#RABlog Week: Post No.5 On not running a marathon!

Today's prompt:

Exercise and RA - write about your favourite exercise. What do you like about it, and what keeps you going?

I've never been a fitness junkie. Pre turning 40 when EVERYTHING changed - I'm absolutely convinced that some huge hormonal thing happens at 40, even if menopause is still a ways off - I had one of those hyperactive metabolisms that just doesn't put on weight. To the point that my mother used to keep putting food in front of me, forcing me to eat it because she was frightened I might be anorexic. I wasn't - it's just that nothing stayed in my system long enough to take up lodging. Fast track to that doomed birthday, and suddenly I find myself with jeans that are too tight, and skirts that don't do up - WTH???

I didn't do anything different. I just had a birthday. So, it MUST be something to do with the aging process. That was enough to get me off my butt and looking for some kind of regular exercise that I could learn to enjoy enough to keep it up. I'd always walked a lot, but that wasn't doing it, and mindful of the RA, I wasn't about to try doing something that could cause harm, so I convinced myself to join a gym that had a pool so I could start swimming laps. The thing was, I wasn't THAT enthused about swimming...

The mornings used to be quite a fight. I'd fall out of bed into a swimsuit and grab my prepacked bag with goggles, towel, drink bottle, etc, and get in the car and the whole way there would chant to myself, 'Go to the gym, do NOT turn the car around, go to the gym, do NOT turn the car around...' I'd get there, park, drag myself in, fall into the pool and start. Week after week I kept going, gradually working up the number of laps, looking for that lovely buzz you get after lifting weights (I'd tried that, and liked it, but it was scary with wrists that could just fail without warning...). The buzz didn't come. And then one magical morning, I hit thirty laps (of a 25m pool) and there it was. You do get a buzz swimming - you just have to do it for longer to achieve it!

From that point on, I started to enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed feeling my body getting stronger, the development of lean muscle, and my jeans being comfortable again. I also realised I was regaining rotation in my shoulders that had been stiffening up, and less pain in my hips and knees with the extra support of stronger muscles. With the exception of the morning I felt good at the end of the forty laps that became my standard swim, and foolishly swam another ten and stuffed up my dodgy neck (not RA, wrecked from two separate accidents) I wasn't hurting myself either because the water supports your body, and provides resistance as well as the cardio workout swimming gives. 

I managed, off and on, to keep up that routine on average days a week for years. There'd be breaks when I moved or changed jobs until I got back into the routine, but it was keeping me stronger and fitter, as well as much more supple than I'd been. When the disease changed its mind about being mild and turned aggressive, everything stopped. I had horrendous reactions to MTX, had to change drugs, was getting very much worse very fast and ended up in hospital. It was a very long time before I was well enough to get back in a pool and actually try to swim. I was also much heavier courtesy of prednisone, and even now that I'm no longer taking that, I'm finding it - as I'm that much older again - much more difficult to shift the weight. 

I got back to semi regular swimming last summer when my eldest started training for his first triathlon and my partner was mentoring him. I went along, and while they were doing their thing in the 50m pool, I'd go inside to the warmer 25m pool and get going. By the end of the summer I'd built back up to 20 laps a session 2-3 times a week. It felt good. I haven't managed to maintain that through winter because we don't have an indoor 25m pool near us, but in the next month or so, I should be able to start again. We're moving interstate soon and I'm hoping that wherever in our new city we end up, we'll be close to an indoor pool so I can swim year round. I have to shift this extra weight because I have a very fine frame and anything extra it has to carry is adding extra strain to joints - so it's coming off - somehow!

#RABlog Week: Post No.4 Five things I have learned

Today's prompt:

Five things I have learned - write about the five things you have learned about yourself, or RA.

This is an interesting one for me. As a freelance writer, I do a lot of web copy - blog posts for business websites mostly, and there are a lot of 'X types of .... ' kinds of posts. Search engines LOVE lists, so blog posts with lists usually land fairly high up in a search. They're also easy to read, so the clients love them. As a result, being a little perverse by nature, I resist making lists on my own blogs. They're not business blogs in any case, other than in the sense that they are a way of promoting myself as a writer, but that's more incidental than a conscious business decision on my part. 

