Gabapentin Causes Post Traumatic Dementia?

I never expected to go through post-traumatic depression from a nasty bilateral four-finger frostbite amputation I experienced recently.  I applied for assistance from the government and was told to drop dead twice.  I can't pay the medical co-pay for my prescriptions.  I think I will fly a sign, help a homeless bum pay for his medical, food, and shelter costs.  I wonder how long it would take before some deranged cop tried to arrest me for creating a nuisance.  Would the inmate population treat a fingerless person with more respect than the police?  But being so vulnerable, perhaps I would be robbed of my nefarious gains by a fellow street person and would require the assistance of the police before I was arrested.  Are crippled people targets for thieves?  When I run out of medication do I go through delirium tremens, and will this require further hospitalization?  Will they control my hallucinations with a good dose of Thorazine?  Do the police assassinate deranged visionary cripples who create a disturbance from sudden medication withdrawal, people who shout at cars, and wave their stumps about in a frenzy while baring their teeth like rabid dogs?  If rabid dogs are removed to protect society why not remove indigent unemployable cripples who are nothing more than stinking parasites who siphon money from productive taxpayers?  The city could employ squads of angry citizens who would round up undesirable bums much like animal control rounds up stray animals.  They put down animals, why not bums?  In ancient history when I was a productive person, (not to be labeled a hypocrite), I would have favored a platform that called for the extermination of bums.  Now that I am disabled, I am ready to volunteer as an example to others.  Civic duty requires worthless people to step aside to create prosperity for others, as there are a finite number of resources...

There was a nasty social worker who asked me some of the stupidest questions when I was in the hospital.   Why do social workers exist and do they serve any useful purpose in this world?

The family took me to a local bicycle shop, maybe out of some sort of sadistic prompting.  When I saw all of the new beautiful bicycles that I could never afford I almost cried.  The salesman treated me like a piece of crap.  Salesmen are only interested in generating sales of high-end bicycles, I understand this sort of morbid reasoning.  People are insisting that with some bicycle engineering modifications I may be able to ride again on a road bike.  I doubt that this will ever be possible because the muscle functionality in my hands has not returned to the extent where I can apply enough pressure to the brake handles even to work hydraulic breaks.  There may be some future improvement, time will tell, but if not, there is always an ugly cruiser which does not require a hand brake.  Wandering around the shop I even found a copy of Tyler Hamilton's book The Secret Race.  Seeing that book made me feel violently ill from noxious disgust.  Tyler Hamilton was a doper extremist and my favorite target.  Tyler Hamilton was so gifted as a rider it was difficult to understand his bipolar depression.  But athletic gifts do not absolutely preclude mental instability.

They gave me something called gabapentin to kill phantom pain.  I hate all medications illegal or prescribed.  The side effects of gabapentin constitute a virtual syndrome of symptoms, including a lethal mix of depression and dementia.  Maybe I should call a doctor.  Some strange physical sensations seem to persist in my hands.  I attempt to describe these sensations to the bored outpatient clinic workers who tell me these sensations are not uncommon.  They doubled my dosage of gabapentin, maybe I am taking too much.  I am having weird memory lapses.  I should call a doctor.  These sensations in my hands are not normal.

Wired in a hospital bed while in perfect health is a strange experience.  I kept trying to convince the staff there was nothing wrong with me and perhaps the bed could be more usefully filled by someone who was really ill.  The hospital staff assured me there was plenty of space.  Being in a burn center, I saw faces of children fried from burn accidents, beautiful innocent little children scarred for life.  How could a compassionate loving God allow innocent children to go through the trauma of being burned?  How could a loving God allow frostbite?  Have me burned for being a blasphemer, heretic, an infidel.  I welcome death.  Death would be preferable to these horrors.

They could have amputated my thumbs, but then again there is voice recognition technology.  There is really no excuse, failure to adapt to modern-day technology is not a systemic failure, it is an individualistic failure.  I see families who sit around the kitchen table for hours with their noses buried in their cell phones, oblivious of each other and the surrounding environment.  The new normal. I had no desire for a cell phone and was happy.  The rustic life I loved has been taken away.  I am bored cooped up in a house all day.  I want to heal and then to vanish into thin air.  Demented thinking takes on many colorful hues, as an expanding soap bubble.

