When Entocort isn't working?

[Cat-a-Tonic]

Fortunately the CMA saw my email right away and fixed the form and sent a corrected version to me. So I got that taken care of at least. Then I got home and saw that our insurance company somehow messed up and sent us a notice of cancellation for hubby's auto insurance. Um, no! I called and made a payment (they never even sent us a bill) and hubby's going to call the insurance agent on Monday and straighten everything out. Seriously, if it's not one thing it's another! It's been a stressful day at work and I've had a wicked headache all day. Not happy.

To cheer me up, hubby took me grocery shopping. I love grocery shopping. We bought some things that should work on my low-FODMAP diet. MLP, I even found some "pea protein"! Not pea milk like you had mentioned, but I think similar. I can't do my soy-based protein powder that I had been using because it's got fructose. This pea-based protein powder looks to be FODMAP safe. Peas are allowed in small amounts on low-FODMAP so hopefully should be okay. Which is good because I was missing my morning smoothies! Now I can make smoothies again!

 

[CeeCeeGo]

Oh Cat

I have just been reading through your whole thread (I had searched for Entocort stops working!) and girl you have really been through the mill recently.

How are you doing now? Towards the end of your thread, you were sounding more positive and it was great that you got back to work.

I really hope things have settled down.

Take care, hang in there and like you I find that building a Lego set really helps!

All the best,
CeeCee

 

[Cat-a-Tonic]

I'm glad to find another Lego fan! The hubby and I splurged last month and bought the $100 high speed train set. For xmas I'm also totally getting myself the Lego advent calendar where you get to build one small Lego set every day in December.

I sort of let this thread go quiet once I was on the road to recovery, and I gave you a brief update in your other thread, but I'll do an update in here as well in case anybody else is reading through all of this. I am back to working full-time and I'm exercising as much as I can in the form of walking (not back to lifting weights just yet). I had good success with tapering down my pred until I got to 10 mg, and then things sort of came to a grinding halt. I had 10 mg tablets which I could break in half to make them 5 mg, and I was initially tapering down by 5 mg every 5 days. So I went from 40, to 35, to 30, and so on and that all was fine.

Once I got down to 10, I figured I'd play it safe and taper a bit more slowly, so I cut a tablet in half and then in half again, and took 3/4ths of the full tablet, so by doing that I tapered from 10 mg to 7.5 mg. By that afternoon, I was having some pretty bad lower abdominal pains - my body was very clearly telling me that it didn't like 7.5 mg. I called my GI and went back up to 10 mg for a week. My GI prescribed me some 1 mg tablets, so that I could try tapering by 1 mg every 5 days. That sounded like a solid plan to me. So I tapered from 10 mg to 9 mg with minimal issues (my abdomen gave me the slightest protest about that, but nothing bad at all). Then last week I tried tapering from 9 mg to 8, and once again felt awful, this time with nausea and extra bathroom trips thrown in along with the abdo pains. Fun. Sooo, I'm back up to 10 mg again. I emailed my GI and let him know what's going on, and I told him I'm going to stay at 10 mg for a few weeks this time before I try to taper again. My body is obviously NOT happy right now when I go below 10 mg, so I'm going to give it a bit longer to hopefully heal more. If worse comes to worse, I have a GI appointment on Nov 14th, so if I can't taper then I'll stay at 10 mg until that appointment and hopefully together we can figure out a better plan.

Still no word back from my GI about LDN. I really want to try LDN - I feel like it's a great compromise, it's not so harsh that he'd feel like an undiagnosed person shouldn't be on it, and it's promising enough that I feel like it might really help me. I'm definitely going to push for LDN again at that GI appointment next month. I don't know that there's another med option that we could potentially even agree on, so I am still holding out hope for LDN, in spite of not hearing anything at all from my GI about it (and I have emailed him like 4 times asking about it!). Once I get to talk to him in person at the appointment, he has to give me an answer one way or the other. And if he says no to LDN, he better have a really good justification, because I *will* fight him on it! And I can be a real pain in the ass, ha ha.

 

[CeeCeeGo]

Hi Cat

I recently bought the Holiday Train Set and can't wait to build it (at the new house). I have never had a train set before - I bet it will wind up my two cats!

I love Lego!

 

[Cat-a-Tonic]

My pets (one cat and one dog) were definitely cautiously curious when I set up the high speed Lego train set. My cat tried to sniff the train as it went past her and my dog just looked at it from a distance but with complete attention, like it was something slightly scary that she needed to keep an eye on. It was pretty funny. Then at one point my dog stood too close to the train tracks and the train bumped her leg and derailed - she looked a bit shocked, ha ha!

 

[CeeCeeGo]

One of my cats is obsessed with minifigures. If he gets the chance, he carries them around in his mouth and then hides them! I have to keep my eye on him when building. :dusty:

 

[Cat-a-Tonic]

Ooh, naughty kitty! So far (knock on wood) my pets haven't stolen any of my Legos yet. If my cat steals anything, it's usually either dog toys or dog treats. She loves to torment the dog by taking her things. Once, after I had gone to bed and the dog was locked in her kennel for the night, the cat got ahold of a bag of dog treats, knocked them on the ground right in front of the dog (but she couldn't get to them because of being in her kennel), and then the cat proceeded to chew through the bag and eat the treats while the dog watched. I know this because I heard a bit of a commotion and got out of bed to see what was going on. Ooh, so naughty! Good thing they're cute, ha ha.

 

[Howard B]

You are definitely at the point where you need to be scoped to find out what is going on or at the very least MRE