Just got home from the Rheumatologist who has been treating me with prednisone for about 7 months. I was on 8mg BID and had been tapered to 4mg per day. I was not doing very well on that dosage and began to have horrible day and night sweats. After asking my MD about the nights sweats, he handed me a pamphlet and said I probably have PMR. This was a shock! All this time I had been blaming the joint pain on post infectious arthritis (I had a very bad case of clostridium difficile and was hospitalized 2 times last year). Has anyone else had C. Difficile followed by PMR? The Dr. is putting me back up to 8mg pred. starting me on alendronate , and is now doing a bone density test. I also have a low albumin rate of 2.8. Does anyone else have this problem??? What a year!Lee, I am sorry, I am not familiar with what you are talking about. I am sure
someone here will be able to tell you something though.
Best of luck hope the prescriptions help.
pgrHi Lee, sorry to see you here, cos nobody wants to be on this boat, but welcome anyhow! Like pgr, I also don't know anything about post infectious arthritis, but it is not unusual for PMR to follow on from some other thing, be it an infection, a trauma (emotional or physical) or a vaccination, or another autoimmune disease. There are a few of us here in that category. Also, not sure what the low albumin is about, but if you google it you will find out! many of us have peculiar blood results, I know I have a few weird ones none of which appear related to either PMR or anything else. lol. I hope the 8mg pred helps you. Stay on this forum. We are not all always here all of the time, but it's still a pretty active forum and very helpful.
Thank you soooo much for your responses. It's nice not to feel so alone. Today is a particularly achy day but it's weirdly good to know what causes all these symptoms. Does this disease have anything to do with fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome? It seems pretty well accepted by the arthritis foundation considering they have a pamphlet. Guess I'll relax and take my prednisone like a "good girl", I really wanted to get off it but, I feel too miserable. Oh, another strange thing that happened a few months ago was extreme pain in my Left eyebrow next to the top of my nose that lasted about a month. It went away when the MD put me on a prednisone challenge of 40mg a day for 3 days. Now that eyebrow and temple are numb feeling. Could that have been Large cell artieritis? I didn't tell anyone about it at the time because I just felt that the MDs thought I was a hypochondriac.
You were lucky! If you have GCA (which I have apart from pmr) you can become blind if you donīt get prednisone fast enough. I have seen some posts from persons who have had eye problems. I got my diagnose after a biopsy in the left temple in June 2005. Now I am down on 2.5 mg starting to-morrow.
Ragnar