#RABlog Week: Post No.1 Visiting the vampires

Today's prompt:

A day (or an hour) in your life. Pick a day, an hour, or half a day, and tell us what happens.

A day (or an hour) in your life – Pick a day, an hour or half a day and tell us what happens? Are you stiff when you get up in the morning? Tell us about getting ready to go somewhere, or going to a restaurant. Pick any unit of time and tell us what your life consists of. - See more at: http://www.radiabetes.com/prescription-day/#sthash.aSX5Jaj5.dpuf

Pick a day, an hour or half a day and tell us what happens? Are you stiff when you get up in the morning? Tell us about getting ready to go somewhere, or going to a restaurant. Pick any unit of time and tell us what your life consists of. - See more at: http://www.radiabetes.com/leading-prompts-for-rablog-week-as-of-august-18-2015/#sthash.BQDphCW4.dpuf

A day (or an hour) in your life – Pick a day, an hour or half a day and tell us what happens? Are you stiff when you get up in the morning? Tell us about getting ready to go somewhere, or going to a restaurant. Pick any unit of time and tell us what your life consists of. - See more at: http://www.radiabetes.com/prescription-day/#sthash.aSX5Jaj5.dpuf

One of the joys (?!) of RA would have to be the drugs... They're none of them nice. Most have potentially nasty side effects, both short and long term. Many of them require close monitoring in the form of regular blood tests to ensure that there's nothing nasty happening with liver levels, and that the RA markers are behaving themselves. I have mine on a Monday morning, the day before I start a new box of Orencia - my injectable biologic drug that comes in a pack of four syringes. 

So, here's the thing. I'm phobic about needles. No-one LIKES needles. But I'm seriously phobic. For twenty three years I've been trying to tell myself that for someone who's been stuck as many times as I have, I should be over it by now...but I'm not. So, there is quite a routine for my blood tests, which is part of how I manage the phobic stuff. Managing self injecting for the biologic is a whole other story...

I'm usually up some time between 6am and 7am every morning - if I've had a reasonable night. I used to be a morning person, but that's changed a lot. I head downstairs, accompanied by yelling Siamese busily informing me that they're in danger of imminent starvation AND a bladder burst, so PLEASE open the door quick smart so we can go out, and have breakfast ready for when we come back in... I can be pretty unsteady first thing, and pretty vague, so two of them winding around my ankles is distinctly hazardous. I've got the auto-pilot kettle on, toast in, dish up mince for the cats, and dole out morning meds thing down pat now, so that all happens while I'm trying to connect brain cells to limbs and trying to convince my fingers that holding on to the teaspoon so the sugar goes in the mug rather than all over the bench is a good idea...I've had some mornings when the sugar has gone in the teapot and the tea into the mug...and I've not discovered that til I've poured it...! We have a sunroom with a couch which has become my morning spot so when my tea and toast are ready I head there with my book and park until the morning meds are starting to kick. 

The cats pop in and out, and usually end up deciding to settle on my lap around the time I'm needing to get up and shower - because one of the key things I have to manage on bloods day is to head out reasonably early so I can park easily.  I need to factor in recovery time after the shower - who knew something that's supposedly refreshing could be so exhausting...?...which on a bad morning, it really can be. 

I have my bloods done at my GP's surgery, which makes it nice and simple. Once I get to the shopping centre near where they are, I do the carpark thing - another auto-pilot feat - and then make my way up to ground level (Sydney is full of underground carparks due to the lack of space to do anything else) and across to the surgery. Usually I don't have to wait long, and that's a good thing. The longer I have to wait, the tenser I get about the needle. Currently, the tech is a little Asian girl who is very gentle. She chats to distract me, and last time, for the first time, remembered to use cotton wool and tape without me having to remind her that I'm allergic to bandaids. 

Then I'm free for another four weeks. I have a favourite coffee place in the shopping centre - someone said to me a while ago that when you have to have something done - bloods, scans, appointments, etc, - treat yourself to something afterwards. It gives me something to look forward to, and it offers me some resting time before I have to head home again. 

I used to be able to duck in for my bloods on the way to work. Having been medically retired two years ago, it's now a separate trip, and one that, some days, can take most of a morning. It depends on so many variables - what the traffic is like, how long I have to wait at the surgery, and how I am that particular day...on a bad day, it can be a couple of hours before I'm able to do the drive there, which means more effort once I'm there and a bigger coffee and longer sit before driving back, and then I crash for the rest of the day. Other days, I might be doing much better and I can be there and back in a couple of hours, and I can do something else in the afternoon.

Needles suck - that's all I can say. I've given up trying to tell myself I'll be OK with them, because I never am. Sticking to my routine on the morning I have them done is partly so that there's a kind of inevitable sequence of things that I can't question - they just happen. If I start to think about it, I start to stress about the needle. But the coffee and rock bun afterwards are always good, so that's something!