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stand up and fight

Cataclysm

I have had a central line for four and a half years.  We placed a PICC line in early 2014 to facilitate vascular access in an emergency, to administer rescue meds at home during an anaphylactic event, and to allow me to use IV fluids at home to stabilize my blood pressure.

Shortly after I had my line placed, I was hospitalized for a five day long episode of protracted anaphylaxis. Because I had pretty much already tried every oral medication that could help manage my symptoms, trying IV medications was the obvious next step. I went home from the hospital with a prescription for IV Benadryl.

Speed matters a lot in management of mast cell disease. There is a tiny window of time during which immediate medication can stave off continued reaction or anaphylaxis. I learned how to dilute and push IV Benadryl during mast cell crisis.

Using IV meds was really nerve wracking at first, much more than I expected it to be. I’m an infectious diseases microbiologist by training and used to develop diagnostics for blood stream infections. I don’t think I can overstate how scared I was of getting sepsis. Every time I touched my line to flush or give meds, my hands shook and my heart pounded. But this was tempered by an obvious benefit: use of IV Benadryl as soon as a reaction started often prevented the need for epinephrine.

My health fluctuated over time. Eventually, I started using IV Benadryl as a baseline medication to manage daily reactions. It allowed me to exercise. It allowed me to eat. It allowed me to travel. It allowed me to work. IV Benadryl restored a much improved quality of life. I have used it ever since.

IV Benadryl is an old medication. It is off patent, cheap to produce, and made by multiple manufacturers licensed in the US. Overwhelmingly, it is used to manage anaphylaxis. Regular use as maintenance for patients was unheard of before the mast cell community began using it to manage reactions. Home use of IV Benadryl both for maintenance and for rescue – that is, to manage regular daily symptoms as well as to be lifesaving in the event of anaphylaxis – has become more popular in the mast cell community in recent years. I think I’m probably partly to blame for this – I have openly talked about how much it has helped me. I probably know a hundred mast cell patients who use it regularly.

In mid September, I got a call from my IV pharmacy. They were calling to tell me that vials of IV Benadryl were unable and they were going to dispense IV Benadryl in prefilled syringes. Fine. I didn’t care what package it was in. But I knew multiple organizations made this medication and I found it strange that vials from all of them would be unavailable at the same time. It was odd. But it was also true. Every manufacturer was reporting that it would be several weeks to months before the vials would be again be available.

A week later, my IV pharmacy called to let me know that the prefilled syringes were no longer available either. I found out on a Friday afternoon that come Tuesday, I would be out of medication. No one could get it. All distributors were out. I called over fifty pharmacies in Massachusetts trying to find some. I talked to the FDA. I talked to the manufacturers. I talked to hospitals nearby.

Despite being labeled a “critical backorder”, this phenomenon was something else entirely. It wasn’t “I can’t get enough of it.” It was “There is no IV Benadryl available anywhere in the US.” EMS is out. Hospitals are out. And every pharmacy everywhere is out or dangerously close. With only a few days warning, mast cell patients found themselves unable to get medication that literally kept them alive.

It is not overstating things to say that IV Benadryl is necessary to sustain life in a number of mast cell patients. I am one of them. Many people need it to maintain an airway. Others, like me, need it to recover blood pressure during anaphylactic shock. A lot of patients were only able to live outside of a hospital safely because they had access to this medication. The danger posed to these people is enormous. This is especially true because in an emergency, you can call 911 and have them take you to the hospital but they don’t even have the medication to treat you. This means that unless patients already have some, in a crisis, it is impossible to get more from literally anywhere. If you need this medication to survive, you are in real peril.

Compounding the issue is that IV Benadryl is the only potent H1 antihistamine available in IV form in the US. There are no alternatives for IV H1 antihistamines. It is IV Benadryl or IV nothing. It is also not used much outside of the US so getting it from abroad isn’t really an option.

Mast cell patients have been encouraged to use epinephrine as early as possible without IV Benadryl to potentially stave off a reaction. So we can all just use epipens anytime we react badly, right? Just kidding. Epipens are also on critical backorder. Okay, let’s use IV fluids to recover blood pressure during anaphylaxis and severe allergic symptoms. Haha, no. IV fluids are also on backorder. One of the safe narcotics for mast cell disease is no longer available. Certain benzodiazepines are no longer available. And we have no idea whether or not these medications will be available in the future.

