Drugs are bad mmmkay

I'm on loads of medications. So many that I thought I might take a wander through the list and let all you people out there know what they're all for:

Cyclosporin A.

I take this to mediate my immune system - this is necessary because my immune system is trying to kill me because it can't tell the difference between self and non self.

Side effects (aside from leaving me open to infection) include excessive hair growth. This manifests in an all over soft furry feeling to me and having to shave more of my face than I used to have to. The dose I am on currently is low enough that it's not that bad but having been on it before I remember when my eyebrows joined up with my hairline - it was all a bit Teenwolf.

Now because I take a drug that suppresses my immune system I have to take a load of drugs to protect me from infection. These are:

Co-Trimoxazole Antibiotic

Azithromycin Antibiotic

Aciclovir Antiviral

Voriconazole Antifungal

As well as those antibiotics that I take daily I have to keep a store of both Moxifloxacin and Co-Amoxiclav for those occasions when an infection does break through that barrier.

The side effects of these drugs are fairly minimal but the antifungal does provide me with occasional hallucinations (mostly aural but occasional visual ones too). They are mild but they don't half interfere with your perception of reality when they do happen.

The other issue from taking all of these things is nausea and for that I take anti emetics like Ondansetron which are an absolute godsend. The damage caused to my stomach by radiotherapy from the bone marrow transplant means I also take Omeprazole.

As well as the Cyclosporin I have to take Gleevec to mediate my immune response. This is the drug I was originally going to be on the clinical trial for if I didn't have a tissue match for the bone marrow transplant. I take it not for it's properties regarding CML, but because it is effective in mediating rejection issues within the lungs, which is essentially what is happening to me. My body seems to think I've had a lung transplant already and is rejecting these ones, even though they really are mine.

Taking drugs for their side effects is a common theme amongst my little assortment. As well as taking Azithromycin because it reduces inflammation in the lungs and Gleevec for the reasons mentioned above I am now taking an anti-psychotic called Olanzapine because it has a side effect of inducing weight gain, which I need before surgery will be safe to undertake. The doses I take of these drugs is different to the normal therapeutic dose for the conditions they're designed for so they don't affect me too much otherwise.

All these drugs mess with the balance of things in your body so much that I've developed high blood pressure, for which I take Perindopril. I also have three different types of inhaler (Spiriva, Symbicort and Salbutamol) to aid the breathing process as well as my constant supply of oxygen and my bottles of food which go directly to my stomach via my PEG tube. I also have assorted creams for my skin and eye drops that I use regularly due to extremely dry eyes.

At the moment I have to take an average of about 20 tablets a day, which is undoubtedly a lot but there have been times when I've been over 50. That was when we were adjusting doses of certain drugs though so I had to take lots of small tablets of the same drug and so is a slightly false high point.

It's a lot to deal with certainly and always making sure that you've got enough of them requires a certain amount of organisation but you get used to it very quickly.

There was a point about 5 years ago when I got down to requiring only two tablets a day. It would be amazing if I ever got to that point again but honestly it has become so much like second nature to me now that it wouldn't bother me having to take drugs for life if it meant I was well.

It really is amazing what we can get used to.

Here's a pic I took of them all a while ago - some have changed but that's fairly representative of my own little pharmacy.