Sjogren’s Syndrome

Am I becoming a junkie?

~ Rachel ~ 2 Comments

In the beginning, when God created the earth, Eve nicked Adam’s apple and I got diagnosed with Lupus, I stubbornly resisted every drug I was offered.  I was adamant that I’d manage without – save for a few ibuprofen when things got extra tough.

Six months later, when Lupus started to dig the claws in a little deeper, I was still in denial.  I was reluctant to set off down a road with no end in sight.  I was scared to start a medication I might never come off.

Roll forward a decade and oh, how things have changed.Sickandalwaystired.comMozi

As the years have ticked past and the conditions and symptoms have started piling up around me, not only have I stopped counting the pills I take, I’ve even started begging for more.  Surely, this is not good?

I think I’m becoming a bit of a junkie.

The trouble with taking bucket loads of tablets every day is that after a while you start knocking them back like Smarties.  You also start getting rather slapdash about the whole affair.

I’ve definitely become far too blasé for my own liking.  I know this because the other day when I pulled out my medication suitcase for the weekly decant, I clearly didn’t have my mind on the job.  After the 126 pills were all in their allocated compartments, I shook out the ones I was due to take with breakfast.

That’s odd, I thought.  I don’t remember them being that shade of green.

So I looked a little closer.

And….holy shit.

SickandalwaystiredAzathioprineIn place of the six white pills I take for vertigo every day, I’d somehow substituted them for six sleeping pills.  Six sleeping pills that weren’t even the same size or colour – for that matter, they weren’t even in my current meds ‘line up’.

As cock-ups go that one could have been rather disastrous.  I’m not entirely sure what that dosage of sleeping fairy dust would have done to me, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been good.

On the other end of the cock-up scale, I made a similar miscalculation that resulted in an entirely different outcome.  The exact polar opposite of results, in fact.

A month or so ago, when trying to get an early nights sleep, my body was so wracked with pain that even the pressure of my bones resting on the memory foam mattress was making me feel nauseous.  After unsuccessfully trying to levitate myself off the offending sheet, I reached into the bedside drawer with my one semi-functioning arm and fished out some extra painkillers.

Three long hours later and I was still laying there: eyes wide open in the dark and furiously trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

I tried hard to relax from my toes up to my temples – but was simply too annoyed at being awake.  I tried counting leaping, sleep-inducing sheep – but was too irritated by their imagined bleating.  I tried to think ‘mindfully’ – but was too wound up by my complete and utter lack of zen.

In the end, with a backward and ever so bitter glare at my sleeping, completely oblivious husband,  I flounced off downstairs to the sofa with a pillow under my arm.  There I lay, accompanied by the slightly perplexed dog and watching the mother of all tripe and trashy TV until well past 5.30am.  I think at that point I passed out rather than fell asleep.

Later that day I discovered what went so very wrong.  When scrabbling for pain relief in the dim glow of my phone screen, I had mistakenly grabbed at tablets containing caffeine.  No big deal you’d think, but caffeine is a stimulant my body hasn’t consumed or experienced in over 15 bloody years.  No wonder I’d felt wired.

Needless to say, I’ve now started to harness all of my powers of concentration when sorting my meds.  I’m also pondering just how much I knock back.

I’d love to be able to wean myself off all of this toxic crap, but I don’t see how it would ever be possible, or if I’m brave enough to see how my body would even react.
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Why Chronic Illness leads to Loneliness

~ Rachel ~ 5 Comments

I think it’s true to say that all chronic illnesses have one symptom in common: Loneliness.

For me, it can be one of the worst symptoms of the lot, often battling it out with Pain and Fatigue to ‘win’ the day and get one over on me.  For healthy, socially active and ‘other side of the bars’ people, it must seem odd that a state of mind could ever pull top trumps on a physical pain, but in many ways it does.

To understand how it’s probably best to dissect each symptom: surgical gloves at the ready!

Let’s start with Chronic Pain.  In whatever wonderful form it takes, there’s no disputing that this one is unquestionably an evil bastard – unrelenting and utterly vindictive.  It takes no prisoners and gives no time off for good behaviour.  I won’t woffle on about just how bad Pain can be, as I’ve already covered that here.  And here.

But Pain (in its simplest, non-chronic form) is a widely known entity.  There isn’t a person alive today who hasn’t felt its wrath, from a grazed knee and pesky splinter to a twisted limb and broken bone.  And let’s not forget childbirth – the mother of them all!

