prednisolone interacting with contraceptives..? Is this a thing?

[SarahLuna]

hello everyone. It’s been a long time since I posted on here but was just wondering if this is something that anyone anywhere has heard of or experienced?

I’ve been taking 6mg of prednisone a day for over 5 years now. This is the absolute lowest dose I can stay at, any lower and I am so unwell I’m permanently bedridden.

Every month for the past 5 years my whole period break is just horrendous. Without fail 2 or 3 days after breaking from the pill I become severely unwell. It lasts for sometimes a week, sometimes 2 weeks. Then it slowly improves, and I get 3 weeks of being well (I keep my pill on a 5 week cycle to just get a bit of a break from the illness) then I break from the pill and the illness starts again. It’s been doing this for 5 years. It’s so debilitating that I have had to give up my job and move back in with my parents at the age of 37.

I have tried the progesterone only pill but the same thing happens just a slightly different cycle (1 week before period due illness starts and lasts until period is half way through/stops) the cycle is shorter so I’m left with only a week or maybe a week and a half before the illness begins again.

The symptoms remind me an awful lot of prednisone withdrawal. Severe severe weakness and fatigue, horrendous body aches, shaking, internal tremor type feelings. At the same time I often get a connective tissue flare up (diagnosed with lupus ages 21) fever, fatigue, flu like symptoms, parasthesia, and at the same time chronic vestibular migraines. The pain of the migraines is almost unendurable.

I am wondering if it’s possible that a change in female hormones can have an effect on prednisone, perhaps on its absorption rates? Or how it interacts with them somehow causing a withdrawal type sensation? I think this then leads to lupus flare ups on top of this and then migraines on top of that?

I’ve been bumped from doctor to doctor, immunologist, rheumatologist, etc etc but nobody can give me any kind of answer other than ‘it’s hormones’ I feel like nobody is understanding the severity of this situation and I’m being fobbed off over and over with it being a ‘female time of the month problem.’

I’ve never experienced problems like this until being on prednisone. So I feel this has to be the driving factor behind it. I’m terrified to come off oral contraceptives as I’m using them to control this situation and worry that without that my hormones would be wildly all over the place making it even worse.

Is this something anyone can relate to? The illness has started again today, 2 days after breaking from the pill, right on schedule!