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From: Sharon
Date: 02/20/02
Time: 01:50:46 PM
Hi all-
As you know I have been suffering from vocal cord pain on and off since my fundo surgery 3 years ago and had found that speech therapy was the only thing that helped, and that helped me about 50-60% as far as pain went.
My doc thought he would try me on low dose amytryptiline(elavil) to see if it wouldn't really help me the "rest of the way", so I could be up and singing, possibly at my daugher's wedding in July. We were very hopeful that this could help. I started on a low dose, 10 mg the first week of December, and went off of it this week, and will report my results:
The elavil seemed to give me lots of headaches, something I don't normally have. I also gained 5 pounds while on it, something I didn't want to do! It appeared to make my post op bloat worse, and also made me slightly constipated. The good news was that I slept like a baby and it virtually eliminated the occassional times I would get chest pains, which we felt were spasms, cause it only happened if I ate too fast or too much food post op.
It did NOTHING for my voice - as a matter of fact, between June and December,(6 months) I probably had only about 3 flareups while not on Elavil. Since being on the Elavil, I have had at least five flareups in two months. Sigh!
The reason why I went off of them is because I feel that perhaps the elavil was relaxing my vocal cords too much, making the muscles around the cords work even harder to produce sound, thus causing further pain and aggravation. As a performer, I used to be warned NOT to take sedating types of meds before singing as it would make the cords sluggish and produce hoarseness and poor sound quality. Even things like allergy or cold meds (like Nyquil) were a no-no. So it makes sense to me that this may have sedated them, and since I have a bit of a discrepancy in the two cords coming together properly, I honest think that I had to work harder to talk on sleepy cords! Of course, this isn't a scientific theory and perhaps my doc will argue I wasn't on them "long enough", but he initially said I would see results within a couple of weeks. I saw results, all right -negative results. So it's back to the drawing boards for me.
Also, I did feel that besides the headaches and weight gain, the sluggish feeling in my digestive tract just wasn't a good thing for me either.
Any input out there from Elavil users? How is it going with you? Any good results in regards voice and throat issues? Does my theory sound like it might make sense? Thanks!