Liver rescued - tapering off prednisone and CellCept
My immune system started attacking my liver at the beginning of the year which resulted in my liver enzymes (ALT, etc.) increasing. My doctors put me on a heavy dose of steroids (80 mg of prednisone each morning) which usually will bring those liver numbers down. the normal range is 0-40 U/L but the numbers kept rising and after a month they were over 1000. My Hepatology team decided to put me on CellCept, an immunosuppressor often used to prevent rejection of organ transplants. That did the trick, 80 mg of prednison a day and 2000 mg of CellCept slowly lowered my LFTs (liver function tests) to the normal range in a month. For the next two months I will taper off of the prednisone (lowering the dose by 10mg each week for 8 weeks) and then we will taper off the CellCept! In the beginning of April I'll get a brain MRI and a CT scan of my chest, abdomen and pelvis and monitor the metastasized lung cancer tumors. If they are stable or shrinking then we will continue to monitor e...