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MY EXPERIENCE WITH ALDARA |
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MY PRESENT MEDICAL STATUS Nearly five years after my “treatment” with Aldara for a BCC lesion on my forehead I am still under continual doctors care for numerous medical problems that all arose during that episode. I require regular visits to my oncologist, dermatologist, rheumatologist, gastroenterologist and hearing specialist. I continue to have leucopenia (low white cell count), thrombocytopenia (an impaired platelet production), fibromyalgia, sjogrens syndrome, osteoarthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, celiac disease, deteriorating hearing loss, and a variety of other symptoms my rheumatologist has identified as autoimmune related but cannot specifically diagnose. In addition, I continue to require MOHs surgeries for BCC / SCC along with general AK treatments. My rheumatologist recently stated that I was presenting so many different and over-lapping autoimmune related conditions that we may never figure out all that is occurring, but that one thing we can count on happening is that from all that is known my condition will continue to decline over time. Basically every condition listed above manifested over a 21-day period beginning on my first day of Aldara use for a simple BCC. None of these conditions or diseases is found in either side of my family’s medical histories. I had always enjoyed excellent health with absolutely no sign of any of these conditions or diseases until the day I first applied Aldara to my forehead.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH ALDARA QUICK SUMMARY • On January 26, 2000, at the age of 51, I received a perfect score on my yearly complete physical and was enjoying very good health, working 14 – 16 hour days in my construction business of 26+ years. I had gone years without even so much as a common cold. • On January 28, 2000, I began treating the BCC on my forehead with Aldara • The treatment site was raw and inflamed on the 4th day • 6th day, the site was an open, weeping, bloody wound the size of a credit card and I was experiencing serious flu-like symptoms. • 7th day, I was rushed to the emergency room with a severe nose-bleed, spitting up blood, severe head congestion, nauseated, joint and muscle pains, neck pains, coughing, shortness of breath, stomach cramps, pounding headache and lower back pain. • 9th day, Dermatologist stopped the application of Aldara in open wound and prescribed additional applications to five other BCC’s on my face. He was not at all suspicious of the many serious symptoms I was presenting. • 11th day, I had all the same symptoms described above plus diarrhea, fainting spells, blurred vision, metallic taste in my mouth, hoarseness, lower back- pain, and trouble with my balance when walking (all are known side-effects of Aldara). I had constant whole body pains and remained in bed most of the day and had lost 13-pounds. • 21st day, I took myself off Aldara due to the severe complications. By this time I was bedridden, still loosing weight, nauseated, weak, and highly disorientated along with all the other symptoms described above. The whole body pain was unbearable. • 31st day, I had lost a total of 20-pounds and my symptoms were still in full force. Between Ensure and regular food, I was eating 3,000 to 4,000 calories / day. By this time, my physicians in oncology, pulmonary, gastroenterology, and more were frantically running all kinds of tests and scans trying to reach an understanding of what was causing all my serious symptoms. Because these physicians, like most, had no working knowledge of Aldara’s mechanism of action on the body, little progress was made in determining the etiology of my symptoms, i.e., they were looking in all the wrong places. Thus, I was simply placed on a "guarded watch and symptom management" program for the following months. (3M was contacted but their position was that Aldara, the drug, (and I will show you later on why this 3M position is important) was not causing any of my symptoms and thus left me and my physicians without any assistance in what could have been at the time a "life threatening" condition which clearly began with the onset of using their drug Aldara for my skin cancer treatment.
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