A brief treatment update. As I'm sure you are bored of hearing by now I am currently on a steady dose of Prednisolone (15mg/day) and an escalating dose of Azathioprine (beginning at 25mg twice daily and aiming for 100mg twice daily) with the hope that the former will eventually be replaced by the latter.
 |
| Three of these = 15mg. They taste bad though. Fruit-juice required. |
Over Christmas my escalation plan for Azathioprine hit a minor snag which meant reducing from 75mg back to 50mg. Over the last few weeks my various blood/liver-function tests have been fine so I have been cleared to move back up to the target dose of 100mg. I will presumably stay on this dose or higher for the time being subject to any other problems before we collectively hold our breath and start reducing the Prednisolone. From reading on the web this transfer from Prednisolone to Azathioprine seems a fairly standard strategy in other conditions so there is a reasonable chance it will work ok for me.
 |
| One 50mg + 2x25mg = 100mg twice a day. |
And apart from that not much to report. Everything fairly normal and certainly stable. I get occasional right-forearm tightness and very slight reduction in walking fluidity (but not so as you would notice) when tired but neither of any real consequence. Apart from that a lingering metallic taste (a bit like paracetamol) which others have reported with Prednisolone. Sleeping has thankfully sorted itself out so I don't usually wake before 6am now. And I seem to have avoided (so far!) the excessive weight-gain and moon-face appearance which is a quite common side-effect of Presnisolone. I have put on about 7 pounds since leaving hospital and do have to be quite careful not to over-eat but that seems to have stabilised too for now.
I have a clinic appointment in about three weeks (in the demyelinating clinic - probably didn't know where else to put me) and probably another scan before then but no date yet. Also keeping an eye on the research literature for new CLIPPERS gems but it's been a bit quiet recently. More news as I get it.
Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
