Clickety-click

That, friends, is the sound my right hip makes now, every time I bend it.

Thankfully, I've been in to see my rheumatologist and I'll be getting a cortisone shot in it within the next week or so. She was great - I emailed yesterday afternoon, and she saw me at 8:30 this morning.

She did a range of motion exam, which hurt like hell but was not impossible. Despite the clicking, my range is still reasonably good and she thinks there is only a small amount of damage to the joint. We'll know more after the x-rays I get when I have the injection. She warned me that "damage breeds more damage", so I'll need to stay on top of things.

To that end, I signed up for a membership to the Y near my apartment. They've changed their pool scheduling, so now I can take a therapy aquafit class a couple of nights a week. I went last Thursday and again last night. Yes, it was me with a group of 80+ year old women (and I was the only one who appeared to be struggling), but it was a good class and I left feeling like I'd had a decent amount of exercise, even though I did have to cheat on some of the hip stuff. And floating around with no weight on my joints felt wonderful. The best part is that they make you sign up for six months at a time, so now I've got to keep at it.

I mooned about on the weekend, feeling horrid. Cried, slept, grouched, ate pie. I'm ready to feel better.

I am so looking forward to this injection. I hope it works like the left one did.

I did it (anyway)!

I’ve just gotten back from a wonderful father-daughter trip to England. We went for a week, stayed in a lovely coastal town in the southeast, and rented a car to beetle around to nearby villages and historic sites. We hiked in the South Downs, explored Canterbury, and poked around lots of National Trust gardens.

Did I hurt? Yes. More than on other trips? Yep. Where there things I couldn't do? Yep. When I went backpacking with my best friend a few years aso, I was shocked by how great I felt. I actually lasted longer than she did on some of our days out hiking. My rheumatologist had given me a bottle of prednisone to take along just in case, but I never needed a single one.

This time was different, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit disappointed to see the way things have changed. It’s still almost all in my hips, which I suppose is a good thing: except for my right hand, my joints are all pretty much the same as they have been for the last four or five years. And I’m also glad that at this point, once I get walking, my hips usually do loosen up. Still, I did quite a lot of hobbling and, unfortunately, quite a bit of waddling as well. My right hip has turned outward and sometimes it’s hard to straighten it out again, which, I am sorry to say, makes me walk like a duck.

The point of this post, though, is that I went on the trip anyway, and I had a great time anyway. All the fun I had and all the pleasure I took in seeing so many beautiful things have eased some of my fears about the future. I learned that pain can’t destroy the things I truly love. It might change them. It might force me to adapt. But that’s okay, because I’ll find a way around it and I won’t let it stop me.

Daydreaming

I've been doing a bit of fantasizing lately. Not about vacations or big houses or handsome fellows. No: I've been daydreaming about hips.

Fake ones, to be precise. Nice metal ones that don't seize up or feel brittle or stiff. Hips that do exactly what I tell them without protest. Hips that can traipse, gallivant, gallop and skip.

Wishful thinking, I know. A hip replacement would be a big deal. It would necessitate a lot of time off from school or work. It would hurt. And even if my hips felt perfect, I'd still have RA, which would definitely cut down on the gallivanting - maybe even the traipsing.

Besides, my doctor's always got another trick up her sleeve, and maybe I'll never need surgery.

Nevertheless, it's nice to imagine.

Vacation!

I'm finally on the other side of exams, and, though it's hard to believe, on the other side of my first year of law school. I had only one minor disaster in which my computer chose to crash an hour and a half into my contracts exam, and I had to switch, somewhat frantically, to writing by hand. The result was a very messy six or seven pages filled with scribbles, asterisks and arrows, so I'm very glad it only happened once.

I've got a few weeks off before I start back to work for the summer. My hips are feeling fragile - isn't it funny how RA brings different kinds of pain? This isn't the sharp, gnawing, can't-move pain I had in my left hip before my cortisone injection. This is duller, and though I'm stiff I can still move around fairly well. My hips (both of them now) feel like they're made of glass. I can use them, but I always feel instinctively as though I have to protect them from shattering. It's pain that can mostly be ignored as long as I stay busy, which is what I plan to do.

Although I learned this year - somewhat to my surprise - that law can be a very creative discipline, I've been missing my old outlets. So, with the next lovely, wide open couple of weeks I'm planning to get back into freelance writing, start a professional blog, and get started on the stack of books I've got waiting for me.

I also want to stay active. I may have helped my grades, but I didn't do my body any favours spending the last month plonked at a desk, grazing all day and staying up until two in the morning. Now I've got time to eat actual meals, go for walks and bike rides, and, of course, keep Henry occupied with his ball.

Happy spring!