Causes of flares / when do you call your doctor?

Going through a flare right now. In hindsight I would have set up an appointment with my doctor earlier. Personally my advice would be to give a call to your doctor's office if you feel at all like things might get worse. For instance, if you decide Monday to call and schedule an appointment for Friday that week, you have a couple of days to see if things get worse or if this is nothing. That way you can still cancel the appointment if you feel better (in my personal experience doctor's offices don't have cancellation fees if you cancel 24 hours before your appointment but check with yours to make sure).

But think of it the other way; if things do get worse and on Wednesday you decide to call, the earliest appointment might be Wednesday of the week after meaning you have to wait 7 days to see your doctor. If you had called on Monday you could have been seeing your doctor on Friday.

I say this because I made the mistake of waiting until things got really bad before setting up an appointment and I had to wait 4,5 days before I got to see the doctor. In hindsight I would have called on the second day my symptoms came back. As long as your doctor has a lenient cancellalation policy I would go ahead and get an appointment scheduled in the near future just so you have it in case things get worse; that way you don't have to wait so long.

p.s. If you do decide to cancel though, make sure to do it ASAP so that other patients who aren't so lucky like you need to see the doctor urgently can take that spot.

garylouisville said...
Have you been taking any meds while in remission to stay in remission?

Yes I take asacol

garylouisville said...
If you can up your Asacol I would up the dosage. Three pills per day is maintenance with 6 pills being the max dose. I would make sure you are taking more than three. You don't want to wait for it to get worse. Kick it in the butt now before it's too late. Did you take any other drugs, oral or rectal, to get you to remission?

I took prednisone for about 6 weeks after I got diagnosed. I'm already on 6 pills per day, I was taking probiotics for awhile and my doctor said I could cut back a little. I'm going to up those again and hope that helps. Thank you for your advice!

For my second two flares, I called after about a month. I wanted to give my body a chance to get better, and once it was clear that it was just gonna get worse, I called.