This shared understanding of Pain makes it socially acceptable: it can be openly discussed and easily emphasised with.  No GP will ever panic if you tell them about Pain, they’ll just reach for the prescription pad (or keyboard, these days) and bombard you with drugs.  In the case of Chronic Pain (or mine at least), most of these pain ‘killers’ barely scratch the surface; they’re as effective as a hit man with a cast iron moral compass.  But at least for Pain there’s plenty of meds and it always makes me feel slightly proactive to pop a pill.

Then there’s Chronic Fatigue, an equal to Pain in every way.  Real, wall-hitting, concrete-encasing, treacle-plodding Fatigue is the undisputed Queen of All Bitches.  It drains the life out of life and the fun out of everything.  But I’ve already covered my hatred of Fatigue here.  And here.  And here’s my Top 10 Things That Fatigue Isn’t list.

Unlike Pain, however, Chronic Fatigue has to be experienced to be truly understood.  It is not the same as tiredness (that everyday, run-of-the-mill stuff that everyone feels) and nothing else compares.  In my opinion, Fatigue is a powerful force for evil: The Dark Side, Dementors, Death Eaters and The Eye of Sauron all rolled into one.  It’s impossibly hard to fathom for those with bounce and vigour and this makes empathy rather thin on the ground.  There is some, however, as  Fatigue can make you look like the walking dead and it’s obvious to all that you’re really not feeling great.

Sadly there are no pills for Chronic Fatigue, but it can (according to the ‘medically’ trained) be aided by rest.  And taking it easy.  And learning to pace yourself.  Please just excuse me here while I roll my eyes.  What all this Fatigue and resting and spending time on your own does lead to is… the actual point of this blog.

Loneliness: an entirely different type of beast and the Satan of Symptoms.

For me, Loneliness is something that sweeps in and out of my life, like an all-consuming surge of water in a particularly menacing storm.  Whether it comes from nowhere or accompanies a flare, it always takes me completely unaware.

It creeps up on me whilst I’m focussing on Pain.  It slinks into the room while I battle Fatigue, filling up every last bit of space until I feel I can’t breathe.  It sits beside me when I’m resting, invading my thoughts and slowly drip feeding negativity into my brain.  It’s as if the worst of my insecurities and crippling fears are joining forces, playing games with an already fragile mind.

It’s hardly a surprise that Loneliness stands shoulder to shoulder with Anxiety and Depression.  They’re like a small coven of witches all hell-bent on dragging me down.

Yes, Loneliness is a bleak and terrible place to find yourself: dark and isolated and a million miles from everything that feels familiar.  It has the ability to transform any environment, no matter how safe and secure and make it feel empty and odd.  It’s the unsettling feeling that something is ever so slightly out of place, but you just can’t put your finger on what or why.

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Loneliness for me is like looking out at the world from behind a set of bars.  It’s seeing life carrying on around me, life carrying on without me.  And however much love may surround me it doesn’t change the feeling that I am completely alone.

In part that’s because it’s true.  Loneliness is something that I often feel and think about but very rarely discuss with anyone.  Partly because I don’t want to cause offence to those who are always by my side and partly because I don’t think anyone else would really care.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.

The worse part of Loneliness is feeling that it’s so damned obvious that everyone around me should be able to spot it.  I really, really want someone to notice how I feel, but of course, it’s as invisible as all the other symptoms so no one ever will.

Even my rheumatologist doesn’t.  He’s certainly never asked me whether I feel utterly alone with the collection of diseases it’s his job to treat; he couldn’t be less interested in my state of mind.  All he wants is for me to take my meds, never query his opinion and turn up once or twice a year to be ticked off his ‘to see’ list.  My new GP also steers clear of Loneliness.  Maybe that’s because she can’t afford to open the floodgates and release the tidal wave of tears that’ll inevitably come.  She knows it’ll be nigh on impossible to replug that dam in a 10-minute allocated NHS time slot.

So maybe my worst symptoms come down to how much understanding and empathy they evoke.  This puts Loneliness on the winning podium as how can there be empathy for something when no one even knows it exists?

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Lupus: surviving summer and box set surfing

~ Rachel ~ 2 Comments

This week I have been wiped out beyond all belief.  Flared up, energy-less and completely lacking the will to blink.

If I were a car, the fuel lights would’ve been violently flashing for at least the last hundred miles.  I’d be running on the remaining fumes of whatever it is that keeps me going.  At the present that would be copious amounts of anti-inflammatories, green tea, bananas and blueberries.

