My wife has had a sore throat for a couple of months. Gets worse at night, becomes just annoying during the day. No fever. Tried ten days of doxycycline about a month and a half ago, no improvement. Tried amoxicillin for ten days, finished a couple weeks ago. The amoxicillin cleared it up until the day before her last dose. Effective, but it apparently didn’t kill it fully. Before the amoxicillin, she had visible white craters in at least one of her tonsils. One of her tonsils was inflamed but we don’t know if it’s always that way. It’s been inflamed ever since (less than a month that we know of).
No fever. She did have a fever briefly right before she started the amoxicillin (pretty sure on the timing there) but none since.
During this all she’s also had a cough. So have both of our girls and I. The cough went away during her amoxicillin.
She quit smoking three days ago. She didn’t notice the scratchy throat getting better or worse as a result, though it may be way too soon to expect any real change from the cessation of smoking.
She went to the walk-in clinic today. The person who saw her prescribed the antibiotic levofloxacin (trade name Levaquin). She was also prescribed Flonase, which has its own yucko symptoms but they don’t come near the severity of levofloxacin’s symptoms and so Flonase is not the subject of this post.
I looked Levaquin up immediately, as I always do with anything my wife or children are prescribed. The side effects floored me. That first link is to the Levaquin.com web site and the side effects are, simply put, horrific.
I quickly texted my wife and she called me promptly. She had already left the walk-in clinic. I told her briefly about the side effects and what I wanted her to do. I called the walk-in clinic and talked to the receptionist. I told her that I simply was not comfortable having my wife take an antibiotic with such severe (and apparently long-term judging from first-hand reports online) symptoms for something that is not life or death. It took my wife about an hour to sort this out and get her new prescription. They prescribed her Azythromycin, which is fine with me.
While my wife said she doesn’t blame them, she said she got real attitude from the nurse and that the person who prescribed the levofloxacin (not a doctor, I believe) never came back to see her. My wife said the nurse gave her the attitude of “it’s that antibiotic or none” and my wife had to press to get something between amoxicillin and levofloxacin without the utterly nasty side effects, to which the nurse finally asked, “What does your husband recommend we prescribe?!?” My wife said azythromycin would be okay and so they prescribed that.
I’m very disappointed with how they handled it. Instead of treating my wife with understanding, they chose to go in a very different direction, getting territorial and making her the bad guy.
I’m also quite disappointed that they prescribed levofloxacin in the first place.