The stress of this situation is paramount. I have patients getting trached to allow them to be hooked up to a ventilator. I have patients who can’t stand up without reacting or passing out. I have patients who are using epi multiple times a week. And I have patients who are scared to use their epipens so they gamble that they can control their reactions with something else. The single greatest risk factor for fatal anaphylaxis is delay in the administration of epinephrine. “Saving” epipens is dangerous.

Those of us who have won some stability through this medication are terrified of going back. I am terrified of going back. It’s already starting. After several months of debilitating symptoms and repeat anaphylaxis, I have been preparing to return to work in November. I love my job. I love my coworkers. I love my company. I can’t safely return to work until I have a guaranteed supply of IV Benadryl. And as of now, that could take months.

I am angry over this situation in a way that borders on holy fury. Mast cell disease is hard on its best day. It doesn’t need to be made even harder. Total loss of access to rescue meds is life threatening for many of us. In a country known for its premier healthcare, essential medications are completely unavailable. Mast cell patients were not even notified of an impending backorder to allow us to identify a source and stockpile. We were ignored entirely. This is the end result.

This is a dark time for our community. It is a time for fear and anxiety. It is a time of uncertainty. It won’t last forever. But that is cold comfort when you are terrified.

It is also a time to stand up and fight. It is a time to be visible. It is a time to be loud. It is a time to shame these organizations for letting this happen to us. Because if I have to suffer, I will damn well make them watch.

I know a lot of us are struggling. Be careful with yourself. Don’t take risks. Wait it out.

Take care of yourselves. Remember: it won’t always be like this. You don’t have to beat it. You just have to outlast it.

Raising hell

I started this blog in 2014 with the expectation that only a few people would read it. There were some educational posts but they were pretty cursory. They were very directed towards patients without a lot of science background. I sometimes included references. I didn’t fret over the wording or the way I presented facts because controversy seemed unlikely to strike. I was basically talking to myself in those early months.

Everyone who reads MastAttack knows where this ends up: that a lot of people started reading it. People came to me in droves for answers to their questions. Caregivers came for advice. Health care providers and researchers began to view me as an opinion leader and MastAttack as a reliable source of information about mast cell disease. I started working with patients and medical teams to advocate for appropriate management, diagnosis and treatment. I wrote and rewrote posts and read and reread literature and data about mast cell disease to guarantee its accuracy. I became an authority on mast cell disease and sort of authority figure in the mast cell community.

I spend a massive amount of time researching mast cell disease. I write and rewrite posts constantly. I read and reread literature and data. The pressure to be right is huge, and it should be. MastAttack is a readily available point of contact for any person trying to learn about mast cell biology or mast cell disease. Failing to accurately vet something could affect people’s lives.

Ultimately, I have to be right, every time, because when I speak, I am speaking for every mast cell patient. I take that responsibility very, very seriously. It is more than just understanding the science. I have to know the story I am trying to tell about these diseases that can direct patients and providers toward effective care. I have to convey the human impact of these diseases. As a representative of the mast cell community, I have to be on message.

I have philosophical and academic differences with mast cell researchers, providers, and patients, especially about some of the more nuanced science. Despite this fact, overwhelmingly, this community is united in telling one story with one message.

Mast cell disease is cruel and debilitating. It steals things from you. It steals your life. It is scary and graphic and gross and endless. It is handfuls of pills and organ damage and surgeries and central lines. It is so, so serious. It is epipens and swelling and wheezing and puke. It is danger. It is the exhaustion of arguing with insurance companies for hours at a time. It is the metal taste of fear when we wonder if our kids will get it. It is the quiet terror that this disease will get worse. It is the unutterable thought that maybe one day it will kill us.

It is also the strength of a patient’s bonds with their family. It is the discovery that you can keep going long after you are certain that you can’t. It is iron will. It is the exhilaration of achievement in spite of the damage your body sustains on a daily basis. It is love and joy and tears and uncertainty. Because this is real life and these are real people and real diseases. That is the message.

