GP Chronicles

May I say again that my new GP rocks?

To those of you with competent GPs this post might seem really boring. It is just a summary of a GP appointment. I have never had a good GP before and I know a lot of folk who are disabled or living with chronic illness do not have a GP who understands how complex, exhausting and paperwork-laden that can be.

Today's appointment (because you are all desperate to know) was about my tummy meds. I've been on metoclopramide to increase my gastric emptying and was helping with the worst of the pain / nausea. Great, except that it was making me twitch/tremor all over the shop. It's been a month and I have a general rule with medications that I stick side effects out for a month if I possibly can to see if they'll die down (obviously, this is not always possible so you have to use common sense - when I tried trazodone ages ago it made me throw up every day for a week, so I stopped it then). For example, the first few days of taking this drug I had an awful taste in my mouth. I'd had it before and knew that within a week it should go, which it did. The twitches didn't and in fact have been getting worse, so lovely GP has taken me off them because of the risk of this being the start of a movement disorder. Metoclopramide is one of few options for gastroparesis/delayed gastric emptying that is now off the table. There was a good chance of this anyway, as a young woman but I'm a bit bummed anyway.

Then we had a discussion (yes, a real discussion where she listened to me and everything) about the relative benefits and risks of domperidone vs prochlorperazine. She went with prochlorperazine because domperidone has risk of similar movement disorders to metoclopramide (although the risk is much less). I pointed out that the endoscopy had confirmed her suspicions of delaye gastric emptying and that domperidone is a prokinetic. She went to make a prescription for domperidone but the computer told her that domperidone + amitriptyline risks prolonged QT (a dodgy heart rhythm that can be very bad) so as amitriptyline is very important for my pain management we decided maybe prochlorperazine would be better. The computer told her that prochlorperazine can increase the effects of amitriptyline and tramadol so she warned me it might make me super sleepy. So she double checked in the BNF to see if there was an alternative, which there wasn't.

She gave me with the prescription with instructions to stop the metoclopramide for a few days to let things settle, to give the prochloperazine a go and see how I get on with it and a warning to come back if my twitches don't resolve when I stop the metoclopramide. She also said that she's not ruling domperidone out, but that we would have to figure out how to use it safely if that becomes necessary.

I left promising to tell my body to behave better for next time and she laughed.

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Does this all sound normal to you? If you'd told me a year ago I could leave a GP appointment not wanting to cry I wouldn't have believed you. To have a GP who smiles when she sees me, takes me seriously, asks my opinion and listens to it, has a good idea of my knowledge base (so didn't need to explain long QT but did tell me the more common name for prochlorperazine, stemetil) warns me about medication side effects, tells me to come back if I need to and laughs with me is nothing short of incredible. Since I changed GPs I have had 3 consultant referrals, support for DLA, blue badge and DSA applications and have made some actual progress in managing all the bendiness. I feel very, very lucky.