I Love Prednisone & I ain't foolin'

I love prednisone in the summer, I love prednisone in the fall, I love prednisone in the winter, and I got my hands on some today because I am very very lucky and this doesn't have to rhyme.

I've had two itis-es since Saturday: laryng- and bronch-, and finally went to the doctor today. I was already on the mend. That's how it always works. She told me to use my inhaler every four hours but the albuterol wasn't doin' nothin. So she gave me 10 20-mg tablets of prednisone--co-pay only $2.40. What can beat that?

I love prednisone because it's the one thing that always cures my very bad asthma or bronchitis. I try to avoid it because it's not good for you--I treat it as the last resort. In fact, I wrote a long poem about it as last resort many many years ago, when I was at a resort of sorts, an artists colony in the middle of allergens. The poem was almost accepted in a feminist magazine's special issue on invisible disabilities, but the editor objected to a line about breaking the back of something, maybe capitalism. It was ableist to be seeing a broken back as negative, that was the argument, though the back that was being broken was sheerly metaphorical. Maybe that made it worse. Anyway, it's probably one of the better poems in English about prednisone.

Stanley Elkin wrote a wonderful essay, Out of One's Tree: My Bout With Temporary Insanity, about craziness caused by high doses of prednisone he was taking to treat breathing problems caused by his MS. He might also have been taking it for the MS itself. I sent a copy of the Elkin essay to my cousin D, after our family dinner was briefly interrupted by a call from one of his patients. D is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst yet, and I think he had to admit his patient to a hospital because she was suffering from prednisone side effects. But I never take it long enough to be so affected. I don't think.