It’s all the weather’s fault.  This summer completely did me in, with its endless weeks of heat and sun – neither of which is my friend – followed by a burst of sub-Saharan temperatures that could have brought an African elephant to its knees.  OK, admittedly I’m talking English summer here, so perhaps with a little perspective I should scratch the elephant and replace it with a cow.  A very elderly cow.  A very elderly cow with arthritic knees, severe heat stroke and terrible dehydration.

It’s a well-known fact that a summer in the UK usually involves three things: high expectations, endless rain and crushing disappointment.  Anything over 15 degrees is met with shock and rapturous applause.  Climb into the 20s and the glamping brigade comes out in force.  Head towards the 30s and severe weather warnings begin.  Creep up any higher and the roads start to melt.  Literally, melt.  Nudge north of 35 degrees and the country battens down and prepares for Armageddon.

Shock.  Horror.  This August the mercury actually hit 36 degrees.  Across our green yellow and pleasant parched lands, the unmistakable raspy voice of Steven Tyler could be heard drifting through the still and stuffy air.  “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” he warbled, on constant repeat.  I humbly beg to differ, I could have happily missed the lot.

This sort of heat could cause even the spriteliest of people to wilt and fade –  and then there’s me.  I’m quite literally as far from spritely as it’s possible to be.  Back in June sometime, my body clocked one look at the ongoing weather reports and threw its hands up in a panicked surrender.  The next few months were brutal.

Roll forward to September and whilst the summer may have finished, the after-effects of that heat are like an unwelcome house guest.  Lingering and annoying.

Once upon a time, a younger, healthier version of me used to laugh in the face of the hottest of suns and crack open another bottle of tanning oil to celebrate summer.  (Clearly reckless and stupid by today’s standards, but normal back then.)  Today it’s a different story that I keep having to learn the hard way: even the mildest of months + lupus/sjögren’s/fibromyalgia do not mix.

And so, there’ve been endless weeks of dizziness and headaches, plenty of staggering around the house, closed curtains and a hell of a lot of horizontal living.  When your body renders you ‘not fit for purpose’ sometimes all you can do is sit, weep and wait the flare up out.  From my makeshift bed on the sofa one week, I worked my way through the latest series of Poldark, two series of The Crown and half a season of Greys Anatomy. Plus Love Island, obviously.  Even for a self-confessed TV addict such as myself, I have to admit this was pretty extreme viewing.

Sadly anyone with a chronic anything will tell you that watching TV as an invalid isn’t half as much fun as you’d think.  By the end of that week when the sofa and I had (temporarily) parted ways, I was miserable, bored, lonely, restless, festering and what felt like mere hours away from the start of a bed sore.

Not being able to partake in the world around you is beyond completely pants.  I hate it and resent it in equal measures.  So yes, for me, I’m relieved the summer is now behind us.  That being said, I have some sketchy recollections swimming around in my grey matter about how the winter is even worse.  Arghhh.

The thought of clambering in and out of all those tight thermal layers, boots and heavy coats is already making my little Raynaud fingers curl up in dread.

 

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Pain: a very curious companion

~ Rachel ~ Leave a comment

Chronic Pain is something of a curious companion.  A very constant, curious companion.

When waking in the morning it’s already there.  Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and smirking in delight.  Always perched at the end of your bed, double espresso in hand and impatiently tapping a foot.  Just waiting to crack on and eager to ruin your day.

From eyes open to eyes shut, Pain makes everything you do a mission and the simplest of things a chore.  Stairs turn into mountains and every walk feels like a trek.  It’s there when you shower, cook, eat, drive, shop and rest.  It pesters you when you’re working and turns your brain to fog.  It mocks all attempts at exercise.  It punishes you for weeks.

Like a lazy toddler who refuses to be put down, Pain hangs off necks causing knots to form and tendons to shriek.  It clings to backs until muscles pull and ache.  It grips hands in a vice, crushing fingers until colour drains and cramp sets in.  It bounces off hips and sits astride shoulders, gripping temples and reigning blows down upon throbbing heads.  It’s positively relentless.  And an utter pain in the arse.

At the end of the day when you eventually collapse into bed, Pain is still there.  Snuggled in like an unwanted spoon, weighing you down and wrapping around every painful limb.  And then for its grand finale – the biggest insult of all.

