Crohn's Part IV

Since I last wrote about my daughter’s fight against Crohn’s disease, there have been a few things that have happened. After some smooth sailing, it was learned that my daughter had stopped taking her medication. My wife happened to notice some pill capsules in the trash in the bathroom. This wasn’t out of the ordinary because since my daughter got her braces and palette expander, she had been unable to swallow her pills. We would open the capsules, pour the contents into orange juice or water, and she would drink it. She would then put the empty capsule ends back together and throw them away. My daughter is 8 but sometimes we give her a little too much leeway. That’s what happened with the medication. We would set her pills out in the morning and before bed and then rely on her to take them. We should have been watching her. We are partly to blame for not watching her more closely. I’m not sure what made my wife check the pills in the garbage but the first one she picked up was still full.

We started looking through the garbage. Pill after pill were full and unopened. My wife had to leave for work so I needed to sift through the entire basket, which was full, to try to figure out how long she had been doing this. After about 45 minutes of pulling pills out and guesstimating (pills at the bottom of the basket were really corroded), the time-frame seemed to be about 6 weeks worth of meds that she had been skipping. We had a long talk with her about the importance of taking her medicine, why she has to take it, what could have happened to her because of this, but most importantly….we couldn’t trust her right now because she lied to us.

Having said all that, this may have been a blessing in disguise. Her health had not deteriorated at all. In fact, she had gained a pound or 2 and her energy level was up. While on the medication, it was hard for her to gain much weight.

The next thing was to inform her doctor. We knew she would order some blood work to make sure my daughter’s blood levels weren’t spiking or rising from being off the medication. We also decided to not put her back on the meds if her blood work came back ok. There was no sense in doing that. Something was telling us that the probiotics and plain yogurt were actually helping.

Her blood work came back as normal as her last test. We decided to keep her off one of the meds and to lessen the dosage of the other for the time being. Our next visit to the doctor isn’t until mid October. We are hoping things stay as is until then. What started as a big scare could actually have been a breakthrough for us. Even with the good news, we are watching her again when it’s time to take her medicine. This will be the last post about Crohn’s for awhile as we seem to have settled into a rhythm of keeping it in check. (fingers crossed)

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