EYWA hydrocortisone pills unstable
I’ve been having worsening control of my adrenal insufficiency. It started the beginning of February and just kept feeling like I was about to have an adrenal crisis out of the blue.
By March, everything was constant it felt like someone had my head in a jar and was shaking just the jar, then my vision was shaking. I couldn’t read on the computer or do anything because it would get worse. Sometimes it felt like I was on a rocking boat and it would even wake me up out of my sleep. Heart rate was out of control (130-150s) and my cardiologist couldn’t get it to stay down.
I stressed dosed but that didn’t improve it much so my endocrinologist decided to up my daily dose a bit to count for all the stress dosing I was having to do. None of my other doctors could figure it out. I even went to ophthalmologist in case it was my eyes because I couldn’t understand why stress dosing wasn’t helping, not knowing that the these unstable pills meant I wasn’t even reaching my normal daily dose.
Sometime in January or February this year, my pharmacy switch manufacturers from strides to EYWA Pharma Inc. I saw that this generic leaves way more dust than normal, but I didn’t think anything of it at first. One bottle had one pill that was like weirdly cut in half longways and I thought it was weird so I put it aside but I was so out of it that I forgot. Idk if there were more like that in that bottle but if there were, I might not have noticed.
Then in April, I go to refill my weekly pill container and realized there is a lot of dust at the bottom of the bottle; enough to represent several crushed pills so I pour out the bottle into a small bowl and see the pictures above.
Took it back into the pharmacy, showed them, and they replaced my pills with 20 from EYWA and 10 from strides. After starting the intact EYWA pills, my heart rate normalized after 1 day for the first time since February and symptoms significantly improved. But by day 3 I realize that the symptoms were coming back and the “intact” replacement pills were breaking up to around the imprinted 5, the score line, and the edges. I switched back to strides and now I’m finally starting to feel like I’m getting better.
It looks like my entire nightmare of the last several months was caused by these pills and I already submitted a report FDA med watch but I wanted to make a post just to give people a heads up in case anyone else was experiencing the same issue. My sister has the same condition and her pills (last photo) were breaking up as well so it wasn’t just me getting a bad batch. I was so out of it these last few months from being under-replaced that it made it even harder for me to realize what was happening and I’m going to have to see more specialists now to determine what damage these pills did.
(Also I wasn’t sure if I should also post this on r/adrenal insufficiency so any advice on that would be appreciated)