Reflection on a London tube-train - curved glass. |
Regular readers may recall I was having problems maintaining a reasonable white blood cell count while on 200mg/day Azathioprine. Since then, my readings went up slightly (3.a-little-bit) and then dipped down again to 2.7 at which point the doctors decided action was required. Of course I feel fine day to day but if the white blood cell count gets too low I could be at risk from infections - and this is someone who travels on public transport to work so I'm concious of being exposed to bugs from other people most days. So I was told to reduce my dosage from 100mg AM + 100mg PM to 100mg AM + 50mg PM , a 25% reduction overall.
I am in uncharted territory now - and a bit paranoid to be honest - as I have been on this dose for 4 years and have no idea what the critical level is or how tightly connected the white blood cell count is to the chance of CLIPPERS relapse. My thinking is that this dose change is simply returning the white blood-cell count to the intended effect of the therapy in the first place so everything should be OK. I have my first blood test since changing the dose this week and I will keep you posted.
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.