Terrified of cancer risk - Imuran

Chris B. said...
I suggest reading this article. It made a lot of sense to me and has guided me in my decision making regarding Cimzia.

http://programs.rmei.com/CCFA139VL/Transcript.pdf

What is Cimzia? Never heard of it?

I suppose the consensus is that the good outweighs the the bad. Looking at it, 4/10000 is bad considering those numbers include high dose transplant individuals. I am seeing a new GI on Wed so I will ask his opinion as well since I want to get scoped endo/colon it may be a med change anyway. I kinda feel my bowels waking up and am starting to get collicky pain in my right quadrant.

Most of the heavy duty drugs have some serious side effects, but then again so does pretty much every drug, they list all the side effects to cover their end. Age and health play an important part of people developing problems with these meds. I was scared of Imuran too, and oddly enough I turned out to be allergic to it and it almost killed me. I remember my first Remicade infusion and being terrified of it too... but its been 9 months now, and I'm doing fine. In fact I would consider myself symptomatically in remission. I recently "celebrated" my first anniversary with CD and the difference between me now and a year ago is enormous. I had a horrible time with anxiety (to be fair i was on Pred til April), but as time wore on and I got better I don't think about CD. I may have a flare in a year, or in a month. I may get cancer eventually, but the flip side of letting Crohns destroy my intestines isn't one I want to take.

There are a lot of things out there that can happen and we don't think about 99% of them, so why worry about the meds. The important thing is to pay attention to your body. Stress does us no good. I look back at myself and all I've been through in just a year... and I'm still here. Anxiety was crippling me, but I don't dwell on the what-ifs anymore. If we worried about EVERYTHING that could happen to us we'd never get out of bed.

I don't think that would be overreacting at all, Labradorite. And once you're on immunosuppressants, you might want to get a skin check every 6 months or so - either at a general/family doctor or at a dermatologist.