You know how doctors say there is not such thing as too any vitamins? Well I have to politely disagree because, with a recent experience I had, I know that you can have negative side effects if you ingest too much vitamin B. This incident happened 15 days after I got out of surgery, only 8 days after I left the hospital. But let me start from the beginning….
Ok so before you have your stomach removed you get a packet from your surgeon stating all the vitamins you need to purchase so you can start taking them right when you are released from the hospital. One of those vitamins was B12 (which I talk about in my blog post “Vitamins on Vitamins on Vitamins”), well B12 can come in many forms. Such as drops, dissolvable tablets, and of course shots. I knew that my mom gave herself B12 shots, but the idea of giving myself a shot freaked me out so I decided I was going to try the drops. We ordered B12 maximum strength drops off of Amazon, and right when I left the hospital, I started to take them. One dropper full of B12, that was the dosage. So, every day I was taking an entire dropper full of this liquid B12, and I thought I was doing everything exactly right. Boy was I wrong.
Along with the B12 drops I was taking the Bariatric Fusion vitamins daily; these vitamins actually have B12 in them already. In fact, they have a bunch of B12 in them. So, I was taking not only the B12 drops maximum strength drops, but I was also taking vitamins that contained a super high level of B12 in them. I still thought I was doing everything right, I followed the instructions that were given to me by my doctors, and a lot of people who have had the same surgery as me said online that the drops work just as good as the shots. I thought I was a star patient keeping up with my vitamins to a T.
Another thing I want to add is that they warn you about hair loss following stomach removal. Since the surgery involves your nutrition changing so much there is a chance that some of your hair will fall out. Look y’all, I have SUPER bleached blonde hair. I am lucky to say that it is pretty healthy, but the idea of it falling out did not fly with me. Prior to my surgery I took biotin daily, and it made my hair grow SO fast. So, when I left the hospital, I decided to start taking it again. I wanted to do everything I could to prevent my hair from falling out, I would literally count how many hairs I would pull out when I was done showering, I became obsessed. The problem was the Bariatric Fusion vitamins also have biotin in them, so on top of taking the biotin pills I was also getting biotin from the Bariatric vitamins. I was doubling down on Biotin. I didn’t think that was a problem, I was under the impression you can never have too much biotin right? What is the worst that can happen?
I started noticing something was wrong about 3 days after leaving the hospital. At night, my hands started to go numb. It only happened at night and my husband and myself thought it was related to my blood sugar or circulatory problems. So, I would get up and walk around while drinking orange juice or apple juice, after a while I would go to sleep and wake up with the numbness being gone. So, I didn’t really think much of it, I genuinely thought I just wasn’t getting enough circulation. I was following all the instructions my doctors gave me, and I kept reminding myself of that, I was doing nothing wrong.
Fast forward two days, it was around 6pm when the numbness started in my hands, except this time is was different. IT WAS INTENSE NUMBNESS, to be totally honest I was freaking out big time. I was walking in circles around my parents dining room table shaking my hands to try and give them circulation, because I still thought it was a circulation issue. I remember my husband and me fighting about how it probably was my blood sugar and how I needed to keep up with it more. I literally took a spoon of sugar and poured the whole thing on my tongue, desperate to make the numbness stop. Well, I’m sure you can guess that walking around the dining room table and the spoon of sugar didn’t solve my problems. By around 9pm the numbness spread to my legs, at this point my entire arms and legs were numb. Now when I say I was freaking out; I WAS SERIOUSLY FREAKING THE FUCK OUT. I had no idea what was happening, I still thought I was doing everything right yet my legs and arms were going numb. I thought once I went to sleep I would wake up and it would be gone but no, not this time. I woke up the next day and the numbness was still there. So now I’ve been out of the hospital for 6 days, and my arms and legs are going completely numb. They weren’t numb all the time at first, the numbness would come and go throughout the day. But when I say numb, I mean NUMB. Like, I could barely pull up my pants when I went to the bathroom, I had such little sensation in my hands. I could step on something on the ground and not even realize I was stepping on anything. It was really scary, but I still didn’t think I was doing a single thing wrong, and I kept blaming it on circulatory issues. I thought it has to be due to the fact I’m sitting down so much, it just has to be. So, I started going for more walks throughout the day, those did absolutely nothing.
On day 8 the nurse practitioner from Johns Hopkins called me, she did this weekly to check in to see how I was handling the recovery. I casually asked her “uhh is it normal for people to experience numbness in their arms and legs following stomach removal??”. She got very silent, and then I heard her say “what?? How numb are they…”. I told her I was having issues picking up a remote, or a blanket, because they were so numb, I also told her my legs were numb. She got really silent then said “I need to contact your surgeon, you probably need to go to the emergency room, let me call you back.” Then she hung up. That’s when I started having a full fledge panic attack. I could hear in her voice that this was not normal and that she was really concerned. I had a feeling that I would be sitting in the emergency room later that night, at that moment I FINALLY came to my senses and realized something was not right and it was not related to my circulation.