Also, my demented brain - while addicted to making lists to manage my days, is particularly resistant to presenting information FOR a list when I'm trying to make one. For instance, any time I need to make a list of people for invitations or sending mail, I have to go get my address book, or check the contacts in my phone. As far as my brain is concerned, I don't know anyone at all, because after the first two or three names, it just dries up and I can't remember anyone else without a visual prompt - which leads me into the first of my five things for this post (which aren't in any particular order of learning, they're landing just as they come).

Brain fog

Brain fog is a thing. An actual, real, medical phenomenon. Some back story to this discovery: for nearly twenty years, my RA grumbled along, moving quite slowly, and for the most part, relatively mild. I had flares - a few that sent me to bed for weeks - and was slowly deteriorating, but it was slow. Three years ago, the wheels fell off and it was like someone had recharged my malfunctioning autoimmune system with mega powerful batteries because over a six month period, everything started changing and I got very sick very fast. This meant finding a new rheumatologist, and starting on drug protocols I'd largely been able to avoid for most of my time with the disease.

So, my rheumatologist prescribes methotrexate for me, and hands me a print out from the Australian Rheumatology Association about the drug, including a couple of lists of different side effects - usual ones and rare ones. There were the usual medical type terms for various things, but right in the middle was this thing 'brain fog'. I laughed - seriously, I did...I cracked up, and told my partner who also thought it sounded amusing. We don't laugh about it any more. These days, I'm on three drugs that all list brain fog on their list of potential side effects, plus both chronic pain and RA itself can generate brain fog - so I'm screwed! But, who knew...? I do now. 

Patience

I am not an inherently patient person. It's just not in my makeup. With HUGE amounts of effort, I learned to be more patient when I had my children - so they'd have half a chance of reaching adulthood alive... RA has taught me a different kind of patience. It's taught me to be more patient with myself, because there are so many times now when I have to slow down and figure out a different way to do something if I'm to continue managing it for myself. On the days that I'm flaring badly, I can't necessarily do the things I'd planned for those days, so I have to just let them go and wait until I'm feeling better. I also don't go off like a firecracker when something makes me angry any more, because that takes way too much energy that I need to just stay upright sometimes... Instead, I have a finely honed inner process that I don't really consciously think about any more - I ask myself if there's anything I can do about the thing that's happening, and if so, I do it. If not, I walk away. My partner is also not the most patient character and has a pretty short fuse, so he finds this very frustrating, I'm sure, when he's in the middle of a huge angry rant over something he's seen on the TV news or read in the newspapers, and is clearly wanting someone to join and support him in his aggro moment - but that's not going to be me. It won't help me to waste that much energy when it's usually something I can't do anything about, so I just don't go there any more.

Medical facts 

I'm an academic by training, so it's just in me to do research and learn stuff. Ever since diagnosis, I've been learning about RA and other autoimmune diseases. It feels natural, because I have this thing, so I want to know as much as I can about it so I can make informed decisions when I'm faced with having to make a decision. I want to have some degree of control over my medical care, so I need to understand what I'm dealing with so I can discuss that with my doctors without feeling like I'm working in the dark. It does result in some funny situations occasionally though, because in 23 years, I've amassed far more than the usual amount of medical knowledge than most lay people. 

I went to Italy for a month ten years ago and was doing an art history course with the British Institute in Florence. On one of our field trips we visited the church where a lot of the Medici family are buried. For a number of years, there'd been a long running forensic medical project running due to curiosity about why so many of them had died young, so permission was granted to disinter them and do piles of tests on the remains. The lecturer was describing the sorts of things they'd discovered and bells were going off in my head, so I asked him if they'd ended up making posthumous diagnoses based on the findings. He wasn't sure, and asked me why so I told him that the collective symptoms sounded like autoimmune diseases, particularly RA and lupus. He was a bit taken aback and asked me if I was a doctor, and I had to say no... Later we had a chat and I filled him in and he found out some more information for me before the course had ended - it is felt that there was a genetic history of autoimmune diseases amongst the Medici.