By the time your eyelids are hanging down past your cheeks, blissful sleep doesn’t even come to save you.  No sirree.  Pain snores like a freight train, kicks the small of your back and hogs the entire duvet.  So now, you’re utterly exhausted and completely wide awake, all at the same time.  Painsomnia they call it.  Possibly the worst hours of the entire 24-hour day.  And that really is saying something.

Week after week, year after year Pain hangs around like a bad smell, just sat there waiting every morning.  You can try drowning it in lavender scented bath water or drugging it with pills.  You can count your breaths and be mindful or ‘downward dog’ it to death, but nothing really seems to work.  No matter what you tell it or how loud you scream, rant and swear, it just smirks a little more and ramps it up another gear.  To give Pain its dues, it certainly has commendable staying power and a very thick skin.

So yes, Chronic Pain is quite possibly the most curious, constant and loyal companion of them all.  Just like cellulite or a very needy dog, come rain or shine, no matter what you do, it’s always there and it refuses to ever back off, take a break or budge.

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Alive. Kicking. Almost.

~ Rachel ~ Leave a comment

Oh dear god, it’s been more than a year since the last post.  There’s so much tumbleweed drifting around this barren landscape I call a blog that I can barely beat a pathway through to the ‘New Post’ button.

I do seem to be making a terrible habit of avoiding my screen and I’m not even sure why.  Every day I wake up with the very best of intentions.  Every night I promise that the next day I’ll definitely do better.  Procrastination in its finest form, I’m sure you’ll agree.  Sadly this terrible lack of motivation seems to have infiltrated almost every aspect of my day-to-day life.

Much like a petulant, sulking teenager, one day, Motivation simply gave me a withering look, rolled its eyes and then disappeared under a festering duvet.  Accompanied by (oh so easily led) Mojo, they both holed up in the dark, barely visible amongst piles of cushions, hoodies and assorted technology beginning with ‘i’. They blocked out the world (except for the WiFi, obvs) and slept like the dead, surviving on nothing more than carbs, Spotify and Netflix.  Sunlight was met with shrieks, hygiene was minimal and conversations consisted of no more than one syllable.  Earphones kept all pleads, threats or bribes at bay.

It was neither a battle or a war I could win.  I’m a mother of a teenager, I knew that.

To make matters worse, at the exact time Motivation descended into pubescent hell,  my ‘Oomph’ simultaneously went into hibernation overdrive and Creativity went AWOL – last official sighting, 28th May 2017.  I put that last deserter down to writer’s block on a gargantuan scale.  The Trump wall of writer’s block, if you will.

Like I said, this last year really has been procrastination in its finest form.  To highlight just how bad it became, both my 2017 and 2018 New Year’s resolutions were to try to write more on my blog.  That panned out, clearly.

Come to think of it, my other three resolutions for 2017 and 2018 also proved something of a non-starter.  They were: to start exercising more (and when I say more I mean to actually start); to make the time to meditate (instead of watching trashy but extremely enjoyable TV); to sell everything I don’t need on Ebay.  Needless to say, my yoga mat was last seen loitering on top of the wardrobe, my Headspace membership expired with an embarrassing lack of use and my Ebay account has been as badly neglected as this blog.  Fail, fail and epic fail.

There is, naturally, a valid reason for all the tumbleweed and radio silence.  It’s called life, and it’s mainly been shit.  I’d go so far as to say that life has completely drained the last jot of energy out of me.  If the last year was put on a spectrum ranging from ‘Rainbows and Unicorns’ through to ‘Complete and Utter Misery’, I’ve probably been hovering right around the ‘Big Dark Hole’ mark.  That’s somewhere between ‘Up A Creek’ and ‘Where Exactly Is The Light At The End Of The Tunnel?’  Nope, not a flicker of a rainbow or a bleeding bloody unicorn insight.

Daily existence has mainly centred around pain, with some exhaustion, frustration, upheaval and therapy thrown in for good measure.  Then there’s been the depression, with a side helping of despondency, debt and despair.  Oh yes, and a little bit of death, like a sprinkle on top.

A right barrel of laughs it’s been.  A ‘fed up/screw everything/ I give up’ type of year in which I just haven’t felt engaged enough with my brain to type anything worth reading.  Certainly, nothing that you, most lovely reader, would want to digest.  That said, other people’s misery does have a wonderfully warped way of giving perspective and cheering the soul, so perhaps I’ve done you all a massive disservice.

