I'll go to my GP armed with printouts from the net and my consultant and say 'Look what about this? You know is this worth trying?', and I think they get a bit fed up of me bringing all this stuff in, and me turning into the consultant and they being the patient, but they humour me [laughs].
I looked up all the procedure on the internet and I had a look for joint replacements as well, because I wondered why they hadn't offered me a joint replacement, which is what they can do for ankles and shoulders and hips and things like that. And found out it, that your ankle and foot have so many, I think it's twenty seven bones in there, and it's so complicated and there was one in the states that sort of worked, sort of like that, but no one had actually used it over in the UK at all and it would be sort of groundbreaking to actually try.
So they went for fusion, so I looked that up and I knew everything they were going to do before I had the operation. I mean I'd actually seen pictures and x-rays of people who'd had, had it done, so I knew exactly what was going to happen. I didn't know how I was going to be able to walk when I'd finished with it you know, but it's been a great success really, he's done it really well.
I started off by sort of doing searches on the internet for rheumatoid arthritis and alternative medicines and got a list of various things like glucosamine crondite and cod liver oil, evening primrose oil, all the sort of things like that, coral sulphates things like this, and I suppose, I still take them, I buy them wholesale from off the net now whether they're doing me any good or not I'm not quite sure but they don't me any harm and I don't know what would happen if I stopped taking them so.
And eventually I, I did see a herbalist properly, a proper qualified one, and I've been going to her for about a year and a half, and she, she basically makes up the medicines herself, but I know there's a lot of anti-inflammatory type herbs that are in the mixtures that she makes up and I've been taking that regularly for a year and a half now. |
