Lil Wayne quit ‘syrup’ use after seizure scares

Rapper Lil Wayne was scared into quitting his penchant for sipping potentially fatal cough medicine drink ‘syrup’ after learning his recent seizures were likely linked to his withdrawal of the drug. The Lollipop hitmaker, real name Dwayne Carter, Jr., used to get high on the mix of codeine cough syrup and soda, but when he suffered a series of collapses earlier this year (13), he was forced to cut down on his drug of choice.
Doctors then diagnosed him with epilepsy after his latest hospitalisation on 30 April (13), but his physician quickly learned that the hip-hop star’s body was also shutting down because he was suffering symptoms of withdrawal as he was no longer sipping on syrup.
In an interview on U.S. talk show Katie, which aired on Monday (09Sep13), he said, “I asked my doctor and I said, ‘Doctor, I haven’t been drinking like that (a lot), and I haven’t been drinking nowhere near to where you would be catching seizures from it (sic)’, and… he asked what else have you been doing? And I’d been taking pain pills (at the time) and we found out those pain pills consist of codeine as well, so the lack of drinking the codeine the way I did drink it (or taking the pills), it’s kinda like a reaction like you’re stopping a drug…
“I can’t (drink syrup anymore)… I was doing too much and the doctor kinda told me, ‘We can’t tell you what to do, but I suggest that your mum tell you to stop.’ She did (tell me to stop).”
Before discovering he suffered from epilepsy, Lil Wayne’s medics had to delve into his family history and it quickly became clear that he wasn’t the only one of his relatives to have the neurological disorder.
He explained, “What we had to do was go back in history, go back to my past… We found out that one of my close cousins suffers from seizures real bad (sic) and one of them actually died from them.”