Sorry, I was a little unclear. I didn’t receive any further Remicade infusions while I had the multiple bouts of tonsillitis, which I had between May 2001 and January 2002. I had my fourth and last (it caused an allergic reaction, but that’s different story). Remicade infusion in March 2002 after having been tonsillitis-free for 2 months. Then in December 2002, I started Enbrel and got tonsillitis in January 2003. During that bout of tonsillitis, I had to postpone the Enbrel injections until the infection was gone and my Clindamycin course was finished.
That sounds awful with the tonsils growing back! I was offered a tonsilectomy, but since my mom had one as a kid and still got tonsilitis, I declined. My tonsils have even gone back to their normal size again and don’t look gross anymore.
Regarding antibiotics, if you have bad reactions to amoxicillin there are a couple of antibiotics you risk cross-reacting to, including penicillin. You might want to try Clindamycin should you get tonsilitis again – partly because it’s safe even for the bad kind of penicillin allergy, partly because it can prevent recidives. Here in Sweden, you get Clindamycin if you have recidiving tonsilitis after penicillin treatment.
The reason I had to switch from Enbrel to Humira was that Enbrel worked well initially, but either it stopped working or it just didn’t work enough, so after a while I was even worse off than when I started Enbrel. Now I’ve been on Humira for almost a year with good results and no problems.
Oh, and since we seem to share the same miserable destiny with streptococci – try avoid children during impetigo season (most common late summer/early fall). I managed to catch impetigo when a hoard of 7-year olds surrounded me at the bus last summer. It’s a pretty benign, but very annoying condition.
