Furosemide 40mg for small amount of fluid on lung, then i mentioned and asked the doctor results for my pmr , he said the esr was 20 and he did not seem interested, i said i get info on this support grouqp, he said. Carry on !!
That ESR is well within the "normal range" for a large population so he wouldn't be particularly bothered/interested. Whether it is YOUR normal is another question and not one that is easy to answer unless you have previously had a lower reading.
As long as you haven't got symptoms - carry on! Nice to know someone approves the use of the internet!
Eileen when you say carry on do you mean keep taking 12. And half mg which i been on for 8weeks , i reduced from 15, now dont know when to reduce, i got no pain but always tired but that to do more with the fluid i suppose, what do you think please ?
No, really I was echoing your GP!
According to the Bristol group after 6 weeks on 12.5mg you should reduce to 10mg. A link to the paper they made this recommendation in is in the first post of this thread, the last link:
https://patient.info/forums/discuss/pmr-gca-and-other-website-addresses-35316
If you can't manage to understand it give it to your GP - he sounds as if he needs a bit of help!
Quick and Kirwan and co leave their patients at 15mg for 6 weeks then 12.5mg for 6 weeks. Then they reduce them to 10mg and leave them there for a year before any further reductions. They find this reduces the rates of flares.
You might be able to reduce the 2.5mg in one step or just by alternating 12.5 and 10 for a couple of weeks and then going to 10mg every day. If not then try reducing just 1mg at a time.
The tiredness is mostly due to the underlying autoimmune illness that is the cause of PMR. PMR isn't the illness, it is the name given to the symptoms the inflammation causes. The pred deals with the inflammation so prevents the symptoms being so bad. The pred doesn't do anything about the underlying cause, it just allows you to manage the symptoms for a better quality of life. As long as the autoimmune bit is active you will need some pred, but hopefully less than 10mg - and eventually the autoimmune part will burn itself out and you won't need pred.
You are quite lucky really - many people never become pain-free. But I bet if you have no pain you are trying to catch up with all the things you didn't do because of PMR until you were put on pred????? Don't! You still have a chronic illness even though your (and others) can't see it. You need to do your part in management too, rest and learning to pace yourself are essential. A few of us have found that once we accepted the PMR was there and adjusted life accordingly (giving up housework and things and turning into "Precious Princesses" as one of us termed it) we felt much better and less tired and were able to reduce our pred doses far far lower than ever before without problems. Which in turn has left us feeling much better overall and we have a lot more energy.
In the 4th and 5th posts of that thread I gave you the link to is a reduction scheme I have used. It has allowed me and several others to reduce far further than ever before and without flares or problems whilst doing so. I always got stuck at 9mg, now I'm on 4mg. Some have used it from the stage you are at (I did) because some people struggle even with 1mg drops done from one day to the next. The body has got used to the pred and doesn't want to have to manage without it even though it can. Spreading the reduction out like this means the body doesn't notice as much and so doesn't protest as much either.
Eileen I must thank you so much for your help, you are very patient indeed,dont know what we would do without all your team on here, thank you so much