And then you’ve got tablet types of treatments, or injections. The tablet treatments that are kind of licensed and we use regularly for psoriasis, there’s one called methotrexate. Which can be, you know, very effective and- but it does need regular blood tests because it can cause problems with your, your blood counts and you liver. And then you’ve got other tablets as well, which work in completely different ways. And we haven’t yet got a test- so we can’t look at someone and say, Your psoriasis is gonna respond best to this treatment, and your psoriasis is gonna respond best to this treatment. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to do that sort of thing, where we can actually say- you know, take a test and tell them which treatment they’re gonna respond best to. And that’s an area of active research. But at the moment we have lots of different treatments which work in very different ways. And sometimes it’s a case of trial and error.

I think it’s because they can cause complications. I know there’s-, the-, all of them that I’ve been on, they can cause something with your liver, they can cause like blood count issues blood pressure issues. So they don’t really like giving them to children.

Do you have any sort of check-ups to keep an eye on it?

Yeah, at the beginning you have a lot of blood tests to make sure that your blood count and your kidney functions and things like that are working in order. And then as you get- , as you become on them more you don’t have to have the blood tests as regularly, but you still have to just in case especially with the methotrexate that I’m on since it was used initially for cancer, I have to make sure that I don’t take medication like ibuprofen that can interact with it. I think it’s ibuprofen, but I can’t take things like will interact with it and I have to keep a little book so that they know like my blood pressure or my white blood counts and things like that.

I’m pretty sure all the medication I’ve been on from methotrexate, cyclosporine and now the biologics, you can’t get pregnant on them. So when you get to the stage where you’re thinking about having children you have to come off the drug and there’s certain amount of time for each one that you have to be off it and I think for Stelara they said about a year or half a year or something so, you know, when it gets to that stage of my life I’ll have to think quite far ahead about coming off it and giving myself enough time to get it out of my system. And I think even then I’ll, I will sort of still worry to an extent that, you know, has it affected my body in some kind of way.

The only problem is also, I, it’s hard, blood tests it’s hard to get blood out often with me. So I find that like some of the more experienced nurses can do it, whereas other times I do often feel like a pin cushion cos like they’re having to do it so many times. With Stelara, it’s not so bad because I don’t have blood tests that regularly only three, every three months. But with methotrexate I had to have a blood test every week. So before the medication I’d have to have a blood test. So that was a lot harder.

And did you have to go to your GP or up to a dermatologist?

I used to go to a GP just because it was easiest. And then they would send it over.