Misrepresenting that message in private or in public does more than a disservice to mast cell patients. It can be harmful. It can be dangerous. And since rare diseases are by their very nature scarce, media around them is also limited. A person without these diseases might only ever read one article about mast cell disease or see one interview. We do not have infinite opportunities to educate people about these diseases. We are not living in forever. When a person speaks to the public on behalf of the mast cell community, what they say MUST be correct. It MUST tell the real story. It MUST represent the experience of living with this disease accurately. It MUST be on message.

For patients who are wondering why I’m waxing philosophical at 3am about the onus upon subject matter experts in this community, there was a very recent televised interview about mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). I’m sincerely trying not to be unkind but I was genuinely bewildered by the amount of inaccuracy jammed into a four minute video. I’m not going to link to it because frankly, I don’t want to generate additional traffic to the video. It was insulting and irresponsible at best.

Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) is a serious, chronic health condition that affects all organ systems. It increases the risk of anaphylaxis, which can be fatal. Complications of MCAS can include organ damage. It is often disabling. It is often found alongside other conditions such as Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and POTS. It is not well known among medical providers. It is difficult to test for. Treatment revolves around blocking mast cell mediators with things like antihistamines and mast cell stabilizers. Most people are not able to manage their diseases simply by avoiding triggers. Most people need medication, and often, a lot of it. Most people have symptoms every day and sometimes experience bad mast cell attacks and anaphylaxis. MCAS is in no way a mild or minor health issue. It should not be minimized and neither should the experiences of the people living with it.

In the same way that experts are responsible for sharing accurate information, patients also have a duty. This is your community. You have a voice and a duty to use it. If you are not being represented accurately, raise hell. If your disease is being minimized, raise hell. If the science is not being explained correctly, raise hell. When misinformation threatens your safety, You. Raise. Hell. Yes, you.

Use your voice. Tell your story.

Stand up and fight. And raise hell.

 

For people looking for reliable information to provide to lay people or providers about mast cell disease, please visit the following posts:

The Provider Primers Series
The MastAttack 107
The Mast Cell Disease Fact Sheet

Independence Day

I live my life as a series of wagers. A lot of these wagers involve my health. I bet that I can fly if I take enough steroids. I bet that I will get better if I get an ostomy. I bet that I will be more stable if I use IV hydration. I bet that taking this med or that will make me less tired. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I don’t.

The last 18 months of my life have all been one large scale bet. It has been many months of moving the pieces around and trying to shove them into place. It has been emotional and stressful and scary.

I slept through the four weeks following my surgery. I did some other things too, but mostly I slept. One day while I was resting in bed, it occurred to me that all of the strength and stamina I had lost was perhaps for the best. There are few opportunities to reset your body and this was one of them. I wasn’t reacting because I was heavily medicating and resting most of the time. I realized that this might be an opportunity to rebuild my body in a calculated way.

Once I was cleared by my surgeon to exercise, I started an exercise program designed for POTS patients. It was pretty detailed (I’ll do a separate post about this) but involved cardio exercise 3-4 days a week. I haven’t been able to do cardio in years. But I figured it was worth a shot.

The first two weeks were brutally hard. Then it got easier. I am now on the sixth week of a twelve week program. For the first time in many years, I can do cardio (with premedication in a controlled environment) without having a reaction.

I went back to work last week. I took the train to and from work on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, which also involves about a mile and a half of walking each day. It was pouring torrentially on Wednesday and hot as hell on Thursday. I was exhausted when I got home but I managed to get through each day without napping. I slept every night last week. Getting myself to and from work is a level of independence I have not achieved in a year.

I very rarely drive anymore because I can’t use some of my medications if I need to drive and I have been so reactive that that might have been dangerous. But I made a huge wager on Saturday: I drove myself an hour away to New Hampshire to celebrate the Fourth of July with my friends and nieces. I stayed overnight and went swimming today, deaccessing and reaccessing my port. I drove myself home after being in cold water and direct sunlight for over an hour, stopping at Whole Foods and doing my grocery shopping on the way. I cleaned my apartment, did laundry, made lunch for tomorrow, ironed my work clothes, and watched Shark Week. I did all these things without any help.

