March 2022 in Review

Posted on April 1, 2022 by Thistle

March was basically a three-part split: First, all the birthdays. Honestly, neither Laurence nor I did much for our birthdays, just kinda stuck to a few fun things and home-family. That’s one thing about the pandemic – we’ve gotten used to not having big birthdays, I suppose. Second, sleep issues. I talked about that in depth in my last post, so I’ll leave this here. Third, the feral colony. We first put out food for the colony we’re trying to adopt on Feb 28th, and since then, we’ve catalogued a number of regular visitors to our yard. There are a couple roaming male cats, two younger cats that probably belong to the colony four doors down, an overnight visitor that we’ve only seen twice, and one little grey girl who has made our yard her home base. We set up a security camera to record overnight footage, and while it doesn’t always capture everything, we have a pretty good idea of what kinds of creatures hang around at night. (Note: We don’t leave out food overnight.) This has probably been the biggest influence of my month, and I’ve literally spent hours watching these cats, planning out and ordering supplies, etc.

Reading and Watching
My brain is so half-asleep these days that I could barely focus on books, and honestly couldn’t really make it through even a single tv show without falling asleep either. So I don’t have much to say. I ended up reading three books, with The Book of Cold Cases coming ahead as the favorite for March.

Goals
The big goal I got to cross off this month was related to finances. Jason’s bonus this year allowed us to pay off a large chunk of our unsecured debt, and once our tax refund comes through, we’ll be able to pay off the rest. That will leave us with just the mortgage, car payments, and Jason’s school loans in terms of debts. We’d made fairly good progress on this last year until we ran into 1) four car accidents including three totaled cars, 2) a very expensive hospital stay, and 3) rescuing, socializing, and vetting four kittens. But if we can get this all paid off in the next few weeks, we’ll be in really good shape for the first time since the major house-explosion in 2018. (For newer readers, a briefing: In 2018, some unscrupulous, lazy work by roofers led to more than half our former house being replaced from scratch, for a grand total of over $20k AFTER what insurance paid.)

House
We continued to focus on the garden this month, getting everything planted before it got too late in the season. The mistflower bed is entirely planted now, and while we decided to put in a few butterfly-attracting perennials into the nectarine bed, we mostly distributed wildflower seeds this year. Wildflower seeds also went into the live oak bed. Seeds are more affordable and will provide enjoyment for a season until we have the money to transform each of these beds into something more permanent.

Health and Fitness
I talked about sleep apnea and its affects on my health in my most recent post, and honestly, that’s been the biggest factor of March. When you don’t sleep properly, nothing else can really happen. I’m not leaving the house because I’m napping all the time. Some (most) days, the inflammation from my RA is so bad that my entire body hurts just laying there, every joint throbbing in pain, and until my cpap arrives, we can’t tell if that means I need a different medicine or if the inflammation is being affected by the lack of sleep. I have so little energy that I can barely move around, much less exercise. I’m eating more than normal to provide extra energy for my body. The whole cycle is awful. So anyway, I may not be doing much in terms of any other part of my health right now, but I forgive all those lapses while I deal with a very major systemic problem. I’ll get back to it when I’m sleeping again.

(the seven hikes of March)

Favorite Photos
Heh. Nearly all my photos this month are of Lady Grey, the cat that’s made our yard her home. When I barely leave the house, I really don’t take too many photos, so there aren’t a whole lot of favorites this time around.

Top, left to right: Laurence as an adult, looking like he belongs on a 90s album cover; the biggest bully among the birds; mystic spire bloom. Bottom, l to r: deer seen at Hardberger Park; columbines in bloom; Eastern Phoebe. Full versions of all these photos can be seen on my instagram stories.

Highlights of March
Once again, the biggest highlight of the month has been everything involved with the feral colony: nicknaming the cats, seeing the nocturnal animals in our yard, starting a project that will be really good for the future of these poor creatures! Otherwise, here were the other fun things:

  • Brandon Sanderson’s awesome announcement and accompanying kickstarter!
  • finally making it to Guadalupe River State Park (after four last-minute cancellations outside my control in the last year!)
  • Gherkin proving just how smart she is !!!
  • starting to see more butterflies in my yard again
  • new upgraded camera!
  • the nectarine tree bloomed – we weren’t sure it would since we kinda messed up with it last year, but it’s definitely still living!
  • my fowl language mug, ha! –>
  • and another Sanderson announcement at the end of the month: a preview of the rough-draft prologue of Stormlight 5!
  • I finally managed to get a copy of Cain’s Jawbone!

