Living with Rheumatoid Athritis

I only just realised that I haven't posted anything for over a month. Apologies but it's been down to the "living" part of arthritis. During the time we have been at a Costa Festival in Hayling Island. Loads of excellent bands but my highlights were The Albion Christmas Band, Banter, Bryony Griffith and Alice Jones, and Phil Beer. Among the artists new to me were The Often Herd, and Keith Donnelly (just never say "bear with me" to me!) If you have never experienced a Costa Festival you are really missing out. They are held indoors and accommodation and, breakfast and evening meals are included. The artists, both established and unknown are usually brilliant and there have been very few that I have not enjoyed. What really makes these festivals though are the people that we have met. We have made a bunch of brilliant friends at them and can't wait for the next one in Ibiza - although we are meeting up with quite a few Scottish Costa goers in Edinburgh at ...

  I can't remember if I have written about the fatigue aspect of RA before. If I have I apologise, if not, here's something new. The tiredness that is associated with RA is something that I really find difficult to come to terms with. I have always been a night owl but, especially during flare ups, I really struggle to get out of bed in the mornings and often have to take a nap during the day. It's different when I have to get up for a reason then I just force myself but I really am finding this annoying. Speaking of getting up early we took a 7.10 train down to Sheffield to see Bellowhead. No problem with the way down but the train on the way back which should have been straight from Sheffield to Aberdeen terminated at Edinburgh so we had to go to Dundee and change there for Aberdeen. As a result we were over an hour and a half late back. On the bright side we should get our money back! Bellowhead themselves were excellent, as were the support act The Longest Johns. If you...

I went to Hampden on Saturday to watch The Dons play Celtic in the league cup semi final and the least said about the result the better. Another real downside was that if I wanted to see anything I had to stand. I didn't realise that standing for so long was going to be so painful. It also took forever to walk back to the car - thankfully I wasn't driving. The worst was yet to come though! I stayed overnight in Glasgow and, as usual, I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet. Getting out of bed was a struggle but walking was incredibly painful and difficult. If there is a next time I must remember to take painkillers before I go to bed. At the moment the worst thing about my arthritis is the stiffness and pain in my hands. They have been worse though. During my worst time my hands were totally immovable and I found it difficult to hold things. They are not as bad as that at the moment, although a couple of weeks ago, after the Steve Knightly gig, both hands were ...

One of the questions that I get asked a lot is - "Does hot weather affect your arthritis?" Well, having spent most of a week in Portugal I can now conclusively reveal my answer which is - "I really have no idea!" While it is true that I had a couple of almost pain free days while in Portugal, I also had one of my worst nights followed by a terrible morning. To be honest I hope that it is the  Sulfasalazine that is kicking in which is lessening the pain. At least then I have hope that things will be better all year round rather than just for a few weeks of the year. I seem to have one side effect of taking  Sulfasalazine though. I have a sort of metallic taste in my mouth pretty much all of the time. Mints do help so I suppose that it is better that most of the other side effects that I could have had. One thing that I have found in the past couple of weeks is that there are real benefits to using a stick when flying. Without me asking it has allowed myself and Maria...

One of the readers of the last post messaged me to let me know that only 25.5% of the content related to my arthritis while 26.9% related to music. Let's see if I can redress the balance a little in this post. I said at the beginning that I did not want to turn this into a"poor me" kind of blog but I have had a really bad day, so I thought that it would share it with you to give a kind of flavour of what arthritis can be like. Last night I woke up several times and was in pain every time. It seemed that almost every part of my body ached - not in a flu-like way as I had not temperature but in a muscular and joint sort of way. The worst parts were my knees and arms, my left arm in particular. Turning over in bed was agony and, because of my knees, going to the toilet was a nightmare and I had to hold on to lots of things in order to climb the few stairs that I needed to. Coming back down was even worse. When I eventually decided to get out of bed I had very little motivati...

It's a wonderful sunny morning in Aberdeen and I am inside typing this so let's see how quickly I can write, although Tia, one of our cats is doing her best to get me to put my laptop down. She reckons that the only use for laps is for her to sit on and get petted - well, she'll just have to wait! Recently I have been using a stick while walking. To be honest I don't always need it but it really increases my confidence - especially when going downhill and walking on rough ground. I thought I'd left it in a taxi the other day. I had a bit of a panic and phoned the taxi firm. They said to contact the police lost property office however before I did I found that it had just fallen down the side of my chair! Panic over. Painwise everything is pretty much the same. My shoulders, knees, wrists and fingers still hurt. Apparently the  Sulfasalazine can take around three months to kick in and I am not yet on a full dose.  I am also taking Omega 3 capsules - as recommended by...