A year in the making. Last year, my September was tough. It was a positive consequence of my August and the decisions myself and my IBD team made to get me well again. A quick recap – View this post on Instagram #throwbacktuesday 🙈🙊 • • • This time last year I was one month post op from my subtotal colectomy. I was in the hospital having my first loading dose of my second restart of #Vedolizumab : time just, flies doesn’t it? Awkward cannula moment, always! 😂 More on my thoughts here – biological treatment, gratitude and being comfortable…
Tonight I hosted the #IBDHour chat on Biological Treatments. In the last six years since I was diagnosed, I have found that I respond best to biological medications; which have given me good quality of life (QoL) and the ability to be closely monitored and managed by my IBD teams. In this post, I’ll answer – at length, because 240 characters and a tweet threads just aren’t enough! – the questions from the chat and provide some good links to resources and detail some more of my experiences with biological medications. Disclaimer: This information is based on my own personal…
Have you ever wanted to just get through something, so you can start to feel better? That’s how I’ve felt about this pending infusion. I’m not one to rush through something, to just reach the end and say it’s over and done with, I appreciate my struggle and woes as much as I appreciate and celebrate my highs and all those good feelings that come with them. But these past couple of weeks, boy oh boy have I just wanted to fast forward. My final loading dose of Vedolizumab was due on October 16th, a few days shy of the…
Today has been bittersweet. I feel like I’ve said that a lot, but the excitement of actually getting back into this whole ‘back on biological medication’ routine has taken over the fact that this was my last outpatient appointment at my hospital. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I relocated at the start of the summer for a new job – read more here and here – and with that came moving my IBD care to a new hospital. It was a big challenge as I was, at the time, not receiving any treatment and…
You always want to believe your consultant when they say “maybe we’ll be able to go a couple of years without any medications or big issues“. You believe because that is the sort of IBD dream isn’t it; managing without medical intervention? It was for me, back in June at my last appointment; full of confused optimism. Fast forward not even six weeks and I was bed bound, in constant abdominal pain; unsure of what was happening to me. I would suffer for weeks, spending days on end in and out of the hospital, not really getting any answers or…