Coming up in April
Normally April is a pretty melancholy month for me, with the change in weather turning miserably hot, but I’m honestly looking forward to it this year. Not the weather change, but I hope that in April, two things will happen: I’ll get my cpap and begin to sleep properly again, and we’ll get our tax refund and finish paying off all consumer debt. I’m a little worried about the impending covid spike, particularly how it might affect the vacation J and I have planned for early May, but we’ll see how that all goes.

Posted in Personal | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Wellness Wednesday – Sleep Apnea

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Thistle

Back at the end of February, I had a sleep study meant to confirm my personal suspected diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea. While previous sleep studies had said there was no apnea, I began to struggle to breathe at night in December, a physical blockage causing sudden stops in the flow of air. I saw an ENT this month who confirmed that there was nothing physically causing obstruction, and that most likely my soft palate was relaxing at night to block the passage to my nose (obstructive sleep apnea). Sleep study results finally came in to confirm this, so I scheduled with a pulmonologist. I saw him yesterday, and he’s sending in the RX for the cpap machine to the insurance for approval and referral to whatever company they use for medical equipment. He says I have roughly 2-4 weeks until the cpap is ready for me. (For a moment, I thought he was going to say 2-4 months, and I was going to cry.)

The big problem with sleep apnea is that I’m waking up a few dozen times in the night. Thankfully I don’t have insomnia anymore, so I basically just go in and out of sleep. I never get any restful sleep, though, and I’ve had many days when I get up at 7 to take my kid to school, fall asleep again at 10am, wake up for lunch, and then taken another nap in the afternoon. It’s awful. I even almost fell asleep while at my massage this month, and after about 8pm, I’m basically operating in half-sleep mode. The memories of any discussion or experiences after dinner feel dreamlike, and I’m never entirely sure what has happened. My REM sleep has been equally disrupted, so I have these vivid bursts of dreaming combined with hyper-realistic mundane snippets of dreams that I then have to determine if they’re real. Like for instance, I recently had to ask Jason if he had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for that day because I had a memory of him telling me he’d made one, but didn’t know if that was real or a dream. (Turned out it was a dream.) Literally the memory was him telling me this while I was making my morning coffee, a snippet of a few seconds time, with nothing before or after to distinguish it from any other morning. This is what the apnea is doing to me.

I can’t exercise. I’m too exhausted most days to even take a five minute walk. I have to plan my time very carefully, because if I have any plan on any given day, I need to make sure that there’s nothing else important scheduled the rest of that day. Makes it hard to get to all my doctor’s appointments, and to get the housework done, and to do any blogging, etc. Not to mention that the lack of restful sleep has made my RA worse, and I can hardly manage the most basic of movements these days…sigh.

Let’s just say that I can’t wait for the cpap to arrive. I hate the idea of sleeping with a machine on my face, but GAH do I ever want that thing yesterday.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Kind of like reviews, but not?

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Thistle

I mentioned back on my birthday post that Brandon Sanderson had announced a special kickstarter that involved twelve months of surprises, including eight swag boxes and four books he wrote in secret during the pandemic. In the weeks since that announcement, Sanderson’s newsletter has released the titles and preview chapters for each of the four novels. Three are in the Cosmere, one is not.

[The Cosmere is a universe that links together many of Sanderson’s books. There are some underlying elements that created and continue to influence the different parts of the Cosmere. The magic systems, though unique to each location, have commonalities the tie them all together. Additionally, there are ways to travel between worlds, and certain characters are known as world-hoppers. The most famous (or infamous) world-hopper is Hoid, who shows up in most (all?) of the Cosmere books, whether in major or minor capacity. Each series or single-book in the Cosmere can be read without reference to the greater whole, but it’s so much more fun to cross-reference, gather clues, and connect the Cosmere books.]

I’m not one of those people who avoided reading the title or preview chapters of these books, and I’m going to give my brief thoughts on each one below. If you’re one of those people who don’t even want to know what these books are called at this point, it’s time to turn away now. (But honestly, I don’t think I have many Cosmere-fans as readers?)

