Seven Days.

It's an important number to me.  Every 7 days my dosage of prednisone decreases.  While I'm tapering from this extremely powerful drug I experience many unwanted side-effects, much of which I can't differentiate from AIH symptoms.  At 5mg/week my body became my worst enemy, leaving me unable to walk from the living room to the kitchen, making it difficult to walk the very short distance from the room I have to sleep in now to the nearby bathroom.  From unshakable episodes of freezing to feeling as if my body is going to melt into a puddle, I never know from one minute to the next what I'll be dealing with.  The turning point for me a few days ago was waking up before the sun in the throes of a migraine.

Tapering 5mg/week was simply not going to work.

Another call to the dr. and I'm told to go back up to 7.5mg and taper down at 2.5mg/week.  The morning of the migraine I discovered that with that 5mg dosage the migraine would go away, and it was that same evening that I added the additional 2.5mg.  While this seems like numbers and boring, dry information, I promise it's much, much more than that.  My entire quality of life depends on a tiny little pill that had the ability to make or break my life in every way.

On one hand it's a life-saver, and on the other it's dangerous as hell.  It's the drug people with AI diseases love to hate.

The usual thinking on getting off prednisone is to slow the taper the lower the dosage gets.  I'm unsure if I will be able to go down to the 5mg again, but I'll certainly find out next Wednesday.  Just how I'll find out is yet to be seen.  Will I feel better?  Will I feel worse?  Will there be debilitating symptoms again?  Or will everything go smoothly?

Without answers I can't make plans.  With each day being a giant mystery that unfolds one minute, one hour, one symptom (or lack of) at a time I am no longer really in control of my life anymore.  Prednisone now determines everything---basically, it's made me its bitch.

I can be honest about this.  I have to be honest about this.  I'm willing to face this head-on even if it means I'm the recipient, on occasion, of a TKO by a drug that is supposed to save my life.  I'll get up, face another day (albeit at times unwillingly), and keep going.

All of the above has affected my life.  Okay, I accept that.  What I don't like at this time is no support network, no one listening (not including who reads here) when I really need to talk.  If I could just feel good, be without pain, lead an normal life, I can handle the other stuff.

In the meantime I'm ticking down the hours in those 7 days to reach toward that goal of being off a drug that whispers it will save me, while making me feel as if I'm dying.

Seven days at a time... we'll see where I will be when I'm finally free of the prednisone shackles.

We will see...