The World As I See It

This week I am going to talk about Copaxone and my experiences with it.  Copaxone is given in shot form that you take every day.  It goes just under the skin.  It is composed a amino acids that may act as a decoy so that your body will attack the drug and not your nervous system.  This drug has been around since about 1996 and seen as a safe drug. Here are a list of possible side effects from the drug:

• pain, redness, swelling, itching, or lump in the place where you injected glatiramer
• weakness
• flushing
• depression
• abnormal dreams
• pain in the back, neck, or any other part of the body
• severe headache
• loss of appetite
• diarrhea
• nausea
• vomiting
• weight gain
• swelling of the hands, feet, ankles, or lower legs
• purple patches on skin
• joint pain
• confusion
• nervousness
• crossed eyes
• difficulty speaking
• shaking hands that you cannot control
• sweating
• ear pain
• painful or changed menstrual periods
• vaginal itching and discharge
• urgent need to urinate or defecate
• tightness in muscles
• white patches in the mouth

I personally have never seen this many possible side effects.   I can tell you when I took it I remember the injection site being red and swollen and that is all the side effects I had.  I hated these shots for a number of reasons but the many one is that I hated to give myself a shot everyday.  I hate giving shots to myself.  I would sit there for hours trying to talk myself into doing it.  It would finally get to the point where someone else would have to do it for me.  This drug didn’t do anything for me at all.  I felt like I did when I wasn’t on anything.  I know for some people they love this drug but for me personally it did nothing.

That is all I really have to say about the drug.  Please don’t base your decisions on which treatment to use sully on my experiences with the drug.  Before I do any treatment I always do research on it and see what people who are on it say about it.  I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving.  As always I am looking for ideas to write about so if you have something you would like to see please leave me a comment and I will write about it!
Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glatiramer_acetate
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000225

This week for MS Tuesdays I am going to write about my latest infusion and the new side effects that I had with this one.  I have always gotten a headache and sometimes I would have a reaction that felt like I was burning up from the inside out.  Well this time I had a whole new set of side effects that I wasn’t prepared for.  I had in on a Thursday because I couldn’t take Friday off and now that I look back at it and this turned out to be a good thing.  Anyways, I  woke up Friday and i was a little stiff but that is pretty much how it goes when I don’t take my muscle relaxer before I go to bed.  I didn’t think anything of it because it does happen and usually wears off after a few hours.  By the time I got to work I was in so much pain I wanted to cry.  I ended up calling my doctor and getting pain pills called  in but I decided that I would rather have a headache all weekend then the amount of pain I am in right now.  I have learned to handle headaches but I can’t deal with this pain especially since it is super hard to get pain pills out of my doctor.  She treats me like I am a drug addict and it is getting on my last nerve but that is another post for another day.  So I have the pain and when I was looking at the other side effects a lot of things made a whole bunch of sense to me.  Here are the side effects that go along with the drug:

When I looked at this list I realized that the UTI I had was because of the drug and the fact that my glands always swell up and hurt me was because of it.  I am amazed that this drug that is helping my MS is always making me sick.  It makes no sense to me.  I know I don’t want to stop taking the drug but I also know that I can’t keep dealing with all of the side effects.  All the ones in pink are the ones that I have had while I have been taking this drug.  After looking at the list and things that I have it is time to go back to the doctor and maybe go on a different medication. 

The big thing I want to say today is don’t let doctors bully you into staying on something that makes you sicker than the MS makes you.  You need to take your health into your own hands and do what makes you feel better!