Micaela: Family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances – Telling people about their medicines
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 finds that many people have opinions about her conditions and how she should be managing them, which is not always helpful.
Well, there's … like, at first, I didn't really want to talk to too many people about it, because I suddenly found that, particularly when I was diagnosed with Crohn's, not so much the eye thing, because the eye thing was apparently a bit more rare, but suddenly everyone knew someone or, you know ... I think, I don't know.
Somebody … some South American singer had come out and said she had Crohn's or something and suddenly everybody had an idea of what you should do and what I needed to do and I found it all really overwhelming, because I was still finding out about it myself and the more of people's experiences that I heard ... and part of the problem was, it was often, ‘Oh, I've got a friend of a friend ... ’ or ‘My cousin's sister-in-law ... ’ It was often quite removed, so you're hearing it well down the track. You weren't even sure if you were getting proper information.
But the more I did learn, from a very early stage, was that Crohn's disease seems to have ... everyone seems to have quite a different experience of Crohn's disease and I don't know that that's necessarily exceptional to Crohn's, but ... so, I went through quite a while where I didn't want to go looking for anything, because a lot of things were coming to me and it was all ... I needed to work out what was going on in my own body first, before I sought further afield.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.