My surgeon, Dr. Amalia Cochran, has a blog herself, Life in the Wild West, the musings of a burn surgeon.  I could not refrain from reading some of it.  She was complaining that at an academic conference some of her male colleagues commented unfavorably upon her flowery attire as lacking in professional etiquette.  I wanted to be an organizational sociologist once, I even read, Men and Women of the Corporation.  Have we as a society yet to emerge from the stone age of male/female professional relations and is there still a gender-specific double standard?  I hope people are beyond such mundane concerns as to what constitutes proper attire in professional settings, there are more pressing concerns, all this nonsense seems so trivial...

Demented reasoning again?  But, you know, a woman commented, without fingers how do you jerk off?   I did not expect an existential question of such probity.  How do you respond to such a question without being gender-specific?  If I respond I need to hire a prostitute does that make me sexist?  Should I fall upon my knees and beg the first woman I see?  Would she have me arrested for perversion?  Since I have no wife and am not gay, do I risk offending anyone and does anyone care about being offended anymore?

This is 2015, not the stone age.  We regard ourselves as very sophisticated people, at least we enlightened ones do.  The unwashed are the same old dullards, unable to grasp the concept of equality for all regardless of circumstance.  Thus utopia is foiled once again, nipped in the bud by the same old prejudicial nonsense, the inability to share power between the sexes on a level playing field.

Anyone care for another gabapentin?

Addendum:

I was looking at the neurotransmitter, Gamma-Amino Butyric Acid (GABA) out of scientific interest.  GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter found in the central and peripheral nervous systems.  GABA seems to slow the firing rate of excitatory amino acid-dependent neurons. GABA has been touted as a natural tranquilizer and has been given to patients with anxiety disorders under the hypothesis that over time, increased platelet levels of GABA induces beneficial sedative effects.  However, oral administration of GABA may not pass the blood-brain barrier, therefore, GABA taken orally may be nothing more than a high priced placebo.

Okay, everyone knows my opinion of supplements.  Bodybuilders seem to think that GABA increases levels of human growth hormone (HGH) and muscle mass...seriously?  GABA is being taken as a performance-enhancing drug?

Mode of action of gabapentin from the Physicians Desk Reference:

GABA analog; has not been established. Binds with high-affinity to the α2-delta subunit of voltage-activated Ca²⁺ channels. Analgesic Effects: Prevents allodynia and hyperalgesia (animals).

One of my doctors said that gabapentin blocks excitatory amino acid-dependent receptors.  A very generic explanation as no doubt there is a whole constellation of excitatory amino acid receptors.  Nevertheless, there is no doubt that gabapentin crosses the blood-brain barrier, the drug is prescribed for seizure disorders.  Seizures are postulated to be caused by scar tissue from injury near the corpus callosum, or the area of the brain that contains neurons that connects the hemispheres of the brain.

In the good old days, scientists experimented upon themselves with unknown drugs and they recorded their own physiological reactions.  Nowadays crazed researchers use laboratory rats under stringent ethical rules to establish medical efficacy of drugs. Then there are cumbersome human trials and voluminous recorded medical data sets.

Good enough, but consider this, how does a rat express his or her mindset without language?  If a rat sits all day in the corner of his or her cage with a languorous demeanor does this indicate a depressed state of mind? May an inference be made as to the state of mind of a research animal based upon a downcast expression?  Perhaps.  But the complexity of human reactions does not generally generalize between species, people can mask depression or anxiety with cheerful expressions.  Therefore, human verbal descriptions of changes in psychological health are required to determine how side-effects of drugs can be adequately described, measured, or predicted.  Radical invasive measures are forbidden.  Living human tissue samples from the brain cannot be extracted for the research purposes except in extreme cases of radical surgery where large tracts of damage exist, but even so; neurons that survive in vitro work beyond the ken of human understanding.

I would willingly contribute slices of my limbic system to expand knowledge of affective disorders like the intrepid researchers of old, but that would be considered unethical as long as I am alive.  Better would be to dedicate my corpse to science, medical students could spend all day carving up my cadaver marveling at the abnormalities.

But damn it! gabapentin does not block dead excitatory amino acid-dependent receptors, does it?  [Indeed: calcium channels are dependent upon stimulation of receptors to perforate the double membranes of the vesicles that are contained within the presynaptic neuron.  The perforated membranes then release neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft.  So I am uncertain as to what sort of receptor blockade my doctor was referring to.]  And my GABA receptors can't report to me what is happening, damn it!

Another scientific breakthrough squandered by limitations of the human brain!