Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

Fifteen-year-old Hannah remembers last March like it was yesterday. She was staying with a friend while her mother was out of town, and she began to come down with what she calls flu-like symptoms. “But I started to get even more sick then I already was,” she said. Rashes were forming on her skin and blisters in her mouth. Her friend’s mother was alarmed and took her to the hospital. Hannah was transferred to a room and underwent tests.

“I was scared because first I couldn’t talk (because of the blisters in her mouth) and now I was in the hospital not even knowing what was going on,” she said. Among the physicians who examined her was an eye doctor, who knew immediately what she had. He said one of his employees had had the same thing a month earlier. He said, “She has Stevens Johnson Syndrome (SJS),” he said. Hannah quickly wrote down, “What the heck is that?”

“No one could really explain it to me,” she said. “They were taking blood and giving me morphine and drugging me up and they didn’t even know what had made me so sick.”

By the time Hannah was able to go home three weeks later, she learned what caused her SJS – it was a severe adverse reaction to her bipolar medication, trileptal.

Trileptal, also approved for the treatment of epilepsy, recently amended its safety labeling to include a warning of the risk of SJS and its more severe form, toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN). SJS and TEN are hypersensitivity disorders that begin as a rash that blisters over and causes the skin to peel away. Mucus membranes also can be affected with blisters causing dehydration, infection, blindness and even death.

It has been almost a year since Hannah became ill. She has recovered but the memory of SJS still lingers in her mind. Her skin is almost completely healed, but now she must avoid the many medications that have been associated with SJS and TEN for fear of a relapse. “I can’t take Midol or Advil anymore,” she said. “Now, my mom tells me what to take.”

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