Life after Lipitor

In my last post I described the effects of three years of Lipitor on my memory. This event has changed how I think, what I do, how I work. Unfortunately it has caused me to find barriers that are self-created.

My mother was poorly educated but very intelligent. She taught me to accept my limitations, but not to invent them.

The limitations imposed by struggling to retain vital information for longer than minutes has made me completely re-define my life. Now I discover the limitation was imposed by a drug. The manufacturers of that drug were aware of the problem. They state that they have 145,000,000 YEARS of patient usage from which they gather data. That means that Cholesterol patients have been taking Lipitor for a combined total of 145 Million patient-years.

If two percent of patients are suffering memory loss that is a total of 2,900,000 years of misery and suffering spread across patients taking Lipitor.

• That is 38,666 lifetimes.
• That is 116,000 people taking Lipitor from age 50 to age 75.
• That is 290,000 people taking it for 10 years.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are victims of a simple statistic - only two percent have memory problems. A percentage too small to worry about.

• I am one of the two percent and I resent the three years that have been taken from me.
• I resent a growing business that has been reduced to a shadow of its former self by my inability to move it forward.
• I resent the personal trauma I have suffered believing I was incapable of performing any longer at a sustained level that I have maintained for decades.
• I resent the loss of confidence in my abilities that I now have to re-establish.
• I resent the sleepless hours at night worrying about the result of my descent into Dementia or Alzheimer's on my family.

I am ANGRY.

Fortunately I know I will rise above this and move on, but the damage will take some time to repair.





Images from Flickr by D Sharon Pruitt, pink sherbet photography and Caseywest. 

How Lipitor Stole Three Years Of My Life

Over the last two to three years I have begun to have memory problems. I can't remember when they started, but that is hardly surprising. My son said it started as if someone had flipped a switch, perhaps he is right.


I had a computer business. I was writing software for a number of businesses. I also did computer repairs. Many of those involved virus removal and cleaning up Windows to improve performance. My memory became so bad that I would tell someone I would call that afternoon and then forget to go. I would bring a computer back to the office for repair and forget where it came from. This is not the way to run a business. The business languished.


I began to wonder if I was developing Dementia or Alzheimer's. I allowed the business to run down to nothing, and began working as a casual bus driver. I could not remember the number of the bus I was driving, but that was OK, it was printed on the bulkhead above my head. The route was on file cards, and the ticketing computer told me where each stop was.

If Its Tuesday, This Must be Launceston

I was living in a fog where doing each task required intense concentration. Old information was at my fingertips. I could remember the IP addresses of servers I installed 10 years ago, but not today's date. The current time became a puzzle. I would drive past a café and wonder if my friends where there having lunch and then realize it was 7:30AM. My years of experience developing software, designing and managing security installations and flying all over Australia installing high priced electronic and mechanical systems was  far in the past.


Shadows lengthened across my mind. I own 5 computers. I would estimate I have re-installed operating systems and software on them about 100 times in 3 years. Sometimes I would install, remove and re-install 3 times in one day, trying to get it right. Then I would re-install a few weeks later just to find I had settled on the current setup for a good, but forgotten reason.


I began taking copious notes about everything, writing numbers on my hand, Post-it-Notes, in Tomboy Notes or pocket notebooks. I often could not find the notes.

The Lipitor Effect

Then a friend told me he had been having memory problems until he stopped using Lipitor (Atorvastatin), a common Cholesterol medication. I had been Diagnosed with high Cholesterol several years ago. I was on a fairly high dosage. I had begun taking it at about the same time as my memory began to go.


After a couple of months I decided to try a change. My doctor was quite offended. He assured me that if there was a problem with Lipitor, it would be in the medical literature and he would know. He humoured me, and suggested I stop taking Lipitor for 3 months

The New Me

A month after stopping the drug, I feel as if I am waking up from a long dream. I can remember the date without looking a my watch. I can remember not only what bus I am driving, but which one I drove yesterday. I can feel the ability to multi-task coming back. I feel like the shadows are shortening and the sun is rising after three years of darkness.

• I want to write software.
• I want to ring old friends and tell them I am back.
• I want to get that business working as I intended when I started it.
• I want back into life.

Look out, Phil Stephens is coming BACK! And this is after less than a month without Lipitor - the next months should be interesting...


Lipitor-Side Effects are discussed here, and a video about memory loss cased by Lipitor is here by ABC news

Images from Flickr by Peter Heilberg, Quinn.Anaya and Xornalcerto,