Anyhow, I’ve decided that things need to improve, at least on the blog front.  So I’ve dragged a stinking Motivation and Mojo out from under the duvet and slung them in the shower.  Oomph has been given a triple espresso and Creativity has been frogmarched back from the wilderness and shackled to the keyboard.  Now we’ll just have to see how that all goes.

So thank you – to everyone who hasn’t unfollowed me, to all those who’ve recently shown their support and for the truly lovely comments that have helped to remind me why I started the blog in the first place.  It’s a mixture of all of the above and my therapist’s steel-capped boot up my backside that’s (hopefully) got me back on track.

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What is the point?

~ Rachel ~ 7 Comments

Sometimes it feels that people are constantly telling me how best to ‘beat’ this thing.  Doctors, nurses, specialists, family, friends – all telling me how to get the illness in check and under control.  All offering up an opinion.  All offering up advice.  All telling me what I should be doing.  All reprimanding me for not doing what they say.

But I try to do what I’m told, I really do.

I rest.  I sleep.  I take it easy.  I take a break.  I rest.  I do things in moderation.  I don’t push myself.  I rest some more.  I pace myself.  And then repeat.

That last one’s the worst.  Pace yourself they all say.  How is one meant to ‘pace’ oneself in a normal, everyday life?  What about the kids and family and home and work and pets and school runs and sports fixtures and all the other crap that comes in between? How do you pace this little illness into that gigantic mix?  Please, someone, do tell.  What exactly is meant to give?

Even if I do make myself do all the above – the resting, the breaks, the endless sleep, it still gets me absolutely bloody nowhere.  All the pacing in the world and it achieves what?  A couple of ‘good’ days to get stuff done and then a week of feeling like absolute shit while my body struggles to get over the unexpected exertion.

Moderation.  There’s another word I hate.  I am sick to death of trying to live a life in moderation.  It’s like setting out to only ever achieve half of everything you want to do. For a task-loving, goal-oriented person like myself, this is the very definition of frustration.

Oh yes, while I’m at it, I’m also completely over being told I should of ‘learnt to know better by now’.  Two words to that one.  Bugger Off.

I did already learn long ago that this moderating, pacing and enforced rest doesn’t really work.  I get why those living in a logical think it would, but it really doesn’t.  I’ve learnt that truth the hard way – and on a regular basis, in fact.  Living like a sloth can usually buy a day or two, or a week tops, but that’s really about it.

But anyway, here’s the thing.  It’s not really the ‘learning’ to pace myself that I have an issue getting to grips with, it’s the acceptance that I have to do it at all.  The acceptance that there will always be limitations of one sort or another.  And with that comes the realisation: I’m never going to be able to climb a mountain, or walk for miles and miles along the beach, or hold down a full-time job, or even hit the town and dance till the sun comes up.  OK, granted, the mountain climbing was probably never going to happen, but it’d sure be nice to do all the rest.

What a dismissal, depressing and utterly uninspiring prospect this acceptance malarkey can seem.  Who in their right mind would ever want to do it?

So like I said before – seriously, what is the point?

When opinions come thick and fast

~ Rachel ~ 1 Comment

There are just so many helpful people out there in the world, all rushing to give their opinion on what chronic illnesses are or aren’t, and what they think will cure them. Opinions that are, more often than not, based on judgmental presumptions, half-baked facts and an irrelevant article they once read about an entirely unrelated medical condition.  A condition that was (according to Bella magazine) miraculously cured by dancing naked in the moonlight whilst chewing on the roots of a cactus plant.

Granted, sometimes these opinions do come from a place of caring and concern, but that doesn’t mean they sound any less patronising, insulting or annoying. Accusatory is how they often come across.  Like we’re somehow greatly exaggerating how we feel.  Or perhaps all these ailments are really just in our heads.  Or maybe there’s a glaringly obvious solution that we simply haven’t bothered to find out about for ourselves.

“You haven’t got the first bloody clue.  Please remove your interfering beak from my business“.  Is what you want to yell.  But you don’t.

Who knows, perhaps it’s human nature that makes people always feel obliged to offer up an opinion or want to ‘fix’ things they don’t fully understand.  A bit like a man, I suppose, who when presented with a problem, will always try to solve it, instead of just dishing out the sympathy that’s required!

Having read countless posts on countless Facebook forums, it would appear that the majority of these uninvited and insensitive opinion givers are often those found closest to home: the spouses, parents, siblings and friends of the chronically ill. People, in other words, who you’d expect to be offering empathy, sympathy and a whole lot of understanding.

