Day 22 - Accutane

I finished my first draft yesterday, so today the chopping and polishing begins. I wish I was more dedicated to it this morning, but instead I'm just exhausted. Thursdays always seem to be the most tiresome day. Only two more days, but you're already thinking about the sleep in you can have on Saturday. For me, though, mine is from waking up so much last night.

I have the tiniest of hayfever symptoms. I've been sneezing for about a week now, naturally then having to blow my nose. So breathing is a little hard of a night. Relieved for a few minutes but then I wake up.

Normally this tiny issue doesn't really give me any problems sleeping, but I'm on a daily dose of Accutane. So it is much worse.

I've been on Accutane for a year now. I was supposed to be slowly raising the dosage. I started on 20mg every other day, then at 3 months, I was meant to be on 20mg every day, and then at 6 months, I was meant to be at 40mg a day.

I got to the 3 month mark and moved up to daily. I was super sick to my stomach for weeks. It wasn't until a month had passed that I realised it must have been from the meds. I did some research on the internet (yeah... bad idea) and found it was a common complaint. So I stopped the med altogether for a couple of weeks. When I started to feel better, I went back to an every other day routine.

When I went back to my dermatologist, he acknowledged my need to move back down to this and agreed it was the right course of action. My normal blood work for it came back fine, though, and he said that if I wanted to go back to daily, I could. I was not sold on the matter, so I just spent the first year doing every other day (when I remembered at all).

The new year came, and I decided it was time to try daily doses again. So I have been doing it since the start of the month. I immediately had the chapped lips that comes with a dose this size. Dry skin came next, so I moisturise daily. As long as I do, I have no issues. I started getting dry eyes last week, so I have to keep tear drops around.

But this week I started having issues with these allergies. My nose has gone dry now too. It is very unpleasant. They are cracked and painful inside the nostrils, and bloody. It only occured to me last night after the second wake that it was from the Accutane. I looked up the information leaflet for the drug and found that with a certainty dry nose is one of the side effects. Oh goodie!

Hopefully the dry nose won't be so bad when my allergies go away, cuz another 1 1/2 - 2 years of this will kill me. 

I did feel a bit sick to my stomach yesterday, but I'm going to just assume that was from my IBS. Fingers crossed it is! I'll keep going until my 3 monthly visit and have my liver tested while I'm actually on this dosage. If it has changed in the slightest, I'm going back to every other day. 

This stuff is so very toxic, but I really hope I can finish the course so I don't have to worry about acne ever again.