Micaela: Starting and changing medicines – The need to change 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 needed to try a number of medicines to treat Crohn’s disease before finding one that she was not allergic to, that worked and did not cause side effects.
Micaela:
I had had another eye flare-up. I'd been put back on high doses of steroids again, although that had continued … oral medication had continued, from the end of 2001 with my eye problems and the methotrexate had continued from the end of 2001, so five days after that episode, I suddenly presented with severe, severe, severe abdominal pain and was taken to hospital in an ambulance and spoke to a gastroenterologist and he said, ‘Yeah, I reckon you've got Crohn's, but we'll do a gastroscopy to confirm that.’ It was confirmed. They were surprised about the severity of it, given that I was already taking medication which should have been treating it.
Jacqueline:
That was the methotrexate?
Micaela:
Methotrexate and the steroid medication, because they're both actually used in the treatment of Crohn's for various people, although they may not be the first medication that is offered to a patient. I think they were also surprised because … my immunologist, I think, wasn't surprised I ended up with bowel disease, but he hadn't seen any evidence of it yet and he was surprised that the meds didn't keep me under control, because I was already on immunosuppressants. So, actually a range of medications were then introduced that I was trialled on and I actually didn't react very well to the first two that they trialled me on. Finally, [they] settled on a third one, which was specifically targeted to Crohn's and that was olsalazine, it's called. Previous to that ... like, they tried me on ciclosporin and that made me really sick ... nausea ... I kept vomiting pretty instantly after taking that. Then they tried me on a similar drug to the olsalazine but apparently I am allergic to sulfonamides and it has a sulfonamide as part of its component. So, yeah, eventually settled with olsalazine and that continued right up to another episode, a much later episode I had in 2010, which is when the mesalazine was introduced.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.