Introduction & Early Stages

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October 2006

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

At the risk of complaining, or sounding like someone who complains too much, I’ll be cryptic: how come juice bottles are so difficult to open? How come jars of jelly are so tough to turn? Why is it so hard to spray Windex? When did holding a steering wheel become a chore?

Why are my hands hurting so much?

It’s amazing how much we rely on our hands to perform really basic jobs like opening doorknobs or dialing telephones. Not to mention typing emails and diary entries. And the problem I face most often is not whether or not I can do something – because the pain in my hands never prevents me from doing something – it’s whether or not I want to tough out the pain in the first place. And then for half an hour after I’ve finished the bottle of water, I’m still pissed off that my hands are hurting. The lesson? “Drink from the water fountain”…but it’s far beyond that. It’s not taking for granted every other day my hands don’t hurt, and every other day I can type without a problem.

That’s what my arthritis is all about: reminding me about the better days when the worse days roll into town.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Things haven’t been going so well for me – my hands, back and hip have really been bothering me. So at my last visit to the doctor we mapped out a Seth Game Plan. It started with switching back to Celebrex on top of the other meds I’m taking. Gone are the Mobic days. Officially. It was a good run while it lasted, but together we defined successes and failures, and Mobic was quickly becoming a failure. Which is fine, as my doctor put it, because when you go to an ice cream shop, there are lots of flavors to try. COX-2 inhibitors are far from ice cream flavors…(though they’ve both been known to cause stomach aches!) but the analogy is relatively the same.

And…knock-on-wood…so far so good! I am noticing a marked improvement already, and it has been about a week. I’m also trying to get better about going to the gym; the tough part is going from once or twice-a-week to a more regular 3-4 times-a-week routine. I find it difficult to make it out of bed in one piece, and by the end of the day I’m out of energy. Which makes weekends ideal – provided nothing else is going on – to bang out a mid-morning workout. Sadly, I feel better after I work out, but making the leap to weekdays has been more of a challenge than anticipated.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. New meds. New season. New socks. I’m off to a great start. On to bigger problems: what should I be for Halloween!?