Prednisone tapering and getting sick with respiratory crud.

My daughter (who is 19) was diagnosed with ITP a few months ago and was taking 100 mg. of Prednisone a day. Prednisone worked, platelets rose, but she's now been tapered completely off and platelets seem to be falling quickly. If the purpose of the Prednisone was to weaken the immune system and therefore, raise platelets, how does that affect the body in terms of it's ability to resist other illnesses? She is pretty sick today (there's respiratory crud going around), coughing, with really deep sounding congestion, and she has a fever. It's Saturday, and we won't be able to reach the doc until Monday. How urgent is it to seek medical care? The only option now is urgent care or the E.R. Does the weakened immune system from Prednisone mean that she won't be able to fight this off? I don't want to overreact, but I also don't want to leave it untreated if that means it becomes harder to treat later, or if the infection will somehow become life-threatening in some way.

Prednisone isn't as bad as some of the other immunosuppressants. It might take her a bit longer to get over whatever she has, but I don't think she won't be able to fight it off. She still has many working parts of the immune system....the spleen, white cells, lymph nodes, etc. I'd worry about the seriousness of the symptoms, not how steroids would affect her. Like if her fever goes too high or her congestion gets too bad, then yes, you'd want to have her checked out.

Thank you! I Googled my little heart out and couldn't find anything about whether we should be worried about this.

The only thing I've ever heard about Prednisone and illness is that Prednisone can make a person very susceptible to chicken pox and shingles if exposed. It happened to my mom when she was on high doses...she got shingles. I've been on high doses a few times and only remember getting sick once with a nasty case of bronchitis. It took a while to go away, but it eventually did. I usually get bronchitis once or twice a year anyway and so far, steam has worked better than any antibiotic or other medication. I bought a personal steam inhaler (Vicks brand) on Amazon and it really works. There are a lot of nasty things going around though, so watch her to make sure she doesn't have pneumonia or the flu.