vanco dosage

Hi tcoach1 -

You mean the dose of IV vanco? or oral vanco?

IV vanco
You will likely start slowly with a nominal dose (say, .5g) and have the lab test your blood levels 12 hrs later. The level of vanco that is still in your blood 12 hrs after it should be mostly gone will advise your "effective" dose.

It took me 6 WEEKS!!!! to get through this process that really should have taken a few days because my LLMD's office and the home health care kept faxing ea other like it's the 1960s and repeatedly failed to communicate the lab results/responses.

So, in the interim while they were stumbling over themselves, I s-l-o-w-l-y titrated up with almost no herxing or side effects.

Then I finally yelled at everyone to PICK UP THE PHONE and we all agreed that my optimal dose was 1g every 12 hrs. So I jumped up to it - a little overconfident because I'd been OK so far on the way up and...

BOY... that put me in bed for a few days, nearly bed-ridden for the first 2 wks. But then everything go much better

So, titrate slowly.

-p

Yes - they want labs done at the trough level, so that's 12 hrs after your dose. Vanco requires two doses per day.

I started treating bart (actually, my Fry Labs test identified a "bart-like organism or BLO) with Byron White A-bab and I herxed quite a bit and it also gave me horrific GI attacks every 4-5 wks. It took a year to figure this out so since I was already on IV Rocephin, MD took me off A-bart and put me on something else that I can't remember and I felt nothing on it at high doses. So then she put me on the vanco.

After a very rough 2 wks and a rough 2 wks after that, all my herxing subsided and I have been doing great on vanco now for one year - no side effects, minimal herxing, significantly reduced sx with a few exceptions every-now-and-then.

I really, really hate the weekly labs the pharmacy requires with vanco, however. Your pharmacy/state regulations might be different than mine - hope so.

The home health nurses come every week to reaccess me so they were drawing labs from my port (hopefully, they can use your port to do this if you get one installed - I can't remember if they can draw labs from a PICC) but my port stopped giving blood a year ago (some sort of tissue overgrowth has created a flap over the tip of the catheter - so it allows me to push liquids through the catheter but slams shut when I try to draw blood out).

So then the nurses moved to my arms, and that became challenged so they moved to my wrists, hands but they would still have trouble, go digging and it was so painful being jammed with IV needles 4-5 times on each hand so I decided to go to Labcorp.

But the professional phlebotomists couldn't get blood either. Took me a long time to figure out that it was the turmeric I was taking. So I was having great success at Labcorp until recently now that I'm on a new biofilm buster (cistus incanus tea) and the phlembotomists are going so deep they are hitting tendons that cause weeks of pain or immobility in my arms and also keep blowing the veins... you should see my arms.

So, for me, being on IV has so many complications and there are times when the complications literally dominate my Lyme & Co symptoms and treatment. I was not prepared for this. I am so indecribably lucky to have insurance coverage (2 yrs!) so I try very hard not to complain but it is just overwhelming.

That said, the direct answer to your question is - the drug itself has been AWESOME and my GI appreciates the work-around probably more than I could quantify/express.

Good luck! ;)

-p

My neuro stuff was helped mainly with the Rocephin, anti-inflammatories, cyst-busters like samento and banderol and just more time in tx.

I will never take oral abx again, unless prescribed to by law or under threat of losing a limb or my eyesight or something... ;)

I'm being overly dramatic but I've worked too hard to build up GI.

So I have slowly transitioned to herbs and I'm also interested in other therapies.

I feel my benefits from abx, while CONSIDERABLE, have peaked.

-p