It's been a long time since I have posted... Here's why:
You see all of those "possible side effects" listed? Imagine you have all of those, at the same time, while being pregnant and responsible for a four year old and two year old little boy. Imagine you're also in the middle of moving. And while you're at it, throw in a sick two year old, and a compromised immune system. Now imagine that rather than getting a little better each day, you're getting a little worse, every week getting two fresh doses of the meds that are producing this misery to begin with. That was me, for a month.
It's been a rough month, there's just no sugar coating it. IVIG felt like it was very near killing me, and left my immune system completely depleted. After six infusions my body was beginning to shut down and quite honestly I had given up fighting it. Everything hurt. My skin, my eyes, every muscle in my body. I couldn't regulate my body temperature and was taking several baths a day to keep warm. I couldn't hold my head up, couldn't keep my eyes open, my breathing was irregular, I was constantly sick to my stomach, head pounding, and running a fever. There were several days when I almost drug my entire family to the ER convinced something more then just side effects from my meds was to blame. The final straw was when the flu hit out house... it took down Maddox first, then me (which wasn't tough considering my immune system was pretty much toast to begin with), then Jax, then Nolan. By the time I showed up for my fourth week of infusions it was pretty tough to hide how much pain I was in. The nurses called my doctor, and my wonderful doctor sent me packing back home. Thankfully I was still so early in my pregnancy that the chances of a bleed in the baby because of skipping one weekend of treatments were pretty tiny. My body needed to regain strength, and another two days of IVIG would have just made things worse.
After a bit of research I discovered that the hospital had switched their default IVIG brand since the time that I was pregnant with Maddox. I had previously received Previgin, and had never had a single side effect from the dosage. Now I was on Gammunex, at double the dosage from my last pregnancy. The question was, is the brand causing my body to react this way, or is it the dosage? Being that we can't help the dosage amount, the logical thing to me seemed to be to try switching back to Previgin.
I am now four weeks into treatments with Previgen, and aside from an occasional headache I feel FINE. Better than fine in comparison! It feels so good to feel relatively normal again!!! Now it's time to focus on getting through the next three months :-)
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving, as I hope you all did. We were even able to squeeze in a date night, and some family photos!!