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged | 2 Comments

Sunday Coffee – Oops

Posted on March 27, 2022 by Thistle

Hmm. It wasn’t my intention to disappear. I’d say I don’t really know what happened, except I do.

One: I haven’t really had much to talk about. Nothing in my life that I usually talk about here has had anything noteworthy come up, and my brain has been too preoccupied with other things to read or write.

Two: I’ve changed up my morning routine. It used to be that I’d get up, make coffee, and then spend some time going through my social media, email, and blog stuff as I woke up. Now, I get up, make coffee, and spend that time scanning through the overnight footage from the outdoor camera. That’s really where my brain has been the last few weeks: the feral colony.

I’m not going to go into a big thing of it again, since I just wrote about all that a few weeks ago. The biggest update we’ve had is that Lady Grey (or perhaps Lord Grey, right now we’re just assuming) has essentially declared this her home base. She comes by half a dozen times a day, spends time rolling around and bathing in the dirt piles behind the succulent garden, chases birds along the fence-line, and has generally declared this spot hers. She knows the feeding schedule, and is getting more and more comfortable in our yard. We’ve put out a shelter for rainy nights, and we hope she’ll take advantage of that soon. In the meantime, we’ve ordered a trap, but unfortunately, due to supply chain issues, it’ll take some time to arrive.

Another current preoccupation has been the garden. We’re right in the middle of planting season, and over the last few weeks, we’ve been planning, tilling, prepping the soil, and planting. The mistflower bed is now completely set. The nectarine garden has a few butterfly-attracting plants in it (like butterfly milkweed), we tied the honeysuckle up a cone trellis, and the rest of the soil was seeded with sun-loving wildflower seeds. We also moved the jessamine to a new location, as it wasn’t doing very well in the mistflower bed. We have a few more plants to acquire and get into the ground, plus we’re in the process of tilling and seeding the live oak garden. If we’re lucky, we’ll have time to make some raised veg beds on the side of the house, but I have a feeling that project will have to wait either until fall or next spring.

Lastly, I’ve been doing deep-dives into longterm health issues, looking back through journals, organizing information from the last eight years to help get some ideas about what else I can do. My mobility hasn’t been great this month – the good effects of the new medication seemed to taper off slightly after six weeks – so I’ve spent the time I’d normally spend in fitness doing this instead. It’s too early in the process for me to talk about anything I’ve found, but I have some hope.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been. I’m not sure if/when I’ll start posting regularly again, but I’m at least going to try to touch base here on Sundays until I get back into a rhythm!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – Most Anticipated Books

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Thistle

A few days ago, I saw an article on Goodreads about the most anticipated books coming out this spring. I looked it over, and there was literally only two I’d heard of, including one (The Book of Cold Cases) that I’ve already read. So I decided to make my own list. These are the books that I’m most looking forward to releasing over the next few months, in no particular order:

How to Be a Wallflower by Eloisa James – I’m an absolute sucker for James’ romances!

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas – Other than the fact that this book should be titled La Hacienda, everything about this book sounds delicious!

The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths – I’m not sure if this is book 13 or 14 or what in the Ruth Galloway mysteries, but each one is a joy and I cannot wait to get my hands on this!

The City of Dusk by Tara Sim – Queer adult high fantasy – I have high hopes!

Ordinary Monsters by JM Miro – Victorian London is not my cup of tea, but I’m a sucker for the marketing and this looks like it could be great portentous fun!

The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager – I admit, Sager’s books are a bit hit or miss with me, and this one sounds a lot like Stillhouse Lake, so I hope it ends up good?

The Gifts that Bind Us by Caroline O’Donoghue – Loved the first book, definitely looking forward to this one!

Any other books coming out over the next few months that I should check out?

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Paris Apartment, by Lucy Foley

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Thistle

Five floors, nine residents, one missing. Jess arrives to join her brothers in his Paris apartment, but he’s gone. None of the other apartment residents seems to know what happened to Ben, but they also don’t seem to be telling the truth. Something is rotten beneath the upscale exterior of this building.

I don’t have much to say about this book. It was a fun thriller with some twists I didn’t guess until literally a page or two before the reveals, and with no sudden extra twist to ruin everything at the end. None of the characters were particularly likable, so if that’s not your kind of thriller, don’t bother. That doesn’t bother me, though, and I enjoyed the round-robin style narration hopping from Jess to each of the other residents to tell the story.

