Mast Cell Disease Awareness Day Thing #3: Med 2

I couldn't get the yogurt to fit in the container.

Time for another dose. This batch is actually half MCAS, half bipolar.

So right now treatment for mast cell disease (and MCAS in particular) does have a path, but it's hard to see and even harder to walk. We do have a loooong list of medications to try, but there is actually zero means of predicting which ones will work (or may instead cause a reaction) or what will address which symptom. That means that an individual doctor has a very rough guideline of "try these first" and a series of levels of meds based on things like overall cost and safety. Doc and patient will join through the meds one by one and toggle the dose.

Now imagine this: you've just had a huge health crisis that has left you extremely ill. You're a single parent who now suddenly goes anaphylactic at the smell of cooking or microwaved food, or the sole wage earner who has developed severe reactions to fluorescent lighting, or a senior in high school that has wound up in the hospital mid year. Now you're told that treatment is trial and error and could actually make you worse, and there's no guarantee you'll ever get better anyway. Who is gonna feed your kids? Pay your family's bills? What happens if you don't graduate?

I'll give you a hint: "fake it 'till you make it" or "working because you have to" are fallacies and extremely ableist. If your body is going to break it absolutely will, and it does not care about your hopes, dreams, or responsibilities.

No one person with mast cell disease is on the same meds as another, and we can't gage our own futures on others' experiences. You know how drug inserts include a list of side effects that might affect one percent of the population. We are that one percent. We *always* have been, and when you get a group of us together to try to talk about med effects it's honestly pandemonium.

The yogurt is there because my vitamin is in this batch. I had/have a terrible time finding supplements (many MCD folks do) but this is the best daily vitamin I've found by far. It still makes me gag and I've puked up my pills before but, given the restricted diet, I need to have that nutrition cushion. Chasing it with the yogurt just helps my throat to knock off the dramatics.