Adversely Affected by Advil

You may remember Cousin Kim from Erin Davis’ retirement show. She was my “date”. She’s a great lady and one of Derek’s favourite first cousins. Now, Kim is coming through a terrible ordeal as the result of seemingly “safe” over-the-counter medication. 

Kim had been dealing with severe knee pain for some time and finally had replacement surgery done. Following the operation, she was given morphine for the pain. Once she got home, she swapped out morphine for Advil, believing it was better for her. Her surgeon agreed and his advice was, “Take it with Tylenol too, they work together”. After about a week, she started to itch from head to toe. A couple of weeks later she found she couldn’t pee and called her doctor who told her to go straight to the nearest ER. Those doctors at Uxbridge hospital recognized the situation as dire: renal (kidney) failure. They had her airlifted to Toronto General Hospital and that began a long and frightening ordeal that isn’t over yet.

When you hear about someone undergoing dialysis you might think, well, there’s a solution if the kidneys stop working. What you don’t hear about is how awful the solution is. The number one side effect is nausea and vomiting and Kim got that at 11 on a scale of 1 to 10. It made her dread the treatments but she didn’t have a choice but to submit to the artificial cleansing until her kidneys got back to work. She understandably worried that they would never start up again.

It took more than two weeks before her kidneys began to show signs of life. In the meantime, Kim endured a boring, scary and sickening stay in hospital. Although she’s home, she’s not fully recovered by any means. Any long-term illness sucks the life out of you, and in Kim’s case, her body is slowly working its way back from the trauma of the sickness and the cure.

So, what’s the villain in all of this? Advil, apparently.  Says Kim: “I had no idea that continuous use could cause kidney failure, even though my continuous use was only for two-to-three weeks before the kidney failure happened. It actually says on the bottle that it can cause kidney failure (which I found out after) but I don’t think I’ve ever read the bottle except for dosage. I do believe my surgeon should have given me a warning.” She was taking two pills every 4-6 hours during the day, with 2 Tylenol if the pain was severe. She was tapering off the medication by the time she called her doctor but the damage was done. The itching was the start of her kidneys shutting down.

Advil is considered so safe, so routine, that likely none of us has read the bottle. I know I haven’t. Considering that Kim was advised to take it regularly, and with Tylenol, to deal with constant pain after surgery, a warning ought to have been part of the surgeon’s conversation. Kim will make it part of the conversation with her surgeon this week, to prevent future incidents of this kind with other patients.

Cousin Kim isn’t back to work yet, although she’s going to try a few hours at a time this week. She still has a long way to go after this experience with a “safe” medication.

“I still get very tired, sometimes nauseous and a really fast, heavy heartbeat when I do too much, which includes being on my feet for more than an hour.  The doctor said it would take about three months, maybe more, for my kidneys to function normally.  But things are definitely getting better and I can’t wait to get back to a more normal life.”