Living with Rheumatoid Athritis

I am determined that this will not be a "poor me" blog but I cannot write it without saying what I am going through. Over the last few weeks I have had several extremely painful flare ups. They are fairly typical of what you would expect with increased pain, reduced mobility and excessive tiredness. One of the other symptoms is weight loss, unfortunately I have not "suffered" this. At the moment everything has settled down to pains in my knees and shoulders, and stiffness and pain in my hands - especially in my index fingers. (Note the use of the Oxford comma in the preceding sentence. Impressed?) I am using paracetamol to try to dampen the pain and, at the moment, the soreness is more or less what I can cope with. It also seems to ease off as the day wears on. It is still difficult to walk any distance at a sensible speed though and it gets more painful after a while. This has led to an unexpected bonus though - I have access to field six at Cropredy. This field is...

Well this is new - not only is this being written on a ship on the Danube I am also writing this blog on my phone instead of my laptop so it may be a little shorter than usual.  A proper benefit of being immunosupressed is that I get an extra Covid injection. It was supposed to be during the holiday but I was able to get it moved to the Saturday before and I even got a cup of coffee. Moving it forward may have been a mistake as, never having had a reaction before my arm started hurting - and did so for ten days. Just breaking off to do my soundcheck with Fairport Convention.  Right, back now. To catch the ship we spent four days travelling by bus. On the whole the journey was fine with exceeded company but I did find it a little difficult to get on and off the bus at times. Sitting wasn't bad but, as my knees were still painful walking around was more challenging as I would have liked. I needed some breaks so it was an excellent opportunity to check out some of the local hoste...