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| Apologies to my long-suffering wife - this was actually for a far more important anniversary! |
Honourable Discharge?
Today marks 6 months since I was discharged from hospital - hurrah! It seems a long time ago now but shows how things can change quite quickly - up or down. I also just got the follow-up letter from my consultant after last months clinic appointment. No real surprises. Apparently my Lymphocytes are below normal which is (presumably) the expected consequence of the Azathioprine and probably the reason I've been coughing for two weeks - Lymphocytes help fight viral infections. The only other thing of note was that I have a "mild left beating nystagmus" which basically means that I have abnormal eye-movement when looking left. This has been mentioned before and may represent residual damage (to brain - it's not an eye problem). It's not something I notice so I'm not losing any sleep there.
Step On Down
Today also marks another change as I've started stepping down the Prednisolone corticosteroid. The suggested schedule is by 1mg/day/week so I've just gone from 15mg/day to 14mg/day. Some reports have suggested that around 12mg/day may be a crucial dose for some CLIPPERS patients. Last year I briefly went down to 10mg/day and thought I could feel myself slowing down a bit. At the time, I wasn't on Azathioprine so the theory is that now the Azathioprine provides sufficient immunosuppressant effect to allow reduction and eventual elimination of Prednisolone. We shall see.
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.
