It’s official – I have a love/hate relationship with prednisone.

I’ve been on it for nearly two months now, and it’s the only thing that’s had any kind of effect on my UC symptoms. But, as previously mentioned, I’ve been tapering it… and my insides have been starting to play up a bit again. So after a chat with Jacqui, the lovely IBD nurse at Middlemore – and after she consulted with the head of gastro, who’s one of the doctors on my case, as it were, I’m back up to my initial dose – that’s 20mg a day, which is actually a fairly small dose, still, but twice as much as I’ve been on for the past week.

And now that I’m on day two of taking it again, I’ve already had a freakout session. I had a few good ones soon after starting the pred, but after the first taper and then the second, I was feeling a little saner. But now – bam. It’s like I have to choose between intestinal and mental health – I can’t have both. I’m still at the stage where they can’t be sure whether or not my body and the infliximab are cooperating to make it work, so steroids are all that there is for now. In some ways, steroids are better than infliximab. Cheaper, for one thing. Pills, rather than infusions, which is a definite bonus.

But my mind is not okay with prednisone. Nor is my body, in other ways – I’m trying desperately to get healthier and fitter, and taking medication that can cause weight gain and puffy face and all that jazz is just making the mental breakdown all the worse. There’s no winning. Either I’m sick, and can’t do anything to make myself healthier in any way – or I’m ‘healthy’, colon-speaking, and I turn into an angry pufferfish.

It’s becoming very easy to just feel sorry for myself and melt into a sobbing mess. Lord knows it has happened before. I can yank myself out of the deepest pits of despair sometimes – doing the dishes while singing along to Avril Lavigne’s first album sort of helped, even if I did mostly just get angry at the kitchen. Frittering away time on Facebook and Reddit, even if it feels empty and pointless, it’s still better than lying facedown on the carpet, right?

But hey. Maybe it’s time to introduce you to ALL my drug friends. There’s more to life than prednisone, after all – even if none of it seems to do much, into my body it goes!

Therefore, let me present

BRIAR’S DAILY DRUG COCKTAIL.

The day starts with the aforementioned prednisone. Four little white tablets, knocked back at once, because I’m cool like that. Along with my first four Asacol of the day. Asacol is mesalazine – which, according to Wikipedia is ‘a bowel-specific drug that acts locally in the gut and has its predominant actions there, thereby having few systemic side effects.’



So there you go. I’ve been on Asacol for about two years now, ever since I said to the doctor that the relationship between myself and the Pentasa enemas he prescribed was not going anywhere anytime fast. Nor were my symptoms. They didn’t really go anywhere with the Asacol either, but, as I’ve said before, and I’ll say again (likewise my doctors), if I wasn’t taking it, who knows how much worse I might be? The prednisone needs to be with food, and the Asacol is twice a day, so they get scarfed down with whatever I can stomach for breakfast.

Then, some mornings – though mercifully not all mornings at the moment, I pop my bff, TRAMADOL. Some mornings I’ll attempt paracetamol first… I do have a box as tall as my head of the stuff, after all…

…but realistically, the kind of pain that paracetamol can handle is just my daily business, so if I feel like I need pain relief, it just doesn’t cut it. So that’s where my tramz come in to play!

Seriously. Until prednisone started doing stuff, getting the tramadol prescription was the only thing that ever seriously helped me out pain-wise. It’s courtesy of these bad boys here that I’ve managed to get through the past 5-6 months without any pre-arranged sick days at work. AMAZEBALLS.

Then, the day progresses. If I remember, I’ll take a multivitamin and a Executive Stress B vitamin with my lunch, especially since I’m still working on managing to tolerate most fruits and vegetables. Then work finally finishes, we all cheer, and I come home and collapse for the evening. But before rolling into the sweet embrace of sleep, there’s….

MORE ASACOL! FOUR MORE! FOUR FOR YOU GLEN COCO, YOU GO GLEN COCO.

And a tablet and a half of azathioprine, also known as Imuran or Imuprine. I pre-cut them and keep a bunch in a gladware container. Cunning! Azathioprine, again, quoting everyone’s favourite research site, Wikipedia, is ‘an immunosuppressive drug used in organ transplantation and autoimmune diseases and belongs to the chemical class of purine analogues. Synthesized originally as a cancer drug and a pro-drug for mercaptopurine in 1957, it has been widely used as a immunosuppressant for more than 50 years.’ GOODNESS ME. The more you know.

And that’s the lot. So, at the moment, a relatively pain-free day will consist of thirteen and a half tummy-related tablets, plus painkillers if necessary. Gosh.

Tune in next week, for our latest installment of Tales of Ward 32 – Infliximab Infusion Live-Blogging! What a thrilling time to be alive.