There’s one trigger warning I have to give, though, and unfortunately it would also potentially be a spoiler, so highlight at your discretion: (highlight to read) TW for sex trafficking (end).

Posted in 2022, Adult, Prose | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Book of Cold Cases, by Simone St. James

Posted on March 14, 2022 by Thistle

In her spare time, Shea maintains a website and blog called the Book of Cold Cases, looking into theories and evidence of unsolved crimes. She never expects to run into Beth Greer, the so-called “Lady Killer” of the 70s, acquitted of two murders, nor does she expect Beth to agree to an interview. Shea is wary of the Greer house, not only Beth’s home but the site of the home invasion murder of Beth’s father years before the Lady Killer case. Neither Beth nor the house is particularly welcoming, and before long, Shea is questioning her sanity as taps turn themselves on, objects move to new locations, and there’s a whisper on her phone’s interview recording that wasn’t audible in person.

Mystery, (fictional) true crime, ghosts, psychological warfare, gender issues, and light romance. Really, you can’t get any more me if you tried. This book was very similar in feeling to The Sun Down Motel by St James, which was my favorite of the two I’ve read by her in the past. The creep factor was through the roof, and brought me not only chills during the read, but horror-based nightmares when I wasn’t smart enough to put the book away for my before-bed read! It was that kind of delicious.

And beyond the excellent atmospheric writing, St James explored some really heavy topics. Shea suffers from severe PTSD and survivor’s guilt due to an incident in her childhood. Beth’s childhood was the unpleasant combo of wealth, neglect, and her parents’ horrific marriage. There’s discussion of genre roles in the 50s-70s, and how women were limited, and how they’re treated by cops and media alike when they’re accused of major crime. There’s never any overt discussion, nothing heavy-handed, but this is a great look at the way women have been viewed, treated, and limited in our society, and how that changed over the decades.

I love the setup of the book. The story is split into two parts. In the first, the mystery is open-ended, but early in the second part, the answers are mostly revealed to the reader – if not the characters. I’m a big fan of the “mystery is for the characters rather than the reader” style, so this completely worked for me. I also liked the interweaving of the historical story chapters with the modern day chapters. And best of all, I like that the supernatural elements of the book weren’t just written off or explained away. That’s probably my favorite thing about the three books I’ve read from St James. The supernatural is just accepted as a thing that is, rather than a thing that must be a trick, hallucination, or misunderstood phenomena. It’s not magical realism, because the supernatural bit is still out of the ordinary and terrifying for the characters, but it’s never brushed aside as not-supernatural, either. Very few authors write that way, so I really enjoy the books I come across that fit into this narrow framework!

Posted in 2022, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – The Last Child

Posted on March 13, 2022 by Thistle

It’s official. I only have adult children now. Happy 18th, Laurence!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 1 Comment

The (new) Feral Colony

Posted on March 11, 2022 by Thistle

It’s been some time since I discussed the ongoing problem of the feral cats in my neighborhood. There are multiple colonies, and honestly, I’d guess many of them track back to the original colony in the hoarder’s yard. (Many kittens born into a colony, especially the males, will branch out as they get older to find or form nearby colonies, reducing the chance for inbreeding.) I don’t know that these all come from this one situation, but I know that in the episode of Hoarders that featured this man, there’s one shot of a siamese-tabby cat in a metal cage in the house, and that was all the way back in 2012. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it’s very rare to have feral siamese cats, and the litter born in summer 2020 were siamese-tabby.

(Regular visitors, clockwise from top left: kittens’ mom and aunt (with Berlet); Big Papa; kittens’ uncle; tuxie; kittens’ aunt or uncle and our most regular visitor)

We live at one end of our neighborhood and very near the original colony. Our kittens of course came from that colony, and we were working to TNR the adults until the folks next door to the hoarding house took over** the colony. We still get regular visitors to the yard, including the four siamese cats – though the two sisters in the photo together (our kittens’ mom and aunt) stopped showing up*** anywhere several months ago – a tuxie that I think is someone’s pet; and Big Papa, likely our kittens’ father and a cat that is seen just about everywhere on the streets in our part of the neighborhood.

