Micaela: How people feel – Long-term impact of multiple medicines (1)
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Micaela
Female
Age at interview: 38
Number of medicines: 21
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Micaela is mindful that she takes medicines that can have serious side effects and impact on her future. She was initially quite frightened but she felt reassured by the response of a specialist in whom she had a great deal of trust.
But one of the exceptions to being ... having things explained to me by doctors, was being put by the immunologist on the methotrexate, because one of the things he thought might be of concern to me was in relation to how it could impact the possibility of having a child and, while I wasn't necessarily decided on having a child and I'd just broken up from a serious relationship,
I was thinking, ‘Well, I don't want that choice taken away from me.’ That was the first time I had quite an emotional reaction, I think, to the knowledge of the drug itself, as opposed to it being a side effect, but I have a very fantastic gynaecologist, who spoke me through it ... spoke me through it [laughs] ... talked me through it and she's just very upfront and practical. So, I realised that wasn't necessarily something I needed to worry about as much as I was. Especially because she ... ultimately she said to me, ‘Look, if you are not trying to get pregnant at the moment, let's focus on what you do need to fix first and then we'll work on what we might need to do to help you, if you decide to have a child.’ I had a lot of faith in her, so I calmed down about that, but there was a constant awareness that I was on hard drugs, you know?
That's always at the back of your mind. When I changed to ... with the initial Crohn's episode, when they tried first the ciclosporin, I mean, that's another one which is associated with cancer patients and so forth. It's given to cancer patients. Again, as soon as you hear something like that, which you know can be a terminal illness, I knew mine wasn't, but you do realise that you're taking something of quite high strength. So, in some ways, I was quite relieved when I had an adverse reaction to that medication, because that's when ... by that time I had started reading a lot more and learning a lot more, when I could, and that one I thought was a little alarming. So, I thought, ‘Well, that's one less heavy duty that I have to cope with.’
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.