The Fourth of July is Independence Day in the US. As I watched the fireworks, it felt like I was celebrating my own personal Day of Independence. I don’t know how long this will last.  But I got this one great week and this one Fourth of July.  And maybe I’ll get more.

Self evident

For hundreds of years, prominent practitioners of medicine believed that miasma was responsible for disease. This so called “bad air” was thought to arise from rotting flesh and to contaminate its surroundings. This idea was widely believed and identified convergently in various traditions, from the ayurvedics in India to the plague doctors in Europe. As epidemics decimated the population, artists drew black robed spectors with scaly feet and sickles – miasma, the very incarnation of Death.

In 1546, Girolamo Fracastoro described a theory in which epidemics are caused by seeds that transmit disease through either direct contact or indirectly. In the coming centuries, various scientists proved links between disease and organisms –Louis Pasteur, who connected puerperal fever and Vibrio; Ignaz Semmelweis, who realized that women died disproportionately in delivery when attended by physicians responding directly from autopsies; and Robert Koch, who at long last solidified germ theory as the basis for infectious disease. He proved that organisms cause disease. Like all good science in years down the road, this fact seems self evident.

In 1972, Stanley Prusiner met a patient with Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD.) A devastating neurologic disease, it literally causes the brain to develop large porosities and to look like a sponge on autopsy. CJD is just one of several known spongiform encephalopathies, which include Kuru, a disease transmitted by cannibalism in Papua New Guinea; scrapie, which affects sheep; and the most famous, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, better known as Mad Cow Disease. These diseases are universally fatal. All of them were thought to be due to a “slow virus” that had never been isolated.

Ten years after his fateful encounter with a CJD patient, Prusiner published a paper in Science that identified the cause of these diseases: not an organism, not a bacterium or a virus, but a protein. His experiments described how this protein, found in abundance in the brain, when misshapen, could somehow induce the rest of their proteins to refold themselves the wrong way. His data described not an infection by a living thing, but a completely novel disease causing process. It involved no DNA or RNA, it involved no replication or gene expression. It just involved one molecule with the wrong shape causing everything around it to fall apart.

The ensuing fallout from Prusiner’s publication was nasty. Science, real science, is cutthroat. It is competition for funding. It is spreading rumors. It is discrediting. In 1986, an article in Discover accused Prusiner of seeking fame over science – the very worst slur in research. They said he didn’t care about the damage he was doing to the dogma of biology, that he didn’t even care whether or not he was right.

That’s the thing though – sometimes it doesn’t matter if you want to be right, if you are. In 1997, Stanley Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize for his identification of prions (infectious proteins) as the causative agents of these transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. And while prions still have detractors, for microbiologists of my generation, we find prion theory to be self evident.

A hard fact about mast cell disease is that the science behind it is being unspooled right now. That is the trouble with learning things in real time – the pull of history is still so strong for many doctors and scientists. They are loath to unlearn the things they know, to look at the data, to change their perspectives.

In the last few days, I have spoken with several people with masto kids who have either had their children removed from their care or who are at great risk of this occurring. And there is another family that I suspect is right now living this nightmare of losing their child because their rare disease is poorly understood and under recognized.

Medical professionals turning aside solid science in favor of accusations and ego is not just a failing in the system. It is life ruining, traumatizing, unthinkable. It is a tragedy.

I am not a religious person. But I kneel faithfully at the altar of science. When the monsters howl at the door, science protects us, comforts us, promises us that these horrors cannot go on without end. People say that there isn’t a time limit on important discoveries, but of course there is. If it doesn’t arrive in time to help, it is utterly devoid of meaning.

It is not enough that our bodies try to kill us, that the treatments cannot give us our lives back, that current diagnostic methods are inaccurate. We are told over and over again that we are not as sick as we say, or that we are not sick at all, or that parents project these diseases onto their children, that our suffering is the result of anxiety and overactive imaginations. They take our dignity, our livelihoods, our children.

Saying we are crazy, that we are liars and deceivers, does not make us not sick. It just makes us sick with little chance of effective treatment.

I don’t know how much longer we can live like this, how many more weeks like this I can stand. I don’t know how much longer I can wait for doctors to realize that mast cell activation disorders are real. I don’t know how much longer I can wait for them to agree that these diseases, that our suffering, is self evident.