It started a little over a year ago.

I would wake up at around 1 or 2am every single night. Er, morning. I would be wide awake and it would take about a half hour for me to fall asleep again. Of course, I’d feel less than 100% the next day. I need my sleep, at least 7 if not 8 hours. A friend of mine suggested I take Benadryl. She’s a nurse, so I trusted her.

Taking Benadryl every night helped tremendously.  I slept through the night and felt refreshed each day. A creature of habit, I did this every night for over a year.

And then I read this article.

Basically, anticholinergic drugs have been found to cause dementia in people 65 and older who used them for over 3 years.

This was the first study where they looked at over-the-counter drugs. You would think that if you don’t need a prescription, they’re very safe, wouldn’t you? Not so.

The writer recommends you take all the drugs you are taking, put them in a baggie and discuss your use with a doctor. I have mixed feelings about that. Of course, it sounds logical. However, for those of you who know me, I was diagnosed with breast cancer over five years ago and I believe that it was caused by being on birth control pills for so long. When I complained to my OB about my PMS pain, she literally pushed me onto the BC pills and assured it was acceptable to be on them for years.

I’m Asian. I don’t eat much red meat. I exercise regularly and am not overweight. I have never smoked. I have no breast cancer history in my family at all. I am in the lowest quartile for breast cancer risk. And yet it happened.

That’s my hypothesis. Beware of popping pills to solve your problems! You might create bigger ones!