BE VERY VERY CAREFUL WHILE TAKING THIS MEDICINE. Get regular bloo...

BE VERY VERY CAREFUL WHILE TAKING THIS MEDICINE. Get regular blood tests. I have Chron's disease. This is the drug I was supposed to have been taking to keep me in remission once I got there. (I took it while I was trying to get into remission as well- actually not into remission yet.) I landed in the hospital for what the "DR.s" say was "unrelated severe back/flank pain." Aside from it being the worst hospital experience I've ever had (they told me that nothing they could see was wrong and that the ER was only for life threatening conditions. ) After mixing up every conceivable test they possibly could, the ER dr came in with blood results and said well we have to keep you in the hospital because your KIDNEYS ARE SHUTTING DOWN. I was freaked because he made it sound like they were already almost gone. Luckily a nephrologist came to see me quickly and explained that it had lost 1/4 of its function but that she thought it could be fixed. After an exam and talking she determined it was the PENTASA that had done this. She said that I had to immediately stop taking it and that if that was the problem as she suspected my function would come back up to the reasonable range. It was the Pentasa and my function did come back. What was trying was that all the GI doctors and hospital doctors other than the nephrologist hadn't even thought about Pentasa as a possible problem because they say that "there is less than a 1% chance that Pentasa would shut down your kidney function." None of the doctors in their time had actually seen someone who it had happened to. If I hadn't landed in the hospital for back pain my kidneys would have shut down completely over time without me having a clue and the consequences of that are scary to think about. I'm just glad that I had at least one doctor that looked at the overall picture and examined the "less than 1% chances."