It can be an issue - some doctors are pretty sensitive and protective of their position as the medical expert. They can get quite huffy when confronted by a knowledgeable patient. My own rheumatologist likes it - he encourages all his patients to learn as much as we can so that there can be a more collaborative relationship between us. He wants to know what I've been reading and what I've been discussing with people. 

Appreciation of the simpler things

It's SO easy in today's over-full consumer driven lifestyles to get caught up in things that, ultimately, don't really mean very much. I've had my time running around trying to keep up with all sorts of current trends, working multiple jobs, striving for more and more... It takes a crazy amount of phenomenal energy and stamina. That, I don't have any longer. I live a much simpler life now. My children are grown and out on their own. My stepson too. So it's just my partner and our two mad Siamese cats now. He works very hard with his business, so for us, the most precious thing is having uninterrupted time together doing simple things. We're finding we need less 'stuff' - it's just so much clutter in the end, really. Time together, a good meal out occasionally, seeing a good movie or a show when there's time and the funds, or even, like yesterday afternoon, just taking the time in the middle of errands to stop at a wicked shop not far from us that sells cake by weight and makes excellent coffee. We indulged, laughed and enjoyed ourselves before heading home to get on with work things again. 

Family and friends

This is related to the previous thing... A lot of people online write about how they've lost friends due to being sick. I've had people go from my life, and others come in. On the whole, I think that's mainly just been part of the normal changes that happen in the course of a life - people DO come and go, and some aren't around for very long, while others may become lifelong friends. Whether I can or can't 'do' some of the things I used to hasn't been a huge factor for me in retaining long term friendships. I've moved a lot, so a lot of my closest friends aren't nearby in any case. Also, for me, the RA is something I have, and it's a pain in the butt, but it's far from the primary focus in my life - and that's for my own sanity more than anything else. I find it incredibly tedious being sick so I tend to focus on other things in the normal course of my day, no matter how bad it might be on any given day. 

I DO say no to things when I'm asked to be someplace, or do something, if I know I'm not going to manage it - like a good friend's 50th birthday, when it was going to be a camp out situation on her brother's acreage. As much as I loved camping growing up, tents and blow up mattresses aren't going to be figuring on my activity list any time soon these days! She got it. We'll do something else to celebrate - which means she'll get more out of her birthday - bonus! My friends are infinitely precious to me - losing a good friend recently has been devastating. That I got to spend the day of her funeral with my very closest friend and another from our uni days was very lovely, and I know Lizzie would have been so pleased that the three of us had that time together. But it makes me very conscious of just how fragile life is and how much every opportunity to spend time with dear ones has to be grasped with both hands and taken. There don't have to be spectacular occasions, or fancy venues - just time. 

So that's my five things - at least that's the five that came to me as I wrote this post. If I wrote it tomorrow, there might be a totally different five things! I'm looking forward to seeing everyone else's too, because I think it's going to be a very diverse list... 

And now, because I can, one of my 'simple things' - here are my two cats. Rumi - the little one - is 4 months old, and Callie is 16 months. They're full sisters, born a year apart to the same parents. They make us laugh every day. Enjoy.

#RABlog Week: Post No.3 You want to know about living with RA?

Today's prompt:
Explain your RA - perhaps you want to tell someone else (doctor, sibling, child). Pick a person and decide what to tell them. You might want to tell them about living with RA or what it's like to have RA. ... You might also choose to write to a newly diagnosed person about life with RA.

Just recently, I lost one of my oldest, closest friends to ovarian cancer. (My tribute to her is HERE.) She had also been diagnosed, only a couple of years ago, with RA. I remember the conversation I had with her when she phoned me to pick my brains, so because she's very much on my mind, I'm going with that...this is pretty much what I told her when she asked me what it was like, what could she expect, and what should she do next...

Everyone's experience with RA is different because the disease can present so very differently from person to person. My first rheumatologist once said to me that if you lined up twelve people with RA, it's entirely possible that if you looked at their blood work, all twelve could be completely different. They could all be presenting very different symptoms - some might have considerable morning stiffness, others not so much. Some might have a lot of swelling in particular joints, some none at all, and some could have swelling everywhere. Some might have some involvement in joints that aren't typical for early presentation, while others have a really straightforward (if there is such a thing!) presentation of sequential changes. And THEN, there are the meds, and the different ways everyone can respond to the same medication. More on that later...
 