I think the trouble here lies with so many of these conditions (Lupus, Sjogren’s, fibromyalgia, CFS, chronic fatigue, chronic pain etc) being an invisible illness – and one that often involves two very different faces.  So unless the opinionated person in question has seen firsthand the fatigue or symptoms at their very worst, they can’t even begin to comprehend how life-changing and debilitating such a disease can be.

On the other hand, all these unsolicited opinions could just be down to that person being a thoughtless, self-involved, mentally draining, arrogant arsehole.  And if that’s the case, telling them to sod off out of your life is probably the simplest solution of all.

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Get outta of my head

~ Rachel ~ 2 Comments

Today was the first day in over a week that I woke up and didn’t wince.

For the last 8 days I’ve had a killer headache that just wouldn’t shift. A migraine-like nightmare that has made me sound sensitive, light-sensitive, heat sensitive, people sensitive and living sensitive.

headache-sick-and-alwaystired-comIt’s felt like a 100lb block is crushing down on my scalp, sharp spikes are stabbing into my eye sockets and a metal band is wrapped around my forehead – a metal band that some sadistic little bastard is screwing tighter and tighter into my temples every time I move.

This has made me feel nauseous, dizzy and as grumpy as hell.  It’s hurt to look, think and move, and as a result of this, I haven’t been able to really do anything or go anywhere. I’ve mainly moped from room to room, moaning a lot and clutching my head. Writing anything was pretty much out of the question, as sitting in front of my computer screen was like staring at an eclipse with my eyelids taped open.

Every morning last week, I opened my eyes, reassessed the pain levels and thought ‘shit, here we go again, there’s another day ruined.’  When there’s no end in sight and the tablets aren’t even making a dent,  8 straight days of headache can seem like an eternity.  That’s 192 hours, 11520 minutes or 691200 seconds of feeling like utter crap. For heaven’s sake, we’re told God created the entire universe in less time than that, including the 7th day when he sat back, relaxed and admired his work.

Sadly, I am all too familiar with the whole ‘headache’ scene.  I spent a large chunk of my childhood experiencing the varied delights that a migraine has to offer: flashing lights, dancing black spots, exploding head, spinning rooms and wall-to-wall puking. Thankfully I rarely get a fully blown migraine these days, although they have been known to creep up on me in seconds if I do something foolhardy.  Like, tilt my head back, for example.  Lesson certainly learned that particular day: never attempt to paint a ceiling.

A trip to the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel a few years ago also proved rather pointless, when I realised I was unable to look up and see the paintings on the ceiling – the paintings being the very reason for the visit in the first place.  Of course, by the time I’d walked a good 3 miles through museum’s long (and frankly boring) corridors to get to the chapel, my hips had long since given up on me and I had to limp into the room and have a sit-down.  Adding insult to injury, after lining up to touch St. Peter’s foot in the Basilica, and putting in a request for a cure, my health has only gone from bad to worse.  Seriously Pete, where’s the love?!

With Lupus, Sjogren’s, vertigo and a Chiari malformation all sticking the boot in, these days the headaches are pretty much part and parcel of my everyday life.  I would, in fact, be more surprised if an entire week went by ‘headache free’.  Keeping on top of this amount of pain requires the stashing of tablets in every pocket, bag, room and drawer in the house.  I batch buy every week just to keep up with the demand.  I’m pretty sure my local supermarket thinks I’m stocking up for one big Armageddon style hurrah.

Making life that little bit easier still, the listed side effects of both Azathioprine and hydroxychloroquine are… wait for it… headaches.  Seriously people?  Is there no break to be had here?

With Lupus being a disease that affects the nervous system, sufferers are statistically twice as likely to get these migraine-like headaches.  Lupus headaches, they call them.  Yes, someone obviously put a lot of time and effort into thinking up that name, didn’t they.  Tension-types headaches are also more prevalent.  I totally get that.  Having Lupus definitely makes me grumpy and tense.

The Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Disease Activity Index (SLEDAI) – a scoring system often used in Lupus research – describes a Lupus headache as a “severe, persistent headache; may be migrainous, but must be non-responsive to narcotic analgesia”.  Narcotic analgesics, by the way, are drugs that ‘relieve pain, can cause numbness and induce a state of unconsciousness’.  You’d think that unconsciousness would probably be enough to stop the pain, surely?

