Off Orencia & ON Diclofenac, side effect help?

December 23, 2010

I had cervical spine surgery on 22 Nov (healed nicely). Both the neurosurgeon &

my rheumy stopped the Orencia infusions in early Oct. Then they took my beloved

Darvoset off the market. With no pain meds at all to cover up the RA I realized

I felt no different without the Orencia than I did with it.

Last Friday I had a great back & forth discussion with my rheumy about this.

Seems before he saw me he'd been out in the hall looking over the last YEAR of

my " symptom & difficulty " checklists to see what has changed and how. He walked

in, said " Hi, Mrs. , have you noticed the Orencia isn't helping anymore? "

Well, yeah, duh.

He gave me another torture exam- handling, squeezing & moving my joints plus my

feet! Geez I hate it when he works my feet over. He'd make a great torturer.

Ends up that he did that because my blood workup from 2 days earlier showed no

inflammation present and that all was good. He told me that he has a handful of

patients that are similar to me. We have normal or close to normal blood workup

but the physical exam shows significant inflammation.

The final decision was to to stop the Orencia. I've been on it for roughly 4.5

years. It did help me at first but it petered out. He left me on Arava and added

the Diclofenac, which is a prescription strength NSAID. The side effects are

nausea, gas both ways, dizziness, just a whole list of truly enjoyable effects.

I had to ask the pharmacist days later if I can take an antacid with simethicone

with all my meds. My kids appreciate my efforts to save them from this horrid

" chemical warfare " as my 10 year old daughter calls it. She calls it that

because I unintentionally cleared the living room one night.

Are any of you on Diclofenac and, if so, what have you found to help with the

nausea & " chemical warfare " ?

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