diabetes and statins

[Felinia]

I wasn't sure if you were asking me - but it hit me like a truck - I was walking with sticks after about 3 weeks taking Atorvastatin and Metformin, my hips knees and ankles were painful, my muscles ached, I became unable to recall a lot of things - I sing English Folk music and had to relearn all my songs - luckily I had made a start on writing them down for my daughter, but it took months of work to get them back enough to sing from the words. I had to stick a post it on the photograph on my dresser to remind me which one was my mother. I was burning dinner, forgetting to go shopping, I was unable to concentrate enough to knit.
On top of that Metformin made me explosively faecally incontinent, my insides knotted up really painfully.
My darkest moments were just before Christmas 2016 when I decided that it might be best to kill myself rather than lose my mind completely and end up like the people I had seen in the care home where I worked for a time. Around the solstice it suddenly hit me that every morning when the medication trolley went around, the noise and energy level in the sitting room dropped to almost nothing.
I threw the tablets in the bin. It was a long way back but I think that I managed it after some years.

Oh my - what a dreadful experience. You are the first person I have come across who experienced the severity similar to what I did. Even worse in fact, as I didn't have the memory issues, just the pain, rash, incontinence and depression. I remember telling the GP I would rather have quality of life over quantity. My road back took 9 months, and I now take a non-statin for my cholesterol. It works fine for me without side effects.