(view from our deck at the scrubland behind the yard)

The area behind our back fence is scrubby woodland. It’s technically commercial property but has stayed woody (with tons of animal life, including many deer) until recently. One part of the woodland closer to the highway has been cleared for some kind of new build. It’s close enough to our house that I can hear the construction easily, but not close enough to see. However, I have a feeling that it’s displacing a bunch of feral cats, as we’ve had a flood of one-time new visitors: a little brown tabby that could be Gherkin’s twin, right down to her clipped tail; a brown tabby with orange patches and a bright white tail tip; a long-haired gigantic tuxedo cat. Those are the three that I got long enough looks at to get a full description, but there have been others. Most of them look like they’re cousins to our kittens. And given the history of what I believe to be the original colony, they probably are!

After seeing half a dozen new cats in our yard over two weeks, Jason and I decided that we needed to do something. San Antonio has almost no resources for feral cat rescue or TNR programs. The San Antonio Feral Cat Coalition, which we went through last summer, is really disorganized and, frankly, abysmally run. They don’t help with trapping, there’s very few slots for low-cost spay/neuter surgeries (like maybe 30 a week in the whole city, and you have to line up at like 2am to hope to catch a slot), and when they say they’re sending help/resources, you never get a call back. They wouldn’t even let us list the kittens on their adoption page last summer after socializing and paying for all the medical care out of pocket! I know a few other people who have had equally bad, if not worse, treatment from SAFCC. That’s literally our only resource in town. So J and I have decided we’re just going to do this on our own. Put out food to try to lure the displaced cats to our yard. Buy traps if the luring works, and work with our vet to get these babies TNRed. Provide food and shelter and a safe place for these community cats that no one else seems to be helping.

(Left photos: this last week. Right photo: last August)

The first day we put out food, Feb 28, we immediately got a visitor that we hadn’t seen before. They were a beautiful all-grey cat, and I was so excited to see them because I think this may have been the kitten that hid under our deck back in August! So far, this cat has come back almost every day to check for food. (There’s not always any left when they come as we put out food twice a day, but they still come, which is exactly what we want!)

(left: giant unaltered male; right: another Gherkin-twin)

Since then, we’ve had three more new visitors that I’ve gotten photos++ of, plus a return of an earlier kitty. The first new cat showed up at dusk on the 2nd. At first, we thought it was Big Papa, but a closer look showed that while they’re probably related, it’s not the same cat. Too much white around the mouth, different slant to the eyes, shorter tail, etc. This big guy looks intelligent and crafty, and has probably been around for some time. He barely flinched when I left the house and went to the end of the deck to take better photos of him; just kept an eye on me between bites to make sure he was safe. Our next new visitor, from the 6th, was another twin to Gherkin, but without a clipped tail! How many of these guys are out there?? It’s not just that they’re brown tabbies, which are very common, but they have the exact same markings, body shape, and eye shape as our kittens. It’s clear they’re cousins, and in fact, we actually texted the neighbors to find out if this was one of the born-in-late-June kittens from the original colony. They said it wasn’t. This little one – probably female – has returned a couple times since then, and seems to like to hang out in our yard.

(Top left: new tuxie; bottom left: brown tabby girl with orange patches and white tail tip; right: possum, because apparently we’re going to feed all the wildlife)

Our third and most recent new visitor (9th) is the tuxie in this photo. At first, I thought this might be the tuxie in the first photo in this post, one of our regular visitors, but the white patterns don’t match up, and neither do the cheeks or facial shape. It’s also not the recent super-fluffy longhaired tuxie I saw before this project started. Definitely new, probably a roaming male. Our last (cat) visitor, just yesterday, was the return of the brown tabby with orange patches and a white tail tip. She came into the garden to dig a litter spot, and I only got a very quick blurry photo through a screen before she saw me, spooked, and ran off.

In the meantime, the cats are not the only ones getting something out of this experiment. The birds and squirrels keep stealing bits of dry food (we put out a mix of wet and dry), and as you can see above, we’ve had a possum come to visit as well. It’s very amusing! And then there was the night when I took one last look outside, when it was almost too dark to see, and I saw a form slinking around with a fluffy tail. At first I thought it was going to be one of the big tomcats again, but as the shape revealed a smaller head and longer legs, I suddenly shouted, “That’s not a cat!” and scrambled to try to get photos.

