Lamictal Day 39: 125 mgs? Oops.

I'm supposed to be taking 75 mgs of lamictal.  Today I accidentally took 125.  For a drug which can have serious consequences if too much is taken too soon, this could have been a serious mistake.  So far though, the only side effect seems to be some mild tachycardia, which went away after I meditated.

How did I manage to screw this up?  Well, in order to replace the disastrous NorthStar lamotrigine, a prescription which my psychiatrist had written for 25 mg pills, I needed a different denomination of pills in order for my scrip to be covered by insurance.  Lamictal and lamotrigine apparently don't come in a 50 mg denomination (no, that would be easy).  My pdoc had to write the scrip for 100 mgs, and then I was supposed to break them in half, and cut the remaining piece in half, and thus achieve 75 mgs.  Kind of confusing.  To help explain, here's a picture of Teva lamotrigine:

As you can see, they're scored down the middle, so it's pretty easy to break them in half and get 50 mgs. To break one of those halves in half takes a sharp knife, but it's doable.  I know this because I did it yesterday.  Then I put the half of a half tablet back into the medicine bottle.



Where, this morning, I mindlessly grabbed it, along with a whole 100 mg pill, and swallowed them.  Oops.

I wasn't sure what might happen.  The Rash?  A splitting headache?  Hypomania?  Wandering lung?

Turns out it was nothing dramatic.  I felt somewhat dizzy when I stood up after eating breakfast (in a way that's different from the usual head-rush feeling that the medical community has labeled "orthostatic hypotension" for our convenience), but it went away pretty quickly.  There was the aforementioned tachycardia, which also went away, and hasn't returned, even though I had to visit the dentist today, and I really HATE that.