If at some point in the future a doctor offers you Gabapentin for pain control, run away as fast as you can. Our GP seems to think this is the latest and greatest panacea to be available.

This is a dangerous medicine.

Yes, it will probably cause you to be drowsy, but a good twelve hours of sleep takes care of that. Do you have four extra hours, plus a couple more of feeling very drowsy? I didn't; and I wasn't up to the theoretical theraputic dose. I was only takeing 400 mg and it was wiping me out.

Then there are the other, more obscure side effects.

For the wife, it messed up her glucose levels. As a diabetic, she can't have waking up with a reading over 300.

For me, well, let's just say that it messed up the nice, calm mental state I've been trying to maintain since being put on Depakote and Wellbutrin. Life was going along and then hostility and anger shot through the roof. Depression sunk me into an unbelievable gloom. I was, in a word, dangerous, to myself and others. Quite frankly, that old demon, suicide, raised its ugly head and tapped me on the shoulder, offering eternal solace.

The dreams? Yes, they were abnormal, weirdly abnormal, strange, scary, but not nightmarish. I kind of like dreams where I'm the star, it's quite another thing to have a dream where you're just a face in the crowd, not even an extra in the movie, just one of those people over there on the edge of the set hoping to get a glance at their favorite actor. I do not like dreams where I look across the street and see myself going into a building and not coming out, then going off doing something I have no memory of. I do not like being someone else. It's just too weird.

So, I stopped taking the vile medicine.

And, I'm much better, thank you very much.

Hostility and anger are back down to manageable levels, depression is practically nonexistent, I feel okay. Just okay, middling, which I'm supposed to feel on Depakote.

I can deal with middling.

The dreams are back to normal, too.

Quite frankly, I kind of like okie-dokie.