Serum sickness -remicade

Hello! I’m back on the forum after enjoying 7 years of remission with the help of remicade.

At my recent routine colonoscopy I showed mild inflammation but my GI still considered it remission. A week later I experienced debilitating pain in my joints and muscles with fever and chills. I was basically all of a sudden immobile. Blood tests showed not only had I built up antibodies but I also had zero remicade in my system.

So we switched to humira and added back in imuran which I had quit last year (lesson learned!).

While I’m now able to mostly get back to normal, im still dealing with joint and muscle pain. It’s not nearly as bad but at night my hands are almost useless and if I over exert I definitely feel it the next day.

Anyone else have lingering symptoms like this after serum sickness or antibodies? How long can I expect this to last?

I ended up in a similar situation with serum sickness but mine was for all the anti-tnf biologicals. I tried Remicade (first one), Humira, Simponi, and Cimzia. I had bad reactions to all of them; Remicade worked great for the first 4 years until I developed serum sickness.

You may want to move to a new biological mechanism medication if your symptoms do not start going away on Humira. I had decent GI symptoms but the serum sickness was my issues.