out with the old

i have a tendency to hang on to things too long. a bit of a packrat, maybe some hoarder tendencies, but it's an overdeveloped sense of "waste not, want not." i hate not having what i need, so i get nervous about getting rid of things in case i need them later. i'm working on it.

anyway, this of course extends to drugs. being chronically ill with a new disease of the week, i tend to stock up on things that i end up no longer needing. it feels so good to throw it all out. last week, i threw out a metric ton of mesalamine. bottles of asacol, samples of lialda, packages of canasa, and my favorite thing to throw out, those goddamn rowasa enemas. i hated those things. always cold, always hard to keep in, always making a surprise appearance the next morning at work if i made the mistake of sneezing. fuck you, rowasa. i hate asacol too - taking 16 of those damn pills everyday, then they look completely intact on the way out. i knew they weren't, but still, it bothered me to see them apparently survive, without actually making any difference in the UC symptoms i was experiencing. also, i have a lot less gas now that i don't take them. coincidence? perhaps, but if not, damn, all those noxious gas attacks of the last year could have been avoided if i went on colazal sooner. fucking asacol.

also disposed of the gigantic sharps container i had to get for the humira pens. i have another smaller sharps container that i bought, thinking i could use it for my procrit needs, diabetes lancets, and humira pens. but the humira pens are like the size of bananas and need a hugemongus sharps container. luckily i got it free from the myhumira site, and could've shipped it back to them, but my personal emt took it over to the hospital for me to get it out of my way. that thing was huge. it's nice having the room back in the bathroom for important things like mousse and saline solution.

i also finally tossed all the advair i haven't been taking since my sinus surgery. not that i've been running or doing anything physical, but i haven't had an asthma attack either in over a year. buh bye inhaled steroids.

so now my bathroom looks a little less like a sample closet.

i'm almost done with the steroid enemas, which were way less horrible than the mesalamine ones. and they were actually effective. i'm reducing the pred from 40 mg a day to 35 a day -- woo hoo! i'm sure the doc is going to taper this nice and slow, but i'll be happy to be off those damn things too. i'm so tired of flushing, and sweating, and being puffy and irritable, and not sleeping and having heartburn and being nauseous. and last night was fun, throwing up in my sleep! that's a new one. fuck you prednisone.

while we're tapering the steroids, i also increased the 6mp from 50 to 100 mgs. my bloodwork looks good so it was time to ramp it up. still probably not going to be effective for another 4 to 8 weeks or so, but at least i have the first month down. i've heard this one called the "food poisoning pill" by some other folks that did not tolerate it, so we should know pretty quickly whether or not i can tolerate it. unlike the pred, who used to be my friend but is now like a college roommate i can't stand. i can't wait until the semester is over and they move out. i know it helps me hold down a full time job and stuff, but damn, sometimes i wonder if it's not worse than having UC. i'm such a grouch right now.

i do enjoy throwing things out. it's a good time of year to get rid of stuff. i have too much stuff in the way of what i want, and physically chucking stuff out of my way has been very satisfying. next i'll be chucking a bunch of stuff out of my second bedroom storage room -- books, games, paintball gear, clothes, etc. just stuff left over from who i used to be. gotta make room for new me, and my treadmill. gotta get all this pred bloat off me asap!