Rheumatoid arthitis flare-up

It’s nearly a month since I blogged.

Option A – nothing happened worth talking about
Option B – it has been too hectic to write.

It’s B.

Mrs has been having a massive flare-up of her rheumatoid arthritis. She has got to the stage where she needs help to get out of a chair, and sometimes help to walk across a room. She has taken to using disabled toilets, which are higher, in case she can’t get off a normal one. She has been sleeping badly at night, wracked with pain. So she ahs stayed in bed most of the day instead.

This is not good, when you have a two and a half year old toddler in the house. So I have had to stay off work. Two days a week she is in the nursery. Apart form that I have to stay off work or go in late. Over the last month I have been doing about 3.5 days a week of work. Which means losing 1.5 days pay each week. And annoying the bosses by not being available for meetings. I don’t think it has delayed the project yet, but it may come to that and then I will not be flavour of the month!

Mrs had a routine appointment with the specialist on 22nd Feb., but had been trying to get in earlier for a steroid injection, to get her back on her feet as soon as possible. She had been told that because the specialist had been on holiday, there was now a queue of both urgent and routine cases, and she was unlikely to get in. But last Friday th9ngs came to a head at home, with me being off work again and her being in a lot of pain. We managed to push into the queue, and got seen that afternoon.

The steroid injection had very little effect, which was partly expected: she has needed boosters before. So she had the booster at her routine appointment yesterday, and they say she may need another booster this Friday. Not encouraging. But she did manage to go to the loo three times last night – so maybe it is starting to work.

They are proposing to change her medication. She seems to have become immune to the sulfasalazine, so they are planning to try her with one of two anti-TMF drugs. These are expensive (£10,000) so in the English National Health System they will only put you on it if you have tried two other drugs unsuccessfully (in her case this is methotrexate and suphsalazine) and the specialist has to get authorisation from the Primary Care Trust for each case. So that will take a month.

These new drugs are injected, so I will have to learn how to do injections. The only practical difference between the drugs is the frequency of injection (weekly v fortnightly) so I expect she will choose the fortnightly one.

So today things are very bad, but the future does seem a bit brighter.