Taking the Medications

Swallowing Pills
Finding the Right Medication
Manages his Own Medicine

Crohn’s Disease          Ulcerative Colitis

Swallowing Pills

His medications work for him, and he’s in a routine with them. It’s like getting up in the morning and taking your vitamins or brushing your teeth— you just do these things. He takes his medications, and they seem to help reduce his symptoms.

We had to learn in February how to teach him how to swallow pills; they were big pills, and there were a lot of them. The only way we could get them down is the way the nurses showed us— trying it with a piece of bread. Some of the medications you end up with you can’t mash up, because they are painkillers and if you mash them up they could numb your throat. So you really do need to swallow pills, and one of the things we were doing was having him take them with bread. Another way we tried was just before he was ready to gulp down some water, have him pop the pill and then have the water and then gulp. So it was an experience, but by now he can take about four or five pills in one shot.

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Finding the Right Medication

We’ve learned that some medications work better for some people than they do for others. It took us a long time to find something that was really going to work for him. The medication he is taking now is something that the doctors didn’t even want to give him initially because they were afraid of allergic reactions; it affects different people in different ways. But they started out giving it to him every six weeks, and you could see instantaneous results. He came home and felt so good— he was healthy and ready to get out there and go back to a normal life. But towards the end of the six weeks, all of a sudden we’d start seeing little symptoms coming back; he wouldn’t tell me, I just would notice it. I noticed with this treatment that he would start gaining weight and he’d be healthier and going to the bathroom on a regular basis, but as the six weeks wore on he would stop eating and start losing weight again— little symptoms that when put together are a big warning sign. But then he started getting the treatment every four weeks and it has been eight months now that he’s been perfectly fine— no symptoms whatsoever. You really just have to keep an eye on your child and be vigilant. The doctors are here to help and to make us feel better, but you really need to be on top of it and constantly looking for new things.

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Manages his Own Medicine

He manages his own medicine. I don’t do the medication; he knows what to take. He goes to camp and he doesn’t give the pills to the nurse; he does it himself.

[Mother of a 14 year-old with Crohn’s disease.]

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