Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Feeling stronger every day

It has been a very long time since I could actually say I felt strong, but I’m feeling that way now. I’ve been thinking lots about the things I haven’t been able to do and how this summer may be spent working on getting back into living my life, actively.

Since my diagnosis, I’ve been through lots of medication changes, complications, pain and I’ve had to give up so many things that made life interesting and fun. I can’t say for sure what has really made the difference now. Although my elbow still bothers me, and will until I have the revision surgery in July 2011, my RA pain has been more intermittent. I’ve also bought myself some really comfortable Clark's shoes that have helped my feet immensely. I’m ready to plan some hiking and camping trips. I’m ready to pull out my mandolin, guitar, fiddle and banjo, restring them all and set to work to get back to jamming and maybe even gigging again.

I always feel that I might jinx myself by actually saying outloud, that I feel good. It seems that the minute things get better, I’ll have a flare of disease activity and get pretty depressed. But, I haven’t felt this good in 4 years. The only medications I’m taking are 400 mg Etodolac 2x day, 7.5 mg prednisone and 200 mg plaquenil. That list is so much shorter than it has been for a while. It makes me wonder if that has anything to do with it. It did seem that the more medications that were added, the worse I felt. When I stopped the methotrexate, piroxicam and prilosec, I started to feel better right away. Of course, that is also about the time that I fell and broke my elbow.

I hope that I won’t have to add any new medications. I hope that I can enjoy feeling “normal” again for a while. I won’t count on forever. I’ll hope for the summer at the very least. With RA, you just never know.

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