As ever, with such medical theories, opinions and statistics, there are ‘people’ who dispute the notion that people with Lupus could possibly suffer from a specific headache.  Dare I suggest these non-believers don’t have Lupus, don’t get the headaches and don’t have the first bloody clue.

Try living inside my head for the last 8 days and just maybe they’d have a fresh perspective and a totally different viewpoint.

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Want to know how ‘Chronic Fatigue’ feels?

~ Rachel ~ 16 Comments

How best to describe what chronic fatigue feels like?  Perhaps the most effective way would be to compare it to some more relatable ‘everyday’ scenarios.

So here goes:

Imagine you’re midway through an atrocious bout of flu.  No, not the sneeze and sniffle sort that men call flu, I’m talking the full works: body aches, pounding head, cold sweats, chills, and the raging fever sort.

Now, with your energy levels already running on 50%, you head to the airport and embark upon an epic 24-hour flight.  The seat isn’t big enough to swing a hamster in and the food is inedible at best.  An irritating child kicks you in the small of your back for hours on end; your body now feels even more bruised, battered and achy than before.

Sitting in the dark and surrounded by 100’s of snoring strangers, you feel isolated and totally alone.  You give up trying to sleep and watch film after film to pass the time, but this makes your eyeballs sore and sandpaper dry.  You’re desperately thirsty, but as you’re pinned in by the window you can’t risk a full bladder.  Five films and two rock-hard bread rolls in, you realise just how far you still have to travel and you begin to feel a bit beside yourself.

By the time you arrive at your destination you look, feel and smell like death.  As you exit the plane, you’re hit in the face by a 50-degree heat and a 90-degree humidity.  You’re feeling weak, disoriented and so dizzy from exhaustion you can hardly stand.  Your brain is completed shrouded in fog and you can barely remember your own name.

By now you’re running on 30%, tops.

Fast forward to that night and your body is moving in slow motion. Your use of speech is limited to grunts and your concentration levels  are shot to shit.  You’re convinced you’re battling the worst diagnosed case of jet lag ever.  But still, it’s holiday time, so you decide to hit the town.  Copious amounts of alcohol and some rather suspect street food later, you collapse into bed.

The next morning, before you even struggle to prise open your eyelids, you realise something has gone terribly wrong with your body.  Panic starts to set in and you feel scared and vulnerable.

Your battered limbs feel as if they’ve been encased in cement and bolted to the bed.  Raising your head from the pillow is a step too far.  It’s as much as you can do to twitch one finger.  You soon come to the conclusion you’re suffering from the worst diagnosed hangover ever.

Despite having slept all night, you’re now running on 20%.

Eventually, your body starts responding to basic requests and you heave yourself into a sitting position; it takes another good few minutes of concentration before you can stand.  You decide it’s probably safer to sit down on the floor while taking a shower.  Hot water helps with the aching bones, but washing your hair is out of the question, as your arms aren’t strong enough to lift above waist height.  Ditto for teeth, so you resort to resting your elbows on the sink while you brush.

By the time you’re clean, you’re running on 10%, max.

Heading out for a day of sightseeing, you attempt to climb (what appears to be) the steepest hill you’ve ever seen.  Everyone else seems to be overtaking you at speed, but putting one foot in front of the other is proving something of a challenge.  It feels as if you’re wading through treacle; every step takes concentration and requires way more energy than you have.  You hit the wall.chronic-fatigue-sick-and-always-tired

 

 

 

 

 

By the time you go to bed that night, every limb is on fire and you’re so knackered you can neither think nor speak.  Another shower is certainly out of the question.  Nausea is coming in waves and you think you might be sick.  You pray it’s not that dodgy street food from the night before.

Climbing into bed you expect to fall into a deep and wonderful sleep – but you don’t.  Despite being delirious with exhaustion you lay awake for hours on end.  You need the loo at least 6 times and each time it’s a mission to get out of bed.  It’s now something stupid o’clock in the morning and you’re wondering how it’s even possible to experience extreme fatigue and insomnia at exactly the same time.

energy-meter-sick-and-always-tiredAt most, you’re now scrapping the barrel on 5%.

The next morning you wake up, peel open your eyelids and realise you still feel exactly the same as you did the night before.  The thought of facing another day like yesterday is just too much.  You could cry.

A full night’s sleep and you’re only back up to a measly 10%.

That day, you lay on the bed and do absolutely nothing.  You can’t bring yourself to read, watch TV or even talk.  By night-time you’re back down to 5%. You don’t sleep well and the next day you wake up feeling exactly the same sodding way.  And so it goes on.

