My doc is having me take 500 mg of niacin (25 times the RDA) to try and lower the cholesterol and tryglicerides.Â? OK… not a problem — picked up some OTC stuff at the pharmacy with my Metformin and took it yesterday without a problem.

I had to go in for early bloodwork today and took my daily pills (we’re up to 6 now) with some blueberry yogurt and a South Beach Diet bar I had left over from Synod Assembly.Â? I then went and got a water bottle and drained it while at breakfast with Jon and his pastor homies.

On the way home, I started feeling hot and like I had pins and needles in my face.Â? It eventually spread over my entire body until I was red from head to toe and feeling like someone had put a space heater inside of me.Â? I was really itchy but couldn’t scratch any of the itches because it felt like my skin was sunburned.Â? Had my grandma not told me about feeling tingles when she took it, I would have thought that I was having a serious allergic reaction to something.

I got home, changed into a t-shirt and shorts and called the clinic.Â? I got their answering service so I called the pharmacy and talked to the pharmacist.Â? He told me that this was completely normal and that it would go away in a while.Â? I asked if there was anything I could do (since I was pretty uncomfortable).Â? He told me to drink some more fluids to see if it would cause the blood vessels in my skin to undilate.Â? (The niacin caused the blood vessels to dilate.)Â? At this point, I was simultaneously feeling chilled so I cowered under a quilt on the couch until I could fall asleep.

The redness and tingling are gone (I was “normal” when I woke up an hour later) and I was told that if I take my niacin with plenty of liquid (i.e. actually DRINK something instead of taking my pills with my morning yogurt), it would probably not happen again.Â? Let’s just say that it had better not happen again or my doc is going to get a really pissy call from me on the subject.