You need to build good solid relationships with your doctors - that's incredibly important. You'll probably be seeing a whole lot more of your GP because, ideally, your GP is the hub around whom all your other specialists revolve, and they need to be updated every time you see someone new, or something changes with your treatment. The next most important relationship you need to foster is the one with your rheumatologist. I don't know what it is, but in my twenty three year experience with this disease, I've come to realise that in a lot of cases, rheumatologists can be among the most socially inept of all medical specialists. I got lucky with my first one. And then very unlucky with a fair number in between - and I've heard some bothersome stories from other people about experiences they've had. At the moment, the doctor I have is brilliant, personable and generally easy to get along with, and that's marvelous. Maybe he's an example of a potential improvement across the speciality - I certainly hope so!

You have to trust your doctors, and that's one of the reasons you have to be able to work with them without it being a battle. You are going to get truckloads of unasked for advice from lots of well meaning, but ignorant people - as far as RA itself is concerned. At some point, you need to know that you have someone in your corner who is focused on working out the best possible treatment for you - for me, that's definitely my rheumatologist, with my GP right behind him. 

On the advice - learn to let it wash over you. Unfortunately, RA is hugely misunderstood by the majority of the general public. If I had a dollar for every time I've had someone move in on my personal space and show me their thumb or little toe and inform me that they've got arthritis there and oh boy it hurts like nothing else, so they know EXACTLY how I must be feeling, I'd be a rich woman! They mean well...I know they do, but they don't have the foggiest idea how I'm feeling. They really don't. And the people who tell you that, oh yes, their grandmother/father/great aunt 'has that', chances are, that's not the case either. What these people have is osteo arthritis - a degenerative form of arthritis that comes about through the wear and tear of a joint through age or injury. It's definitely painful and nasty, but it's isolated to specific joints, it's NOT a systemic disease. 

Another bit of advice you'll no doubt get will be about your diet, and the medications your rheumatologist will probably prescribe for you. The diet thing...you probably shouldn't get me started on diets. I could chew up some people and spit them out for the spurious diet advice they spruik, on the basis that it will CURE your autoimmune disease. It won't. OK? Know that now, and don't forget it. I wrote about this for Creaky Joints a month or so ago, so you can read that post HERE, rather than me ranting about it again now. Bottom line though, eat a healthy, well balanced diet, with as much local fresh food as possible. Stay away from processed food as much as you can. Moderate alcohol, and drink lots of water. THAT will keep you as healthy as possible - and you'll need to do that.

On the drugs... RA drugs aren't nice. Any of them. Some of them are downright nasty. But at this point in time, there is NO CURE for RA. The only thing that can be done - and this is a considerable advance on the few options that used to be available - is to administer drugs that interfere with the progression of the disease, and that minimises both symptoms and damage. Without those drugs, you risk the disease running rampant and out of control, causing irreversible damage and potentially life threatening complications at the extreme end of the spectrum. Initially, in Australia, you'll be started on DMARDs - Disease Modifying Anti Rheumatic Drugs. You have to have taken and/or failed all the available options in this class of drug for a specific period of time before you are eligible for the newest drugs - the bDMARDs - Biologic DMARDs. Biologics are made from human proteins, they're live, and they're injected or infused - although there are some really new ones, that are only available in specific trials in Australia at the time of writing, that come in tablet form. Taken in conjunction with one or more regular DMARDs, these drugs are proving to be effective for the majority of patients in slowing disease activity in some degree - some people are achieving a medical remission (i.e. no disease activity). Those are the main drugs. Others include anti-inflammatories, and a range of pain killers, supplements and different classes of drugs that are being used by pain specialists in an effort to avoid the use of opioids for pain. 

There will be people who try to dissuade you from taking these drugs - advocating a diet or alternative approach instead. Don't go there. In the very early stages of the disease, that MAY help alleviate symptoms so you'll feel better. However, it can't cure the disease, and by missing the window of early opportunity to control it with proven medical protocols, you risk it getting out of hand and doing real damage - you'll have a fight on your hands then, to come back from that, and you can't do anything about damage that's been done until it's bad enough for corrective surgery. It can sometimes take a while before you get to a combination of drugs that work for you. Sometimes the side effects can be so nasty that you have to stop a drug. Sometimes, it just doesn't work for you. You'll need to cultivate patience, and again, trust your doctor.

