"On August 4, 2006 my Mum got up at five in the morning to do some baking and literally dropped dead," says Blake (not her real name pending a lawsuit). "She was taking Zelnorm for bowel problems and apart from that, she was in excellent health."
"We were all coming home for a family reunion so she was making cookies and cakes for us. My dad heard her yell and he went running from the bedroom to the kitchen and found her dead on the kitchen floor. She was only 60 years old.
At that time, I didn't know anything about Zelnorm except that she was taking it for stomach pains and irritable bowel syndrome. I'm not quite sure why the doctor prescribed it but I guess at that time, a small town doctor didn't know about the side effects. Now, with all the things I read about Zelnorm, she shouldn't have been on it in the first place.
Once I heard that Zelnorm had been taken off the market (just about a month ago)
I spoke to the pathologist, because when her autopsy was performed, he phoned and said there was no known cause of death. Then they did extensive testing through biopsies and they showed that she suffered cardiac arrhythmia. There is no heart disease in my Mum's family and, besides her stomach and bowel problems, her health was excellent.
The day I saw on television that Zelnorm was taken off the market was the day I went online and found out all about it -- and contacted a lawyer. The ironic thing I read was that it caused stroke and heart attack and it used the exact same wording that was in her autopsy report. The pathologist had no information on Zelnorm when she passed away and a 'locum' doctor -someone filling in because she lived in a small town - prescribed it, so there wasn't much point in talking to the prescribing doctor.
We had never heard of people just falling down dead. At this point I just want to be proved wrong about this drug; I would like somebody to tell me that she didn't die from it because if she did, it feels like murder. If a drug took my mother from us, it is too awful, especially a drug that was given for irritable bowel syndrome. My two sisters were also on the drug at the time. Of course they aren't taking it anymore. This drug is very scary.
My first thought when she died and we got results from the autopsy, was that there were no conclusive results. I asked the pathologist at that time if they did a medical history on her and why we weren't asked what medications she was on at the time of death. He said that he wasn't conducting an investigation - he was just looking for the cause of death.
He told me that, in 10% of sudden death cases, they go unreported - that is protocol and obviously we didn't know that until it was too late. I have talked to Health Canada about this and now I want to yell this message out to all of Canada. Why don't they do a medical history on sudden deaths? Can the makers of Zelnorm get away with this?