Superpowers

and pills

Tizanidine (Wikipedia)

Five years ago I found myself staying overnight in a hotel at Luton airport to catch an early morning flight back to Athens. I got up, packed my bag and made ready to leave. I leant over to pick the bag off the bed and fell right on top of it: my right leg did not obey commands, and my right buttock hurt like hell. I picked myself up and made it to the plane wincing and muttering, sat in the front row, and was the first to go slowly down the steep airstair in Athens (no tube for cheap flights) with ≈200 passengers cursing me silently behind me.

The pain stayed intense for a couple of days. A GP diagnosed a muscular spasm and prescribed Tizanidine, a relaxant supposedly acting on the spinal cord. It worked, and pretty soon I was on the maximum daily dose of the stuff and going from pill to pill for relief. After two weeks of this things got slightly better and I decided to stop the pills. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. The spasm did not bother me anymore, but the tizanidine withdrawal took me to a different place.

I had skipped the evening dose, and when I woke up the next day I found that I could not walk properly because my legs were slightly spastic. Under normal circumstances your brain and spinal cord make sure that when you pull on one set of muscles the opposing ones stay quiet to allow the movement. This was not working, and I was experiencing what medics inaccurately describe as stiffness, which actually feels more like viscosity, as if each joint contained a built-in friction brake.

That was weird enough, but when I went back to bed the really strange stuff started. I found that all the normal morning sounds in the house felt jarringly loud, and even the light filtering through the shutters was unpleasantly bright. But the real surprise came when I went to the bathroom. The towels stank, the whole place smelled as if a sewer was nearby, even clean clothes smelled unpleasant. The tizanidine withdrawal had caused hyperesthesia in all the senses at the same time.

Were it not for the effect on smell, I would have classed the whole phenomenon as being due to a hypersensitivity rather than hyperacuity, i.e. to me perceiving light and sound as too loud as opposed to it being actually so. After all, even relatively quiet sounds can drive you nuts under the right circumstances, and dim lights can keep you awake at night. But the smell thing said otherwise: I was smelling things that I could never detect normally.

Tania confirmed that the towels were no different to normal, and that she could not smell anything strange. I had to conclude that I had temporarily become a dog. The neurology of this is mysterious. For a start, tizanidine is not supposed to reach the brain, and it clearly did. Second, why would it act separately to increase sensitivity of the retina, the inner ear and the olfactory receptors when these have very little in common?

It seemed that tizanidine withdrawal had turned up to 11 a single volume button governing the salience of all the senses. But then why is it on such a low setting normally? I don’t think I’m missing much in the way of sound and vision in everyday life, but I was clearly missing most of the smell. It is a common trope to deplore the loss of olfaction in humans compared to animals supposedly due to civilisation and pollution, but I never thought a pill, or its absence, could reverse it.

I deeply regret one thing: I did not think of smelling perfume in my heightened state. I know that pregnant women often have hyperosmia and complain about fragrances. If there was a pill to achieve that state without cowering in a darkened room while wearing earplugs, I would take it.