Doctor Doctor
Apr. 22nd, 2010 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanarillMy general physician, Dr. F, is fantastic. But the on-call doctor when I had the colonoscopy, Dr. B, needs to work on his bedside manner a leetle. However, since he was the on-call doctor, he's who I got. Fortunately, Dr. BZ, whose house we will be living at for a few weeks while JJ finishes high school, is an intestine doctor*. Even more fortunately, he specializes in Crohn's, and in fact I am his somewhat-over-two-thousandth Crohn's patient.
I went to go see him today. He said I have textbook Crohn's, which is good in the sense that what medical regimen I should be on is well-known. Not so good in the sense that my chances of gastrointestinal cancer just shot up four hundred times, but I'd rather know than not know.
He took me off the Pentasa (yey!), and is instead putting me on a drug called Imuran. Imuran is an immunosuppressant, so it will drop my body's ability to fight infection somewhat. On the other hand, it will also drop my body's ability to fight itself. On the whole, slightly longer common cold recovery time > horrible constant gut-bleeding. Unless I prove to be allergic to it, which happens to 5% of the population. One of the few times I'm hoping not to roll a natural 20.
Current pill count: 15 a day.
He also had his people suck some more blood. I psychically predict that the result will be thus: I am still anemic, but less anemic than I was. Because eating 900% of my daily iron requirement each day has to be doing something.
Finally, he says in a month we're going to start weaning me off the Entecort. This is because Entecort is a steroid, and steroids are not just responsible for 'roid rage. They will seriously Fuck You Up if you stay on them for very long, so once we're sure it has done it's stop-attacking-healy-job, I'll be dropping it. (Horrible Dr. B said this as well.) At which point I will be taking a manageable five pills a day, all at breakfast.
So it looks like this horrible thing of utter ick will end up being a background concern after all, and MW's insistence on trying to talk to me about any of it was not only unwanted but totally unnecessary. Such is my life . . .
*There's probably a fancy word for it, but that is what he is.
I went to go see him today. He said I have textbook Crohn's, which is good in the sense that what medical regimen I should be on is well-known. Not so good in the sense that my chances of gastrointestinal cancer just shot up four hundred times, but I'd rather know than not know.
He took me off the Pentasa (yey!), and is instead putting me on a drug called Imuran. Imuran is an immunosuppressant, so it will drop my body's ability to fight infection somewhat. On the other hand, it will also drop my body's ability to fight itself. On the whole, slightly longer common cold recovery time > horrible constant gut-bleeding. Unless I prove to be allergic to it, which happens to 5% of the population. One of the few times I'm hoping not to roll a natural 20.
Current pill count: 15 a day.
He also had his people suck some more blood. I psychically predict that the result will be thus: I am still anemic, but less anemic than I was. Because eating 900% of my daily iron requirement each day has to be doing something.
Finally, he says in a month we're going to start weaning me off the Entecort. This is because Entecort is a steroid, and steroids are not just responsible for 'roid rage. They will seriously Fuck You Up if you stay on them for very long, so once we're sure it has done it's stop-attacking-healy-job, I'll be dropping it. (Horrible Dr. B said this as well.) At which point I will be taking a manageable five pills a day, all at breakfast.
So it looks like this horrible thing of utter ick will end up being a background concern after all, and MW's insistence on trying to talk to me about any of it was not only unwanted but totally unnecessary. Such is my life . . .
*There's probably a fancy word for it, but that is what he is.
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Date: 2010-04-24 01:29 am (UTC)