So I was recently approached by a woman that is the Community Awareness Coordinator with the American Recall Center. She helps to educate individuals on recall updates but also is an advocate for medicine safety. October is Talk About Your Medicines Month and she asked me if I would do a post for her about my medications. She gave me a guide with some talking points in the event that I needed assistance with a topic(s). After giving it a little thought I knew that I had a great blog post regarding medicine safety.
As someone with Rheumatoid Arthritis Disease, aka RA or RD, I do take several medications to calm my immune system, reduce inflammation and help with pain. One of those medications is Methotrexate (MTX). I’ve taken it since August, 2001. Initially I started taking it once a week in pill form. Several years ago – probably around 2011, I discovered that it came in an injectible form. I’d been having some issues with being sick from the pills and I asked my rheumatologist about it. He thought injecting MTX was a great option for me since we’d been splitting the 5 weekly pills of methotrexate into 2 doses during the week instead of one dose as a way of making it more tolerant for my system. What I discovered was that instead of feeling sick one day per week, I was sick two days per week.
I started on the injectible form during the summer and immediately noticed how much better I felt! No more sickness. And because I wasn’t being sick and purging the medication, I started feeling much better because I was absorbing more MTX. The RA definitely retreated and I needed less pain meds and less anti inflammatories. Everything was fine until earlier this summer when I started getting sick again. So much so that I actually left work at noon one day and went home sick. I don’t do that often. A couple weeks later the same thing happened and I was very sick again. The most ill I’d been since started the injectible Methotrexate.
I went into my medicine supply to look at the little bottles that I’d been given. I had a number of different sizes that the pharmacy had given to me for several months. I compares all the bottles – from the old supply and newer doses and I noticed a difference in the small print on some of the bottles. Over the years I’d always had MTX that had preservatives in it. I could reuse the same bottle a number of times and store it in the cabinet in between doses. I noticed that some of the bottles said “preservative free” on the label. I had never been given this type of med before but I suspected that if I was re-using a bottle of preservative free meds, I could be getting sick.
I stopped at the pharmacy the next day and the pharmacist confirmed that I had been receiving MTX with preservatives in it since starting to take it in 2001, but for some reason the form had changed recently and while the lettering on the bottle noted the change, nothing in the notes on the script explained the change to the meds or that I wasn’t supposed to reuse the bottles.
Problem solved. Lesson learned: Be very observant about everything as it pertains to your prescriptions. Ask questions. Trust your instincts and most of all, remember that it’s your body and you will definitely know if something is wrong.
phat50chick with ra 