Occasionally, after prolonged periods of rest your body charges back up to 50% – you feel pretty bloody fantastic.  But then you go and ruin it all by trying to do too much.  A slap on the hand for being overly ambitious and back down to 5% you go.

Weeks pass.  Months pass.  Years pass.  You’re forced to accept that this is now the new ‘normal’.

You hate your illness. You hate your body.  You hate what you can no longer do. Your doctors tell you there is no cure for chronic fatigue, just ‘rest’.

You could cry.  You often do.

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P.S. The description above may sound highly unrealistic and incredibly melodramatic, but take away the unlikely chain of events, and the rest (in my experience) is the bloody depressing reality of living with chronic fatigue.

 

 

What is chronic pain?

~ Rachel ~ Leave a comment

I’ve already covered what chronic pain is, so now to talk about what chronic pain feels like.  Of course, everyone has very different pain issues to deal with, but chances are the overall experience is equally life-changing and depressingly miserable for all involved.

When it comes to that ‘Ouch to the Off The Chart’ pain spectrum I was talking about, for me, personally, it’s often at the upper end of the chart.

When I just had the Lupus to contend with the pain was easier to control, but now Fibromyalgia has joined the mix, my pain is now almost constantly ‘on the move’.  A bit like the London Underground, it runs up and down each of my limbs, careering from fingertips to toes and back again.  It rarely stays still for very long, just a brief pit stop in each area (giving it time to throb, burn, and ache) and then it’s changing direction and racing off to the next destination.  Migratory pain, the doctors call it; makes me think of a herd of wildebeest stampeding across the dusty African plains.

mallet-sick-and-always-tired-comAs well as being nippy on its feet, this pain of mine is also rather brutal.  It often feels as though someone has taken a mallet to me, and is smashing, shattering and crushing every bone along the way.

It’s not that dissimilar to when you whack your funny bone, and then have to stand completely still while the pain reverberates through your body.

As if feeling like a clubbed baby seal wasn’t stressful enough, there’s also a rather disturbing sensation of electricity and ice-cold water flowing through my veins.  Clearly, that’s slightly freaky and unnerving, to say the least.  We were all taught in science lessons that electricity and water really aren’t the best of friends.  I’m not 100% sure what causes this arctic electric shock of mine.  Something to do with the nerves, I think.

Some days the sheer intensity of all this combined pain is so severe it makes me feel nauseous.  Just like morning sickness, it comes in waves out of the blue and makes me gag.  The pain also makes me weep and wail.  I’ve sat in the shower and sobbed, laid in bed and howled, and screamed while driving my car.  Music was blaring and the windows were up at the time, so luckily no other road users were harmed or alarmed.

This chronic pain of mine has been going on for about eight years now – with the last six being the worst.  Initially, it resided in my hips and legs; my bones would burn and ache every single day.  Walking was difficult as my hips would seize up, even when shuffling along the road at snail’s pace.  A particular low point for me was being overtaken by an 80 something-year-old man, who was out taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon stroll.  With his cane.

There were days my joints hurt so much I couldn’t lift each leg to climb the stairs.  I would resort to crawling up, step by step on my hands and knees. Sleeping also proved tricky, as laying on either hip was proving agony.  I soon learnt to snooze on my back and keep a large stash of painkillers by the bed. Cortisone injections into each hip proved the only treatment that made a difference, but these were given out sparingly by the doctor and they only lasted 3 months tops.

Then a year or so ago I had a slight lull in the pain. Oh, the joys, what a difference that made – for about a week.  Then, fresh from its mini-break, the pain returned and spread to my arms and hands too.  Imagine my delight. Walking like an octogenarian is one thing, not being able to lift, pull or open a door is something entirely different.

It was at this stage, and after much moaning and groaning to my rheumatologist, that he agreed to try me on Aazathioprine.  After the first couple of weeks of pills, the joint pain almost vanished straight away.  Result! A few months when I was (wrongly) told to stop taking them, the pain came straight back.  And with a vengeance, I might add.  When I started back on Azathioprine for the second time it wasn’t quite so quick to take effect.  I panicked that it wasn’t going to work.  After a brief reminder of how good life without severe pain really was, I didn’t want to settle for anything less.

12 weeks on and, for the most part, the drugs seems to be doing their thing. As long as, that is, I don’t ‘overdo it’ or forget to get enough rest.

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