Stay as active as you can - that can seem counter-intuitive when you're feeling ill, you're in pain and fatigue is dragging you down. But there is good research to back up the idea that gentle consistent exercise can help moderate pain levels and give you more energy long term. Also, muscles atrophy frighteningly fast, so if you collapse onto the couch and stay there you're going to start finding it harder and harder to get up and move again. There's a well known slogan used by arthritis associations all around the world: Use it or lose it - and it's absolutely true. You don't have to train like a demon and run marathons - although, if you can, hats off to you and go for it. But, regular walking, swimming, cycling, yoga, tai chi, and other low impact activities are good for you - physically and mentally. 

Most importantly, educate yourself. Learn about the disease, learn about the drugs and how they work, read about all the diets and what the medical fraternity have to say about alternative practices. Ask your rheumatologist about things you've been reading so you know where he or she is coming from. When you visit your rheumatologist, if there's something you don't understand, ASK for an explanation. My doctor always gives me printouts of anything new he's prescribing for me so I have the information - ask for those if it's not your doctor's standard practice. In Australia, the Rheumatology Association has a website where you can access lots of information via their information sheets. You can find those on the bottom right hand corner of the home page HERE. They're excellent, free and come in printable form.

Lastly - yes, I will draw this to a close, but am happy to continue the conversation with anyone who wishes to contribute in the comments - try not to live your disease. You got sick, and that sucks. It really does. BUT, you're still you. The interests you have, the things you do, the activities you're passionate about - they're all still there. You may, over time, have to adapt how you do them, and some you may have to let go. But there will be other things you'll find that are just as interesting and that bring you joy. There may even be things that you find because you got RA that you may never have found otherwise (who'd have guessed I'd be writing for a living...?). There's another saying that I love and try to live with: I have RA, RA doesn't have me. It's worth printing that and putting it somewhere you see it all the time - for the bad times, and there will be bad times. But they will pass and there will be good times too. And I'm always here if you need to talk, ask questions, or just have a howl...so don't be a stranger.

#RABlog Week: Post No.2 When tired isn't just tired...

Today's prompt:
Managing RA fatigue. We all know that fatigue is a bit part of many of our lives. How do you manage that fatigue?

There's a semi-regular questionnaire that pops up in the online support group I belong to: Which is worse, RA pain, or the fatigue? It's always interesting to read through the thread as it develops, and nearly always, more people say the fatigue is worse than the pain. I'm one of those people. The pain is something that can be medicated. I can fight through it if I have to. The fatigue though...that's a whole other beast. 

It's difficult to explain to someone who doesn't experience it. I hear people - well people - say how fatigued they are sometimes. That's completely understandable, given the crazy busy lives some of my friends have. But, that fatigue will go away once they get through whatever's going on for them, and have a chance to rest and recuperate. Rest and recuperation doesn't get rid of RA fatigue... Trying to fight through it - and I'm a stubborn type, so do keep trying to do this - is well nigh impossible. 

While I was still working, it was a daily battle, fueled by way too much coffee, so that the end of the day would see me jittery with the caffeine overload but barely able to put one foot in front of the other to get to my train and home again. It was a horrible time. 

These days, I freelance. That makes life so much simpler. The fatigue is still there - nasty beast that it is, it rarely goes away. Even on a better pain day, the blasted fatigue is still there like a permanent bad penny... Having a bad fatigue day when you work from home isn't such an issue as it is when you have to get someplace else to work. My clients don't know I'm doing their work in my PJs...and they don't have to know either. Turning up to the office in oversized argyle printed flannel PJ pants and an ancient Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt of my partners would have been a definite no no! My kids used to have pyjama days at school, for fundraising, but it would not have gone down very well at work...
 
When it's really bad, I have to stop. Mostly, I park on the sunroom couch drinking mugs of tea with lots of sugar (I tell myself I need it for energy...) and read. The cats come and go. My partner's office (he works from home too) is off the sunroom, so we can chat between things... At some point, he'll haul me up and take me out for coffee and we'll sit on a bench at our local beach and enjoy the fresh air. He says I CAN'T be on the couch all day - and he's right. I get stir crazy and grumpy when the RA feels like it's winning. 

