-Nessa). Now I have pretty good insurance, so there wasn’t an extreme price difference between the two, but $5 instead of $15 is still saving money. I was a bit leery, but the pharmacist assured me that the two were “exactly the same.”

I started taking the generic, and forgot entirely that I’d even made a switch (since, after all, the two drugs were supposed to be therapeutically identical). If I’d realized I was actually switching medications, I would have been on the lookout for side effects. Instead, the side effects came, and I looked far and wide for other causes.

The first side effect to hit me was unprovoked crying spells. Now, I do cry pretty easily, but there’s usually some reason, even if it’s only a sappy commercial. These crying fits were inexplicable. I couldn’t stop myself from crying, but I had no idea why I was doing it. In many cases I made some little problem into a bigger deal than it was because I convinced myself that it must be the reason I was crying, that on some level it was bothering me more than I thought it was.

The crying quickly morphed into ridiculous mood swings and episodes of extreme depression. I am prone to depression anyway, but I really thought I’d been better since moving back here. I’m quite happy with my life right now, and the depression had me really worried. I started to believe this was something I was going to have to battle on a daily basis, which sunk me into an even deeper depression.

As I got more depressed, I lost touch with far-away people and spent less and less time with those closer. People would email, and I would forget or ignore the email. Phone calls went unanswered and were returned only after prompting by Matthew, who wanted to stay in touch with my friends, even if I suddenly didn’t.

As is typical with depression, I also lost motivation to do things that had once interested me. I grew lax about running. I spent less and less time on my Russian homework until I finally stopped going to class altogether. It wasn’t that I was totally incapable of working out or having fun. When Scott would come over to run with me, I usually enjoyed it. When Matthew would drag me to bowling or baseball games, I had fun. But I just couldn’t put any effort into deciding what to do or making myself do it. Worst of all, my sex drive completely waned. Suddenly sex seemed like a hassle, a waste of good sleeping time. I knew—mentally—that I enjoyed sex, but I just couldn’t get excited about it and my body wouldn’t cooperate when I did try. I attributed all of this to the depression.

The emotional and mental side effects were bad and scary, but I was reluctant to see a psychologist because I hadn’t had success with that in the past. And I knew I had always been able to snap myself out of depression in the past by keeping active. But somehow I just couldn’t do it this time.

However bad the emotional side effects were, it was the physical ones that had me really scared. I started getting headaches that bordered on migraines. Even when my head didn’t hurt, I sometimes felt like I was in a fog that I just couldn’t shake. My vision was blurry, something I eventually realized was a sudden inability to wear contacts. I figured it was allergies, or maybe time to buy new contacts. I was nauseous and bloated more and more often.

These could all be explained away, but my recurring yeast infections were more difficult to explain and were the cause of my eventual panic. I won’t go into detail, but they weren’t fun. Anyone who had bought over-the-counter yeast infection medication probably knows that there are warnings about the possible causes of recurrent infections, which include, among others things,diabetes. With my family history of diabetes, my common blood-sugar problems, my headaches and vision problems, I was convinced that the infections were a sign I shouldn’t ignore. I became completely paranoid and hypochondriacal, reading descriptions and symptom lists for not only diabetes, but every disease that might give me any one of my symptoms. This became especially bad between the time when I scheduled the doctor’s appointment and the actual day of the appointment.

Finally, two days before I was scheduled to go to the doctor, I made the connection that all of this had started around the time when I switched to the generic pill. Although I still thought it must be unrelated, I decided to see if I could find any information about Tri-Nessa. I soon found a website of patient reviews. After reading descriptions of more than fifty women who’d had no problems on Ortho Tri-Cyclen and suddenly developed awful side effects (many similar to mine) on Tri-Nessa, I began to realize that everything I was experiencing could be explained just by reading the side effects list included with the medication. Of course, these are the same side effects one could experience on the brand-name, but for some reason the generic was interacting differently with our bodies. On a blog was a story that sounded like it could have been written by me. Women on bulletin boards on other websites had similar experiences. A ray of hope entered my life with the thought that all of this would go away if I just switched back to my old drug.

A visit to the doctor yesterday confirmed what I was thinking. My wonderful doctor said that she’d heard stories like this about generic drugs, and it upset her that the pharmacist had changed my prescription without informing her. She agreed that switching back to Ortho Tri-Cyclen should clear up everything, but she humored my paranoia and tested me for diabetes anyway. She seemed to think it was a little odd that I wanted to switch back in the middle of a pack of pills, but she sympathized and wrote the prescription anyway.

Of course this is a costly move on my part, since I had already purchased one pack of pills this month and have now spent $45 for basically one-and-a-half weeks of pills (since insurance will only cover one pack every four weeks), but I have no doubt it will be worth it. I did not want to spend one more second on a drug that had such a negative effect on my body. I already feel better today, which I’m sure is more a result of knowing that the side effects will go away than it is a result of the one pill I took this morning.

It’s entirely possible that at least one of my “symptoms” was caused by something else, and maybe I really do need new contacts, maybe I do have unresolved emotional issues to deal with. But I’m fairly certain I will be much happier and healthier in a month or two.

So—be careful with generic drugs, and don’t take Tri-Nessa, no matter how much money it might save you!