Hey there all you folk, hope you had a good weekend, I did. Now that we have finished anniversary week and we’re back to normal life I figured I’d give you another update of my routine as it relates to my day and week as well as a little glimpse of how my next few months should breakdown.
At present I am still taking Prednisone, which is the steroid that I have been taking since I had my original brush with Graft Versus Host Disease (GVHD) in Toronto. I originally started taking 220mg/day, which is an extremely high dose, and now I am on 10mg/day and have been for about a month now. You may remember my stomach and back pain from the past 4-5 weeks, well that was most definitely caused by my rapid drop of Prednisone from 25mg to 10mg in about 10 days. Thus ever since we have been cautious when playing with my drug dosages. My back has improved significantly but my stomach hasn’t performed as well and still causes me a great deal of discomfort thus limiting my mobility. The plan for this week is to begin dropping my Prednisone very slowly. It only comes in 5 mg pills so the initial drop from here will see me alter 10 and 5 mg doses each day, and we will continue from there depending on my body’s reaction. So you know the major problem with taking steroids is that eventually your body stops producing it’s own steroids thus as I decrease my “unnatural” steroid level my body must pick up the slack, and that involves time. I have been told that this process can take considerable time, and in fact some people don’t manage to make it past the final step ultimately taking a small dose of Prednisone for a long time.
Ordinarily right now you would be reading the rest of the message that I wrote but with many thanks to my computer I have lost it. I guess I should be thankful as it seems my computer is looking out for my best interests, as any time I write a message of some “mystery length” it decided not to send it. Thus you receive messages in several parts as you have in the past, this has been happening for the past 2 months and there doesn’t seem to be any fix to the problem. So please bare with me and maybe I’ll remember what I had previously written and will update you.
Geoff
#4
