mary 6820 - - I would like to emphasize what the others have said. Requip and Mirapex and Sinemet all cause augmentation,which is a worsening of WED/RLS caused by the very medication that is supposed to help it. Symptoms start earlier in the day, spread to the arms, get more intense, or start sooner after sitting or lying down. Mirapex and Requip will kick in within 1-2 hr; Sinemet will kick in within 15-20 minutes. Once the medication kicks in, it's effective, but you require a higher dose than before augmentation, and you eventually need to add additional daytime doses.mary 6820 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 21, 2021 3:10 pmI had bad reactions to Requip twice. The first time was 4 years ago when I first moved to South Dakota; I went to the doctor to set up care and she told me I was taking too high a dose of Mirapex and she would like to try Requip. I took one dose and I was like having a panic attack; I looked up the med to see side affects and found that the med should not be taken if you are a smoker and I was a heavy smoker at the time; I ended up in the hospital with left side heart failure. The second time was last week- Mirapex had become ineffective so my present doctor said he would like to try Requip with Gabapentin as we both thought the previous problem was due to my smoking; two days later I notified him it was not helping so he doubled the dose. I ended up having a panic attack while having a Doppler test and the Requip was stopped and I was started on Sinemet 6 days ago.
The more medication you take, the worse the symptoms get, & the more you need, without end. There is, at present, no reasonable option other than stopping the offending medication completely. Your symptoms will be out of this world for 4-5 days after stopping, but then they will gradually get better, and you will find that they are not anywhere near as severe - - once you;ve been off the dopamine med for a good while.
The sad thing is that most doctors don't know about augmentation. Your doctor clearly doesn't know. Augmentation happens fastest with Sinemet. Giving Sinemet to someone like you who is already augmented on Mirapex is downright cruel - but your doctor doesn't know that.
The Foundation has published brochures on augmentation that you can give your doctor. The link in my signature block leads to a page that describes how to access the brochures. If you get the one called Augmentation : Diagnosis and Treatment, you can highlight the Predisposing Factors section, which notes the link between low iron and augmentation.
There is also a brochure called Medications and RLS : Patient Guide which you might find useful, and an even better one for your doctor, called RLS Medical Bulletin: A Publication for Healthcare Professionals.
It is going to be important for you to learn as much as you can, and unfortunately you are probably in a bad state for learning, being augmented and desperate for sleep by now. But please try to learn as much as you can, and guide your doctor's learning, because you can't depend on your doctor to be educated about this particular thing. Augmentation is not common among other diseases.