Margaret
Forum Replies Created
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I take alendronate once a week for osteoporosis. I’m careful to drink lots of water with it and wait before eating to avoid esophagitis. I haven’t had any jawbone problems but I take good care of my teeth. My doctor has me take a year off every few years to try to avoid the bad side effects and so far it has worked. Good luck with your decision.
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I sleep with a wedge pillow and am fairly good about sticking to the suggested diet, omeprazole and anti-GERD protocols. Four years ago I was hospitalized with a severe upper GI bleed. I have never had any GERD symptoms but was diagnosed with esophagitis and Barrett’s esophagus. I stuck to the recommendations of “The Acid Watcher Diet” by Jonathan Aviv MD for three months to help the healing. I’ve relaxed what I eat a bit, but really miss carbonated seltzer (I won’t chance that.) I also drink high PH water before going to bed. Water with a PH over 8.5 deactivates the pepsin in the reflux.
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I was sent to the ILD clinic at the hospital by my radiation oncologist after my post radiotherapy pneumonitis showed up on a chest CT as pulmonary fibrosis. It was a bit of a shock having to turn my mind from worrying about stage 2 breast cancer (with an 85% five year survival rate) to something worse. My pulmonologist answered my questions about progression and what else might happen in a rather unique way. Since I am a high school math teacher, he told me that his daughter in fifth grade had come home from school one day all excited. She had said, “Dad, math is magic! You can use it to solve all kinds of problems!” The doctor then said to me, “Math may be magic but medicine is not.” I smiled and realized that he actually had no answers since the trajectory of this disease is so varied.
Because I am in a small subset (about 200 cases) of a rare disease group in the US, I have found that I have to be proactive and explain what I have been diagnosed with to other medical providers. My PCP thought that the traction bronchiectasis noted by the radiologist on my CT report was like the bronchiectasis of COPD which is much more common. I figure that since I was unaware of PF before I was diagnosed with it and it is relatively rare, it is something many medical professionals may not be familiar with.
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I have been recently diagnosed with radiation induced pulmonary fibrosis after breast cancer treatment (on HRCT) which is a rare side effect. My pulmonologist was not very surprised as I had an upper GI bleed and was diagnosed with Barrett’s esophagus four years ago. I have never had any symptoms of heartburn, but started taking omeprazole then. The pulmonologist thinks that I probably had subclinical ILD caused by silent GERD and the radiation therapy triggered the PF.
He told me that he would expect to find pepsin in my lung tissue if he did a biopsy, but since my treatment (corticosteroids) would not change, there would be no point to doing one. As far as he is concerned, biopsies are useful if the diagnosis is in question and treatment decisions need to be made. He has noticed a significant correlation between GERD and ILD, but nobody has shown a cause/effect relationship yet.
Margaret