She called me back about ten minutes later and told me to go to the emergency room immediately. I said “are you sure this is necessary?” and she said “you might be having a stroke so yes, it is.” At this point I was just not even ok, I told my husband to drive me over an hour, in rush hour traffic, to Johns Hopkins emergency room. That way, if something was seriously wrong with me, my surgeon would be in the next day to see me. We arrived at the ER around 7PM. I love Johns Hopkins and everything they did for me, that hospital saved my life, but their ER was a total disaster. I didn’t get called back until 6:30am, THE NEXT DAY. I was in that waiting room for almost 12 hours only 15 days after having my stomach removed. I remember it was freezing, and they kept saying they were out of blankets. Yet, everyone who was coming in after me got blankets, so where was my blanket?? My husband, bless his soul, raised hell and I got both a blanket and a wheelchair. How kind of them to provide me with these items for our 12 hour wait to be seen.. I understand that hospitals are busy, especially the ER, but this was just outright ridiculous. It didn’t help that half the patients in the waiting room were refusing to have their blood pressure and temperature taken when the med techs walked around every two hours. Leading me to believe that they were in the ER just to avoid being on the streets of Baltimore. I sympathize for the homeless, nobody should have to live without a roof over their head, but to make the ER wait time 12 hours for people who really need it is wrong. I was mixed with emotions of anger, frustration, and sadness. I was angry that I had to wait that long to be seen, let me also note that they did bloodwork on me within the first 20 minutes of me arriving, so they already knew what my vitamin levels were. I was frustrated because they took patients back in order of how severe your problem is. I know that numbness through my arms and legs is not a life or death situation, but I had just had my stomach removed 15 days prior. I slept in a wheelchair that night and had to take 3 pain pills because the pain was horrible. But I was also sad. It was hard to look at some of the people in the waiting room. It was hard to watch a woman walk across the waiting room and pick up an open bag of chips that someone left behind, and eat them. It was evident that she was homeless, and who knows how long it had been since she had the luxury of eating chips. Those 12 hours I spent in the ER waiting room I will never forget.
When I finally got called back it took about 4 hours for the doctor to come in and talk to me, at this point we had been in the ER for 16 hours. The doctor told me that he knew I wasn’t having a stroke; the numbness was too consistent throughout my body for it to be a stroke. He also did some visual and physical tests on me to see if I possibly had nerve damage from the surgery, since they gave me a nerve block. He said I didn’t have nerve damage either. He told me that he wanted to get another blood sample and left the room, it was at that time that the nurse practitioner who had told me to go to the ER called me. I told her I was still in the ER but the doctor was saying I wasn’t going to have a stroke (which was their main concern), she referred me to another nurse practitioner who was actually in the hospital just a building away from me. While I was in the ER I was on the phone with her and she asked me what vitamins I was taking, because numbness can be a sign of deficiency. I emailed her pictures of the B12 drops, the Bariatric Fusion vitamins, the biotin, and the vitamins D3. Let’s just say she got really quiet, then she said “the amount of vitamin B that is in your body is extremely high if you are taking these vitamins everyday”. She then proceeded to tell me that she had never heard of someone accidentally taking this much vitamin B, and she definitely had never heard of people going numb from too much of it. In fact, she called other doctors (while I was still in the ER) to see if they had ever heard of this reaction happening from ingesting too much vitamin B. Shockingly, no doctor had ever heard of this happening. Think about that for one second. NO DOCTOR at Johns Hopkins, one of the BEST hospitals in the nation, had heard of this reaction to vitamin B. They only had heard of it related to people with deficiencies.
The ER doctor finally came back in a few hours later and I told him that the nurse practitioner thought the numbness was related to my vitamin intake. I could tell that he was busy and he was positive I wasn’t having a stroke or going to die, so he told me to go home and follow the instructions of my surgeon and the nurse practitioner I had been in contact with. So, after about 18 hours of being in the ER I got my answer through a phone call and a few emails. I was pissed, to put it lightly.
The nurse practitioner reached back out to me while I was driving home from the hospital and told me that I needed to stop taking the B12 drops and the biotin. She said the combination of everything caused this crazy reaction. Lucky for me vitamin B is released from your body through your urine, so I was instructed to drink a TON of water and try to rid my body of all the vitamin B. I was also warned that the numbness could take about two weeks to go away considering how severe it was, and taking into account just how much vitamin B I was consuming. In reality, I experienced numbness for about a month after my ER visit. It gradually got less intense and occurred less often, but it was still there and would bother me for a whole month. My dad did the math, following the incident, and discovered I was taking over 9,000% of your daily dose of B12… EVERY DAY for 8 days. And that’s just B12, I was also taking extra biotin.
The lesson I learned from all of this is to ask your doctor about every single vitamin you are consuming before taking it, if I had this whole situation would have been avoided. I also wanted to share this story because I still have not come across anyone who has heard of this reaction happening from consuming too much vitamin B. I lived, I learned, I now give myself B12 shots. NEVER AGAIN WILL I TAKE THE DROPS.
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