My Mother's Gabapentin Journey: Eight Years, 2,700mg, and the Decision to Finally Reduce

My mother said that to me a few months ago. She's 65. She's been on gabapentin for eight years. And the person I was listening to — struggling to finish sentences, losing words mid-thought, describing herself as feeling 80 years old — was not the person I grew up with.

That conversation is why GabaDown exists.

I want to tell you her story properly, because I think a lot of people reading this will recognise it. Not the exact details — everyone's situation is different — but the shape of it. The slow accumulation of side effects. The sense that something is wrong but no one is saying it clearly. The frustration of being told there's nothing else to try. And then, eventually, the decision to do something about it.

Eight years on gabapentin

My mother was originally prescribed gabapentin for nerve pain — back pain that has been with her for years and for which she is now waiting for surgery. Gabapentin was presented as the solution. And in some ways, for some time, it helped with the pain.

What nobody told her was what eight years at increasing doses would do to everything else.

She's been on 2,700mg daily for approximately three and a half years — split across three doses, morning, midday, and evening. Before that, she was on lower doses for several years. In total, her body has been on this medication for most of a decade.

When I asked her recently how long she'd been on gabapentin, she paused for a long time. Then she said: "Seven or eight years. At different doses." The pause itself told me something.

What the side effects actually look like

I want to be specific here, because I think there's a tendency to describe gabapentin side effects in clinical language that doesn't capture what they actually feel like to live with. My mother described them to me in her own words, and I think her description is more useful than any medical summary.

When I asked what made her decide she wanted to reduce, here's what she said:

She gave me an example. She was trying to book a medical transport by phone — a routine task. She needed to calculate what time to book a return trip based on an appointment time and duration. She couldn't do it. She had to ask the customer service representative to help her with the arithmetic. A calculation she would have done in seconds before.

"The vocabulary is gone," she told me. "And I'm not talking about really hard vocabulary. It's simple things. It's like my tongue is tied. I can't focus on even one line of a book. My depression has gotten worse."

She's also fallen four times. She believes the balance issues are at least partly linked to the gabapentin. Each fall has had consequences.

• Cognitive fog and word loss
• Memory problems
• Emotional blunting and depression
• Balance and coordination problems
• Persistent fatigue
• Inability to concentrate

She said something that I think is important to put on record: "I feel like a dementia person. And I am not 80 years old. I am 65. And I should not be experiencing these things."

The moment something clicked

My mother is the kind of person who, if she's taking a medication, wants to understand what she's taking and why. She started researching gabapentin — not on "Dr. Google," as she put it, but on medical YouTube channels, neurologist websites, and eventually Facebook groups and forums where people share their own experiences.

What she found stopped her.

"Everything that they were talking about — I'm experiencing," she told me. "It's not in my head. I'm not making this up. I am actually experiencing the same things these people are experiencing."

She read about the connection between long-term gabapentin use and cognitive decline. She saw it discussed in the context of dementia risk. Her own mother had dementia. That was the moment she decided she needed to act.

What her doctor said

She was lucky, she told me. Her doctor listens to her. When she raised the idea of reducing the gabapentin, he was sympathetic. He understood her concerns.

But here is the part that I think many people reading this will recognise. His response was essentially: there is nothing else. For her type of nerve pain, at this stage, gabapentin is the medication available. Everything else is, as she put it, "sisters of gabapentin." The mechanism is the same.

"It's like you have to weigh the pros and cons," she said. "He was sympathetic to me, but it seemed like the medical field doesn't know what else to give."

This is the gap. A doctor who listens, who cares, who has limited options and limited time. A patient who is suffering from side effects and has nowhere structured to turn. GabaDown is built for exactly this space.

A critical point about what tapering will and won't do

I want to be honest about this, because I think it matters enormously and I said it clearly to my mother before we started.

Reducing gabapentin will not make her underlying pain disappear. She has a back condition that requires surgery. She has nerve damage that has accumulated over years. Gabapentin was prescribed for a reason. Tapering is not a cure — it's a way of separating what the medication is doing from what her baseline actually is, so that she and her doctor can make clearer decisions about both.

As doses come down carefully, she will need to continue addressing the underlying causes of her pain through other means — surgery when the time comes, physiotherapy, and whatever other support her medical team recommends. The taper is one part of a larger picture, not the whole answer.

Seeing the journal for the first time

I built my mother's GabaDown journal before I had any other clients. It was the prototype. I asked her, when she first saw it, what she noticed.

"It looked like it was custom planned for me," she said. "The tabs were easy to understand. It's colorful. It's interactive. It's accurate."

Then I asked her how it made her feel. Not what she thought — what she felt.

She said: "It gave me direction. And that's very important. Because when I'm on gabapentin, I feel like I don't have any direction. My brain is just — brain fog."

She paused, then added something I didn't expect: "It pulls out what you are trying to say to doctors that you can't."

That one sentence. That's the thing I had been trying to articulate for weeks about what this journal does. She said it in one sentence.

What life looks like on the other side

I asked her to describe what she was looking forward to. Not in abstract terms — specifically. What would she do?

She said she wants to read. She wants to paint. She wants to volunteer. She wants to have conversations without her mouth feeling like it's full of rocks. She doesn't want to feel stupid when she can't find words she knows she knows. She wants to fly on a plane without spasms. She wants to go outside for a walk.

"Most of all," she said, "I'm looking forward to not feeling 80 years old. Like I am right now."

Where we are right now

We are at the beginning. The supplements that will support her nervous system during the taper are being introduced gradually — this takes two to four weeks before the actual dose reductions begin. Her doctor is aware of what we're doing. Her pharmacist is part of the conversation. Nothing happens without her medical team knowing.

Her taper plan — a phase-by-phase reduction schedule built from her specific starting dose, using published deprescribing guidelines — has been shared with her doctor for review. That's how this works. The plan is a proposal. Her doctor's approval is required before a single dose changes.

This is a 12 to 18 month journey, probably longer. There will be hard weeks. There will be dose adjustments. There will be moments where we go back up before going down again. We are going to document all of it honestly — not a highlight reel, not a success story written in advance, but the actual thing, as it happens.

She said something at the end of our interview that I keep coming back to.

"Of course there's a fear of change. Of course there's a fear of pain. But in the same token — I've been wanting this for a long time. And I've been seeking this. And now there's something real to seek."