Monday, August 13, 2012

Inching Forward

Hey, everybody.  I haven't posted for a while.  I'm mostly hanging around on twitter these days.  140 characters fits my lifestyle better than a whole blog.  Generally speaking, not much happens to talk about.

There have been some changes recently, though.  Last week I saw the new GI after having a colonoscopy in early July.  (Nothing dire, they just like to take a peek at the insides every once in a while to make sure there aren't any nasty surprises.)  He reviewed all my files, and we discussed, and bottom line is that I'll be starting Humira as soon as we can get it approved by insurance.  I've known this was coming for a while.  I'm hopeful that the new med will mean an improvement in my health and quality of life.  But I'm kind of dreading it, too.  The last big med I was on was Remicade.  It's an IV drug, which was no big deal.  (I got over my discomfort with IVs after spending 2 weeks in the hospital five years ago.)  Someone else does all the work.  All the patient has to do is sit there and wait for it to finish dripping.  Humira is a self-injection.  I'm going to have to get over my squeamishness and learn to stick myself.  It'll be an injector pen, like an epi-pen, so nowhere near as bad as it could be.  But I'm kind of underwhelmed by the idea anyway.

The other new thing is a bit more positive.  I went to the Y today and signed up for a membership.  I'm *finally* going to start going to water arthritis classes again.  The next class is Wednesday afternoon, so barring surprise!period (which wouldn't totally shock me-- my cycle has been running at about 25 days lately, but I'm hoping it will at least wait until the weekend), I hope to be back in the pool then.

Also, Troub hasn't been doing so well lately.  He's not eating much, and when he does eat he pukes it back up about half the time.  The vet thinks his allergy to his food has finally gotten to be too much.  We switched to a different food, which helped for a while, but now he doesn't want to eat either brand.  And he hasn't been getting his steroid, because the only way we could get it in him was to squirt it on his food.  No eating, no steroid.  Without the steroid it's become obvious that he has arthritis problems.  I talked to the vet again this morning, and she wants me to significantly up his steroid dosage.  Somehow.  My brother is coming over shortly to see if he can get it in him.  He likes my brother.  He (the cat, not my brother) has been hiding, first in my parents' closet and then under my bed, since he spotted me with the syringe this morning.  The really frustrating part is that he used to *love* his medicine.  And then all the sudden he decided he didn't like it any more.  (I get it from a special veterinary compounding pharmacy, and it's tuna flavored.  We're going to refill in chicken flavor and see if he likes that any better.)

So that's all the scary, positive, frustrating news around here.  At this rate, I'll have more news in another couple months.  In the meantime, look for me on twitter.  I'll be the one making smartass comments and retweeting stuff.