Ever go to the doctor and wonder why you happen to be the youngest patient in the room, always? Well this is fairly common when you are young and have an auto-immune condition. You look around and see just how sickly everyone else is, and how debilitated they are as well. The wait wasn’t too long…but who knew what was to come next…
I had to go see my rheumatologist for a follow up regarding my progress or lack thereof from the Methotrexate. As it turns out, my knee looked worse and felt worse and so does my skin at the moment. This is what a bad flare up does as we know! The only good news I got at the doctor was that my blood pressure was great. 118/70! I’ll take that any day since the Otezla (which I stopped a few months ago) made it really high. After my doc looked at my knee, read through my recent blood work results and my back MRI, she wanted me to head to the ultrasound room to see just how much fluid had re-built up inside my right knee. Let’s just put it this way, she couldn’t even see my knee in the image…it was ALL fluid. So she did her usual procedure, scrubbed the knee down, placed the freezing agent (to numb it topically which does NOTHING), got the DEPO shot ready, mixed with a little cocktail of cortisone and in went the 12 gauge needle…which let’s just say IS LIKE A GIANT STRAW! Sure enough as soon as she put the needle it, I didn’t even flinch (as I am overwhelmingly used to this… as sad as that is.) So the DEPO/Cortisone went in, and then she switched out the needle top to start draining the fluid. The fluid came out instantly…and so quickly that my mom had to assist. Container after container filled with over 60 cc’s per unit. Sure enough there was 300 CC’s drained of synovial fluid (the equivalent of two soda cans) that came out of me. My doctor looked very concerned and said this cannot happen anymore.
This is the ACTUAL IMAGE FROM MY KNEE DRAINAGE YESTERDAY (Minus one)
You have had far too many knee drains in the last 36 months. It is time to UP the methotrexate, start you on a prednisone taper (yuck I hate prednisone)…oh and DRUM ROLL PLEASE….It’s time to start a BIOLOGIC.
:::::::Insert long pause of internal cursing, screaming, yelling, kicking, etc.::::::::
Wait what? You want ME on another BIOLOGIC? Even after my allergic reaction to Humira and Remicade….I wanted to wake up from the bad dream turned nightmare. Is this really happening? Has my arthritis gotten this much worse that I have resort back to more chemotherapy drugs/poison/toxins in my body? I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream, and I wanted to run out the door. But I couldn’t this time. I couldn’t escape the inevitable fate of this disease and my body. I have no choice. I had no other options. This was it. The smack in the face-wake up call I was running from for the past 2 years.
So I did what anyone who got another death sentence would do…I signed my life away to approve the drug to get prescribed. The new drug I will be trying (which isn’t new its been out for awhile now and is made in Belgium) is CIMZIA. What an adorable name for two poisonous injections into my thighs every two weeks. I can’t wait for this drug to arrive so I can feel the burn (or the pain) of the poison seeping into my skin, veins, and bloodstream. Maybe this drug will work, maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll have an allergic reaction right away, maybe I won’t. Its the unpredictability of these medications and how my body reacts that scares me the most.
I can no longer be in fear and run away from these aggressive medications. Clearly my body is ready to try something else because my knee is telling me so. So I will keep on fighting the good fight because I don’t have a choice. The frustration and anger that comes from all of this is deep within me. Know what quite knows what it is like to be in my shoes on a daily basis. I just ask for understanding before judgment.
So cheers to upping my methotrexate, starting my prednisone taper, and awaiting Cimzia to enter my psoriatic arthritis journey of a life. I
Psoriatic Arthritis Warriors! 