Mia: Problems with multiple medicines (I) – Side effects
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Mia
Female
Age at interview: 30
Number of medicines: 12
Cultural background: Israeli-Australian
The doses that Mia is on for her medicines mean that side effects are a rare and temporary occurrence.
The only major side effects are the ones that I have discussed with the nausea, the insomnia, the bruxism and those ones I just have to wait it out. They fade if I can manage to take my medication regularly for about a week. The rest of the medications haven’t seemed to have too many side effects. One of them is an immunosuppressant but as far as immunosuppressants go it is a quite low dose. When people talk about the really bad side effects of the immunosuppressants they are talking about things for a transplant and things like that and it's nowhere a dose like that. I've never noticed that I get sick more often than anyone else. Probably the only thing I've noticed is that if I get it I get it bad but it's not, but it's really not a thing that you couldn’t say it's just coincidence anyway. So as far as side effects go I have been pretty lucky with the medications that I have taken with the occasional nausea but that's about it.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.