When I flare though, the fatigue takes itself to whole new levels - every movement feels like I'm weighted down, and the tiniest effort can feel completely impossible. Those days, I move to the living room couch and pack myself in with lots of cushions and a blanket and watch lots of DVDs. The cats usually move in those days - long term blanketed lap...that's their idea of heaven! I don't have the focus to keep reading on those days - that's how I know it's really bad, because usually I can read through just about anything. 

The very worst thing about RA fatigue - for me - is that I crawl into bed each night, beside myself with exhaustion sometimes, and have whatever kind of sleep I might achieve on any given night (and that's far from consistent) and the next morning, it's like I've not had any sleep at all. There's no sense of feeling rested, even when I have managed to clock up some reasonable hours of actual sleep. I think that's probably the hardest thing to live with fatigue-wise. There really isn't anything that fixes it. I honestly feel better on the days I've pushed myself to the point that I'm in a lot of pain and exhausted from that, because then at least I've done something and there's a logical reason for feeling crappy. Getting to the end of a day when the fatigue is so bad that I've not managed to achieve anything is soul destroying. 

I do try and get out each day - even if it's just the walk down the few blocks from home to our local shops where there's a wicked Greek bakery. I take a book, and sit for half an hour over a coffee and cookies and then walk back. If that's the only thing I can manage that day, so be it. I can't give into it though - because then the disease wins, and I'm not going to have that. On the better days, I get out and do a proper walk, get shopping done, visit a friend, whatever - as long as it's something that helps me feel more normal and not sick. Because I won't be that sick girl...!

 

#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! 

Rheumatoid Arthritis blog event

Regular readers will possibly remember a post I wrote a few weeks ago about becoming a blogger for Creaky Joints - you can read it HERE. It was something I thought about for some time, as this ISN'T a blog about rheumatoid arthritis (RA). I just happen to be a blogger who has RA - as opposed to being an RA blogger (things get a little bit crazy in the blogger world...). 

However, the name of this blog can be attributed in some part to me having RA, because part of why I was such an old-school mum was because I needed for everyone in the household to pitch in and do their bit - especially if I was flaring. No.1 dumped the name on me by telling people he'd been brought up by a dragon...so I figured what the hell, I'll own it! Parenting when you're healthy is a tough job. Parenting when you're not can feel like an impossible challenge some days. I wrote a post about that too, and it was the first time I brought RA to this blog specifically. You can read that post HERE.

I got an amazing response to that post. I wasn't expecting that. But one thing I've learned since I started blogging is that you can never predict which posts will take off and which ones will drop like a stone! It was due to the response I got that the whole Creaky Joints thing happened. I was a member there anyway, and I know the other Australian blogger there - Arthritic Chick. She's been enormously supportive, and convinced me to go ahead with the Creaky Joints opportunity. You can read my posts for Creaky Joints HERE. 

NOW, there's another opportunity... 

Get used to seeing this image... Along with Arthritic Chick, I signed up to participate in this event. All of next week, I will be posting on an RA related topic every day...there are a whole group of us, from all over the world, so it will be a range of takes on the subject prompts we've been given.

I'm already feeling a little bit like I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew, but I'll see how I go. My current emotional state aside, I'm reasonably OK at the moment, and I don't have a big workload either, so I figured that a project might be a good way to get me focused on something other than grieving Lizzie. 

For those who don't know exactly what RA is, I'll refer you back to the post I wrote about being a Creaky Joints blogger - there's a brief description there... This project will expand on that considerably - offering insights about what living with this chronic, incurable disease is like. Comments welcome here or on the Dragon Mother Facebook page. 

On grieving...

