Not 100%

For once it's not my lungs that are making me feel under the weather, though I'm not 100 per cent. There are some nasty bugs going round at the moment, one of which is a sickness bug. I'm not sure whether I'm coming down with this or if it's just coincidence, but for the past couple of days I've been feeling rather nauseous, and today I've had a headache and a bit of a sore throat. It's nothing major, but the risk is that I do end up being sick, in which case I won't be able to keep my meds down and my lungs will go off on a strop. Because I have IBS I take an anti-sickness med everyday anyway (not actually for nausea/sickness, but because it speeds up my insides), so yesterday afternoon I doubled the dose to the max allowed in the hope of keeping things under control. I have to keep an eye on things, not only because of the potential consequences of sickness and my asthma, but also because there's the very slight possibility that this is being caused by the methotrexate I take for the asthma. I'm not overly concerned about this possibility because I know there are bugs going round and I know several who've had it, but I need to be a little wary. If the symptoms are down to the methotrexate then the chances are that I'll have to come off it as it would be indicative of more serious side-effects.

Methotrexate has been a last-ditch attempt to do anything for my asthma as there simply aren't any other options until science catches up with my disease, as my consultant put it. There are mixed reports of its efficacy, but when I first started taking it I did seem able to reduce my dose of oral steroids - prednisolone - that had been at 60mg or more for over a year. However, over the past few months I've had several bad attacks, which isn't any different from previously really, but I haven't been able to reduce the pred again after the post-attack increases. I'd managed to get the steroids down to 30mg at one point, albeit fairly briefly, which was huge progress, but the dose has gradually crept back up to 60mg, although I'm slowly trying to tickle it down a bit again. Anyway, the upshot of this is that my consultant is now not sure that the risks of taking methotrexate are balanced by the benefits and is questioning whether I should stay on it. I still want to stay on it, but I can see his point ... I guess I don't want to give up on the hope of its usefulness though. There simply isn't anything else that can be offered to help my asthma so letting go of this one hope is a very big thing, and I don't think I'm ready to do that yet so long as the methotrexate isn't doing me any harm.

I'm hoping that this slight off-colourness is either bug related or preferably just exhaustion as the fatigue after the last asthma attack hasn't abated yet. It's taking a very long time for this tiredness and lethargy to lift, and I'm a bit fed up with it ... I'm also a little uncertain as to why it's taking so long to pick up. Here's hoping it will lift and that all the other off-colourness symptoms disappear very quickly.