That photo is grainy and blurry, but it was much, much darker outside than it looks here. Jason couldn’t see this guy out the window at all, and I barely could. This was the best I could do with my limited resources. I was honestly glad to get any photo of the gray fox in my yard! This was such a cool experience!

More to come (hopefully!) soon.

**They’re supposed to be TNRing the adults, but other than a young male that we call Bertlet, they’ve pointedly not answered when we’ve tried to talk with them about their progress. There’s some contention because they decided at one point that we were “torturing” the colony cats during the process of trying to trap them. It’s a long story. In any case, it’s possible there are still unaltered cats from that colony running around. We don’t know.

***Those same neighbors were interested in adopting the siamese cats. It’s possible they were able to socialize them and bring them inside, but that’s pure speculation/hope. I just know that as soon as the cold weather started to hit, I stopped seeing them anywhere, when they used to be out in yards, driveways, and porches in the vicinity of their colony all the time. I do hope they’re safe!!

++I can’t watch the area all day, so sometimes the food disappears and we don’t know who got it. We’re in the process of getting an outdoor motion-sensor camera so we can get a better idea of the scope of this project.

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 3 Comments

Wellness Wednesday – Enbrel Update

Posted on March 9, 2022 by Thistle

Back on January 15th, I took my first dose of Enbrel (injection) for my rheumatoid arthritis. Right away, I had a few minor side effects, and slowly, I had some improvements as well. I’ve now had eight weeks of injections, and according to the medication package details and my rheumatology office, most people see their best improvements in the 8-12 week window. I wanted to document where I’m at now, hitting the eight-week mark.

Initial side effects included:

  • slight loss of appetite due to very mild nausea in the afternoons of the first few days after the original injection. Update: This happened again the second week, but went away after that.
  • periods of increased swelling/throbbing of joints (especially feet, hands, fingers, and toes) – this was noteworthy because most of my symptoms pre-Enbrel were in my spine, not my extremities. Update: This also seemed to lessen after a two weeks, but then came back after week 7’s injection and got worse after week 8’s.
  • less restful sleep combined with hyper-obsessive dreams for a few days after injection. Update: Like the loss of appetite, this happened after the first two injections but then went away.
  • sudden and unpredictable stabbing pain in certain joints (ankles, knees, wrists) if too much pressure was applied, followed by the joint collapsing. Update: While this decreased after two weeks – mostly because I stopped doing yoga or any activity that required too much pressure on my joints – this does still happen at unpredictable times when there is pressure on a particular joint. And after Week 8’s injection, began happening at random times even when there was no pressure on the joint.

In addition to the side effects, I did begin to see some immediate improvements in back pain. I could go for a walk around the block without my lower back or hips seizing up, and eventually without pain at all. I still struggled with steeper grades or any kind of climbing, but it wasn’t too bad if I stopped and stretched my back out a few times while I  walked/hiked. The pain along my sciatic nerve dropped to be about 90% gone, and I hardly felt it sitting, standing, or lying down. Definite improvement, and it only took about two weeks to get there.

The downside:

Around six weeks, I noticed that the effects of the Enbrel began to decrease. I was more likely to get those sudden sharp stabbing pains. (I did mention them to my rheumatologist’s PA, who claimed that was a normal part of RA and it meant nothing at all that I never had them pre-Enbrel and they started literally the day after my first injection…sure. Did I already mention how awful the PA was?) The sciatic pain increase to only about 80% gone, and the neck/shoulder pain, which was like 99% gone, dropped to 90%. The throbbing pain and swelling in my hands and feet have gotten much, much worse, and sometimes it now takes over my entire body. I took a nap on Monday, and woke up with every single muscle in my body cramped and aching like I’d run a marathon, for no reason at all.

So to sum up: two of the initial side effects disappeared, two decreased for awhile but are reappearing, and my pain/inflammation/joint-issues/mobility all improved for a month only to start deteriorating again. I actually had a moment earlier this week when I told Jason that I wasn’t sure the Enbrel was doing much at all for me anymore. I’m still convinced that there’s something more going on beyond RA – a food intolerance or allergy or something. But we’ll see. I see the RA PA (ugh) again in mid-April to see where things stand then.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , | 1 Comment