Re: hip, see PM. Re: Celebrex. I am still willing to take Celebrex, but not regularly. Took 400 mg. at bedtime last night. Admittedly, it's risky, but my mother had a gastric bleeding episode which may be instructive.
First, she doesn't have any health insurance but Medicare, and never goes to the Dr., so did not realize how much coverage she actually gets from Medicare, which is quite a lot.
Second, it sort of snuck up on her, she felt a little worse every day, and got really sick without realizing it.
Basically she had walking pneumonia and was self medicating with wine and Aleve, which caused a perforated ulcer, so she was bleeding internally without realizing it.
When we finally forced her to go to the hospital, she had lost so much blood that they thought she had some kind of blood cancer, leukemia or lymphoma. She almost died.
My rheumatoid arthritis is in remission right now, but when it was really bad a couple of years ago, I was taking generic ibuprofen, and took so much that I was vomiting blood. That's when they started giving me Tylenol #3 with codeine.
So far, the risk of death from heart attack and stroke from Cox-2 inhibitors seems to be far less than the risk of dying from a gastric bleed. But the problem is that they are giving Cox-2 inhibitors to everybody, not just people at risk for gastric bleeding.
I ran out of buffered aspirin, will get more today and use that instead of Celebrex and see how it goes. |
