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| My regular blood-testing arm. I stopped counting how many needles have been stuck in this bad boy a long time ago. |
Blood
So the saga of the blood-tests continues. People like me who are on long-term Azathioprine have to have regular blood tests to make sure the "cure" isn't worse than the disease. I've had the occasional blip in a liver enzyme which has settled down for now fortunately. I was hoping to move back to three-monthly tests but a couple of other things to keep an eye on so another panel of tests in a month. Better safe than sorry though. Still taking 100mg twice a day which I think is about as high as it gets.
Bone
I also mentioned in passing that I had some pain in my joints ("Arthralgia" - you learn something every day!), most noticeably in my knees, so I promptly got booked in for some x-rays to check for early osteoarthritis. One or two people on the interweb mention joint/muscle pain in the same breath as Azathioprine, but as I've noted in this blog before, the problem with the interweb is you can usually find someone with any combination of symptoms and possible causes you can think of!
Other than that, pleased to be ticking along. Almost exactly a year ago I was being wired up for my first 1000mg intravenous dose of Prednisolone after three weeks of investigation in the NHNN and hoping it would do some good. Fortunately it did.
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.
