Peter S: Starting and changing medicines – Complex medication regimes (1)
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Peter S
Male
Age at interview: 60
Number of medicines: 18
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Peter S went to hospital and had extensive tests to determine how best to manage his heart condition. Subsequent diagnoses have required cautious decision making regarding his treatment.
I went through … my wife and I went out there, we spent the full day. We went through millions of tests, interviews with different people, psychologists, psychiatrists, registrars, I think everyone but the cleaner I think just about. Then we saw [specialist] towards the end of the day and he said unfortunately medically you would benefit from a transplant, but because of your diabetes … and at the time the anti-rejection drugs aggravated diabetes something shocking, so he said because of the risk of aggravating your diabetes with anti-rejection drugs we can't put you on the program.
So I went back to [specialist], that's my cardiologist and there was a new drug … actually it wasn't a new drug. It was a drug that had been used by post-transplant patients to help settle things down and so forth. It's called Dilatrend … Cyc … no, not [unclear], I can't remember, anyway, Dilatrend and that actually made a huge difference. Within probably a few months my chest had settled down. Even to this day though I still get chest pain, even though I've had the bypass and all the other stuff and all the drugs I'm on, that's another issue … I'll come to that in a little while. But the Dilatrend was brilliant and again he topped up with other drugs which created an issue on the drug side in that when I came to be put on an antidepressant they actually had to send a list of my medications through to the drug companies to work out which antidepressives I could use that would not interact and cause problems with the other drugs.
It took about three weeks for me to actually start on antidepressives because they had to wait for things to come back because some of the cardiac drugs were very fragile and they don't like interference from other drugs and they do all sorts of crazy things.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.