I heard the beginning of Margaret Throsby's interview on ABC Classic FM on the car radio a little earlier today. Her guest, Dr Gillian Trigg, chose the beginning of the first movement of Elgar's cello concerto with Jacqueline du Pre playing to kick off the program. It's one of my favourite pieces of music, particularly with du Pre playing. When asked why she'd chosen that piece, Dr Trigg said that it reminded her, born in England, of things English, but also she so loved the way du Pre played. She spoke about the tragedy of du Pre's early death from MS, and made a comment about the saying 'favourites of the gods die young'. There are SO many variants on that saying - it crops up in literature all the time. At this time in my life, of course, it resonates strongly. My friend Lizzie was only 53. So, yet another trigger for the floods of tears that are beginning to be a regular feature of my days as the reality of her death really starts to hit now that the funeral is over and I'm back home.

Grief is a strange beast. Many people have tried to analyse it, work out some kind of formula that those of us who grieve can work to so we can possibly see an end... After my mother died, I found myself having moments of absolute fury in response to many of the platitudes well meaning folk voiced, obviously in an effort to encourage me to 'move on' and 'get over' my mother's sudden death. My experience was showing me very clearly that there was no straightforward journey when grieving a loved one. Certainly, the model that posits a series of defined stages that you move through until you reach the end and are done - presumably to then just pick up the pieces and go on with life again - made absolutely no sense to me at all. 

What I found was that the loss of my mother had a way, after the initial few months while it was still just so raw, of sneaking up behind me and biting hard at the most unpredictable moments. I could be having a perfectly normal conversation with someone, and I'd suddenly be overwhelmed by a huge lump in my throat, a wobbly voice and the tears, once more, running down my face. It still happens...twelve years on. 

I managed last week, a week that included my birthday and all of DD's well laid plans to celebrate, to get through the days after Lizzie's death with lots of memories of the good times we'd shared over so many years. The conversations, the discussions, the sharing of our children's lives, and so on...sharing them with DD, who'd only met her once. I planned my trip interstate for her funeral, accompanied by phone messages with another of my good friends who was also travelling there, making arrangements... He and a third friend picked me up on the morning of the funeral and we spent the rest of the day together. The trip to the church was full of the catch up conversations that are inevitable with people you've not seen for many years. But then it all started to catch up with us.

That moment at a funeral when you see the coffin for the first time is impossibly hard. The cold hard reality that the person you loved so much is really dead is completely unavoidable. Lizzie's funeral was very simple - just as she'd planned it. All of the people who spoke or sang were there at her request. There was some comfort that the hundreds of us who were there were participating in something she'd created, but at the same time, that it was the last thing she'd organise wasn't far from my thoughts. Her husband told all three of us that she'd have been so glad we were there - which triggered memories of her mother saying something similar to me when I flew across for her father's funeral, and again her brother Peter saying it when I went to their mother's funeral a few years later. I can remember Lizzie's face in amongst the sea of faces at my mother's funeral too, and how loved I felt seeing her and so many others of my friends who were there for me as well as my mother. 

Coming home closed some pages. A funeral is, after all, a ritual that enables us to say goodbye. But none of us wanted to do that. I sat at the airport waiting for my flight and the thing that wouldn't leave my head was that I was leaving there and I'd not seen Lizzie, as I usually did when I visited... I just couldn't get my head around that. I still can't get my head around it. 

At times like this, we look for explanations, rationales, anything that can help us make sense of something that just doesn't make any sense. We ask questions like, 'how could someone so young, so good, die?' The reality is that there are no answers to those questions. 

From the experience of grieving my mother, I am expecting that Lizzie's death will mean entering that weird loop of feelings yet again - because death and grieving doesn't offer a straight line you can follow. The feelings come back over and over, often at the most inconvenient and unexpected times. They don't go away. They change a bit over time because we change as we gain different life experiences. It's not a circle, as such, but a spiral where we can come back to a place that feels similar to where we've been before, but it's a little different each time as we go on living. The memories grow sweeter, and the regrets that we've been that much longer without those loved ones grow, the conversations that we'll not have any more - although, I do find myself talking to my mother now and again...she just doesn't talk back any more. 

At the end of Lizzie's funeral, we were offered sprigs of rosemary to leave on her coffin - a herb that symbolises memory. In Judaism, there is a teaching that says that a person never truly dies while someone remembers them. It's why we mark their yarzeit (yearly anniversary of their death) by reciting the Mourner's Kaddish in their name. Those daily memories that we can share with others in between are part of the remembering and the healing. And that healing will come, I know. I'm just not there yet.