Toronto woman believes Ozempic use connected to her stomach paralysis: ‘I lack hope’
Emily Wright, a Toronto elementary school teacher, started taking the drug Ozempic in 2018 as a way to control her food cravings and blood sugar in her battle with Type 2 diabetes.
Soon after starting the drug, she said she started to lose a substantial amount of weight.
“But that came at a great cost for me. That came at the cost of constant vomiting and nausea,” she told Global News. ” I used to get these horrible smelling sulfur burps that smell like rotten eggs from the food fermenting in my stomach,” adding that at the time, those side effects were”livable.”
“The doctor said those side effects would eventually go away. As I started to lose weight, I remained on Ozempic, and within one year I was able to lose over 80 pounds,” Wright said.
Fast forward two years and the symptoms were worsening. She was hospitalized for severe nausea and dehydration. She could not stop vomiting.
“I was treated for dehydration or what they call ‘cyclic vomiting-like symptoms’,” Wright said, adding that the food that she ate felt like it was fermenting and rotting in her stomach.
She was then diagnosed with gastroparesis, which causes stomach paralysis, and was given medication to speed up her food digestion and help with her nausea.
While nausea and vomiting are common side effects for people taking Ozempic, extreme reactions like Wright’s are not, according to medical experts and the company.
Ozempic is a class of medication called GLP-1 agonists used to treat Type 2 diabetes and often prescribed off-label for obesity. It’s been approved in Canada since 2018 for diabetes, but not approved to treat weight loss.
The full list of side effects includes nausea, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain and constipation, according to the
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