6:22am February 28, 2015

Triptans

I’ve been organizing my meds lately (I’m on an organization kick, and I seem to finally be able to at least organize my PRN meds on my iPad, that and my sleep schedule) and I came to Axert, which almost nobody has heard of.  So I thought I’d tell you how I came to be taking Axert, in case it helps someone.  This is just my story, I am not a doctor, and there are some serious risks associated with triptans (including drug interactions), plus weird things like it being bad to use them more than two days a week, so please talk to a doctor and don’t just demand a script for the nearest triptan.

So triptans are used to abort (or lessen) a migraine in progress. They work best the moment you realize you have a migraine or migraine aura.  For me there are a number of signals, the most reliable being my head involuntarily turning away from any light source.  YMMV.

But the reason I’m on Axert?  Each triptan is slightly different. Here’s a list (first names are generic, the rest are various trade names for each one):

almotriptan – Axert
frovatriptan – Frova
rizatriptan – Maxalt
sumatriptan – Alsuma, Imitrex, or Zecuity
zolmitriptan – Zomig
naratriptan – Amerge, Naramig
eletriptan – Relpax, Relert

Those are all the triptans on the market right now, to my knowledge (there’s a couple more that were never marketed).  Before I went to the headache clinic, I’d tried Maxalt and Imitrex and neither had done much good.  My headache neurologist told me each person responds differently to the triptans.  And that I should try every single one before giving up.

I tried every. single. triptan. on. that. list.  Axert was the last and I didn’t expect it to do jack shit, but it actually worked.

Unfortunately there’s no sublingual version of Axert.  This creates problems because I’m on a feeding tube that doesn’t play well with crushed pills (j-tubes are tiny and clog easily), and anything I swallow goes into my stomach and ultimately is drained out my g-tube, being useless for actual medicines.  I once put, at a doctor’s insistence, liquid antibiotics into my stomach through the g-tube.  I drained the g-tube 12 hours later when the nausea became unbearable… the antibiotics (clearly visible because thick and white) were still in there.

So what I do is I chew Axert into tiny pieces and stick that under my tongue until they dissolve in my spit.  It tastes horrible but it does the trick, and if I can remember to take it, it definitely makes my migraines more bearable (it doesn’t ever really stop them, but it makes them much better).

So “You tried a triptan and it didn’t work, so triptans are useless for you” is definitely inaccurate advice even if you heard it from a doctor.  I had to try every single one before I hit on one that undisputably worked (there were others where I just couldn’t tell if they worked or not, most just didn’t work).

3 notes