Age: 48.0
Sex: F
Vaccine: FLUR4
Symptoms: Asthenia, Dizziness, Electrocardiogram normal, Feeling abnormal, Feeling drunk
Clinical narrative: I received the flu vaccine and about 5 minutes later started to feel symptoms. The first sign was numbness in my upper gums and cheeks and jawline. It was a tingling numbness. It increased to cover my whole head and I notified my  husband who was with me that I wasn't feeling right. He notified the nurse who put us back in the room where we received the shot. I felt woozy when I stood up to walk to the room. In the room, the symptoms increased to cover my arms and legs. I also started to feel "inebriated" and started laughing at things that weren't funny. The numbness increased to muscle twitching and my whole body eventually was twitching. I would try to control it, but could only make my body stop for short periods. The nurse brought the doctor in and I described how I was feeling, but it took all the self-control I could muster to form sentences that made sense and had a regular cadence to them. This is a very similar reaction to the one I get when I take levaquin or ingest mint/mint oil.  The adverse reactions to flouroquinolone that the FDA just added to all of this group of antibiotics is one I first experienced over ten years ago:  "Across the fluoroquinolone antibiotic class, a range of mental health side effects are already described in the Warnings and Precautions section of the drug labeling, but differed by individual drug. The new class-wide labeling changes will require that the mental health side effects be listed separately from other central nervous system side effects and be consistent across the labeling of the fluoroquinolone class. The mental health side effects to be included in the labeling across all the fluoroquinolones are disturbances in attention, disorientation, agitation, nervousness, memory impairment and delirium."  My husband tried to explain this to the doctor. In retrospect, he didn't seem familiar with these new anti-biotic warnings (which we didn't know were officially added by the FDA yet, but we knew the symptoms. The next day we did research and found the new warnings which really helped us!). The doctor had the nurse administer benadryl because we have learned from my past episodes that the benadryl helps ease the muscle twitching and he ordered an EKG just as a precaution because I had had a very small and mild heart attack in August of 2015.  My heart was fine. He asked me some more questions and he said that the symptoms didn't appear to be harming me and I should just wait it out and sometimes we just don't know why things happen. My husband very carefully walked me to my car and I remained at home all day waiting for the symptoms to stop. The muscle twitching calmed down after about an hour and a half. The mental adverse effects took more like 5 hours. The next day, after a reaction like this, my body is weak from all the muscle twitching. This was the same. I believe the anti-biotic contained inside the FLUBLOK QUADRIVALENT must have had some type of fluoroquinolone in it. I would like to report this and hopefully you can discover more information to help future patients.