Moon Face and Midnight Hunger: Prednisone Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe taking prednisone, from ten-day courses to ten years and more. Writers came to it through lupus, Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, asthma and COPD, sarcoidosis, giant cell arteritis and polymyalgia rheumatica, myasthenia, multiple sclerosis relapses, lymphoma, a kidney transplant, severe eczema, sudden hearing loss and Bell's palsy. They include an electrician who frightened himself by shouting at his wife, a piano teacher who could not press middle C, a nineteen-year-old sitting exams on four hours of sleep, a pregnant woman in Karachi, a nurse who had given steroids to hundreds, and parents of a six-year-old with round cheeks, from Galway to Kumasi and Tucson to Sapporo. Husbands, daughters and a sister write from the other side of the kitchen table. The pages cover moon face, midnight hunger, mood swings, sleeplessness, raised blood sugar, thin skin that tore on a car door, shingles, slow tapers, steroid cards, family herbs and planning surgery around the dose. Many describe relief within days. The harder accounts are told plainly too: a man who quietly stopped his tablets without telling anyone, an adrenal crisis that left one writer on the floor, the sight lost in one eye, and years of broken nights that never fully mended.

Who it's for

For anyone holding a first prednisone prescription or partway down a long taper, and for the partners, parents and grown children who notice the mood changes before the person taking the tablets does.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 241 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.