Tuesday 30 June 2015

CLIPPERS in the news


The Detroit News (not a publication I was previously familiar with) has recently run an article about CLIPPERS based on the experience of Roger, a military veteran in Michigan. You can read the article here:
(I can't guarantee this link will stay working forever as it is on an external site).

It's an interesting story and reminded me of my own experience when after several weeks of uncertainty one of my doctors produced this article about this "thing called CLIPPERS" which seemed to describe quite accurately what I had. I did wonder about the title: "World's 51st case of disorder is in Michigan". I haven't counted lately, but I suspect the number of published cases may be around (or probably exceed) 51 as they say in the article, but I also suspect the number of diagnosed cases worldwide runs into the hundreds. Whatever, it is still a very rare condition and stories like this which help raise the profile can only be a good thing. I hope Roger continues with his recovery from CLIPPERS.

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.

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Friday 12 June 2015

More blood.

Filled tubes, 9 of them.
So, following on from last time, I finally managed to get my blood sample collected for the Mayo CLIPPERS study. In fact, I had no problem filling all 9 tubes - I have good veins apparently. Hopefully it survived the trip over the Atlantic with FedEx and will contribute in some small way to helping understand more about CLIPPERS. 
Two warts merged into one.
As of the beginning of June, I am over four years since first symptoms and still taking Azathioprine with few side-effects. Apart from occasional blips in liver scores, I have a few warts (7ish) which is apparently quite common on Azathioprine. They are confined to fingers with a few periungual ones for good luck. Not very pleasant, but could be worse - I had them blasted with cryotherapy recently which will hopefully help. That's enough about warts.

Finally, I'm not sure how long this has been live, but CLIPPERS now has a short entry on Radiopaedia (think of Wikipedia, but for doctors)

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.

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Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.