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Thursday, June 20, 2013 | 2:39 a.m.

Posted: 9:44 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 23, 2012

Woman claims medication mix up caused severe depression

By Veronica Macias

A woman in East El Paso claims a Walgreens pharmacy accidentally switched her medication and caused her to become depressed with suicidal thoughts. 

The woman asked that KFOX-14 not share her identity for privacy concerns. She also said the location of the Walgreens store was not relevant. 

"I was just very irritable... I was also getting very depressed and I was having suicidal thoughts and it was just like, 'Why am I thinking this?'"

The woman says even her mother noticed she had a personality change, going from mellow to very irritable. 

"She told me she started thinking about ways to kill herself," the woman's mother said. 

"What I went through is almost indescribable," she said. 

The woman said she suffers from Lupus, a disease that can affect a person's joints, and she has been prescribed Tramadol, a pain killer. During her last visit to the store pharmacy she was mistakenly given Trazodone, an anti-depressant, instead of Tramadol. 

She claims that because she is taking other medications the Trazodone could have had an adverse effect, and her physician was very upset Walgreens filled the incorrect prescription. 

"I was thinking, 'I'm going to take the bottle and then that's it,'" said the young woman. "Then I thought, what is wrong with me."

She said she realized she was taking the wrong medications when she noticed the pills were slightly different than what she had taken in the past. 

Walgreens issued this statement to KFOX-14: 

"Prescription errors are rare and we take them very seriously. We are sorry this occurred and we have apologized to the patient. We have a multi-step prescription filling process with numerous safety checks in each step to reduce the chance of human error. We will investigate what happened and work to prevent it from happening again."

The woman tells KFOX-14 she decided to share her story so that people are aware of these possible mistakes and are more careful when picking up their medications. 

She hopes pharmacists are more careful when filling prescriptions.

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