Honour Your Inner Magpie

still in shock but with good news this time
I'm still reeling from all the various griefs and travels and funerals and stuff, plus another round of medical stuff when I got back home, to find out if we were going to go to a heavier Crohn's med, one of the steroids. Well, life's still pretty fraught, but least the latter has yielded some good news that I should tell you guys about.

Remember how the medication for the Crohn's disease was making my joints ache so bad, which was pretty awful on top of my currently unmedicated arthritis (unmedicated because I had to go off the massive doses of anti-inflammatories I'd been taking for ten years since they gave me gut pain, and stay off them because they make Crohn's so much worse)? Well, my doc switched me to a different Crohn's med about a month ago, in hopes of not getting the joint pain side effect. He also said that if we managed to knock the Crohn's inflammation down, sometimes the arthritis is somehow connected, and it abates somewhat when the Crohn's does in some cases.

Looks like I'm a winner. The current med, Pentasa, does not give me joint pain. Even better is that the usual arthritis pain seems to have backed off a lot -- to the point where I am currently having less arthritis pain than I did back when I was taking 1500mg of nabumetone (Relafen) a day! And to top it all off, instead of ramping up to the steroids, I get to stay on the Pentasa exactly as it is, because it seems to be working. The magic words I heard are: complete remission.

Man, oh man. This is such a good thing. I still have to be careful of a whole bunch of things, of course, but oh, this helps so much.