Sometimes it's easy to get into a routine with treatment, especially when it is pill-popping. Until something "interesting" (read "bad") happens I am not seeing the docs very often at all. To save me getting too complacent though, there are always treatment-related side-effects to worry about. While taking Azathioprine these have been very mild, at least the overt ones. In fact, the only thing I can report is occasional bouts of a metallic taste, and that seems quite common over a range of drugs. It is the covert side-effects which are potentially the more worrying which is why regular blood tests are the order of the day.
I recently had one of those worrying phone messages from the medical centre which have zero information content and much larger worrying content "Please call the centre as soon as possible.". This was 2 days after I had been in for blood tests. So something obviously amiss, but what? Well to cut a long story short, one of my liver scores came back as "borderline" which triggered a "make an appointment to see your doctor" call. However this was done without reference to my history so when I phoned up and it got referred back to my regular doctor, he said it was OK. So in the land of CLIPPERS, "borderline" equals "fine" on this occasion ...
This, and some recent email correspondence with other CLIPPERS sufferers, made me think about side-effects a bit more, as I think they are often under-reported. So I started a new Forum topic if anyone is interested in relating their experience on medication.
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.
