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When I heard my MS specialist say that, it was like a swift kick in the stomach. And the dude giving me said kick was wearing metal-tipped baseball spikes. Oomph. That hurt. Over the past few years, I’ve given myself well over a thousand injections. And honestly it’s been super easy. Zero side effects, rare injection site reactions, and only the once-in-a-blue-moon painful jab that elicits a cursing. But a relapse in May, my second in just over a year, was a sobering experience, and not just because I had to lay off beer while I was taking 1,200 milligrams a day of prednisone. It called into question the effectiveness of those daily injections.
That’s always a concern with disease modifying drugs for multiple sclerosis. Even though you don’t see improvements—the role of these drugs is to slow down the MS, not reverse it—you have to trust they’re doing their job. Statistically they all work. Unfortunately, their efficacy is different in every patient. One drug might work far better than another.
So now my neurologist has tasked me with choosing a new treatment. I know them all quite well, and there may even be clinical trials that have merit. My wife and I have some difficult decisions ahead, but I welcome them. We’re lucky to have such an array of choices to fight such a nasty disease. That certainly wasn’t the case just 15 years ago when there was a lottery just to have the opportunity to get Betaseron, at the time a new, untested drug that was the sole FDA-approved treatment for MS. So today, July 7, I woke up and for the first time in years I didn’t poke myself with a needle. Weird. One door closes, another opens. I can’t wait.
That’s always a concern with disease modifying drugs for multiple sclerosis. Even though you don’t see improvements—the role of these drugs is to slow down the MS, not reverse it—you have to trust they’re doing their job. Statistically they all work. Unfortunately, their efficacy is different in every patient. One drug might work far better than another.
So now my neurologist has tasked me with choosing a new treatment. I know them all quite well, and there may even be clinical trials that have merit. My wife and I have some difficult decisions ahead, but I welcome them. We’re lucky to have such an array of choices to fight such a nasty disease. That certainly wasn’t the case just 15 years ago when there was a lottery just to have the opportunity to get Betaseron, at the time a new, untested drug that was the sole FDA-approved treatment for MS. So today, July 7, I woke up and for the first time in years I didn’t poke myself with a needle. Weird. One door closes, another opens. I can’t wait.
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