Yes. I don't understand why I have them now having been told for the past about twelve years that the condition has burnt itself out. I, I would have thought I wouldn't have flare ups but I asked the rheumatologist about that and he said that it is, you, you would still have this happening and that you feel as if you've got the flu but you haven't got the flu. There, I find them now very difficult with. I don't have them that often, perhaps twice a year, perhaps three times a year and it almost always seems to happen in the night, sometimes it'll, it'll begin to come on in the evening and I know that it's coming on. But usually it's in the middle of the night. And everything seems to seize up.
My muscles seem to become very painful and it's very difficult to move at all. My joints become painful, particularly my knees which is odd because most of my knees are now metal and plastic but the pain seems to concentrate around my knees. And I tend to go a bit hot and cold and it, it's very, very difficult to move. So I find if I need to get up to go to the bathroom I can't actually pull myself upright in the bed so my husband has to help me upright and then although I normally can do, do those sort of things and, and get up off the bed without help it, I can't when I'm in a flare up. He has to pull me upright off the bed and it becomes almost impossible to walk across the floor.
It is, I can, I get there through, really through will power I think. It is, is, is very, very painful to move. But I manage to, to still walk about a bit when it's like that. And I just have to really sort of cope with it. When, when I asked the doctors for help with that the advice was to take the full amount of the anti-inflammatory drug, the, the Voltarol. But I don't find that it makes any difference when it, when it happens.
If I take extra of those it, it doesn't seem to have any difference whatsoever. I take extra painkillers as well and they don't seem to touch it. So it's just a ma, a case of kind of struggling through it and just staying in bed until is settles down again. It doesn't usually stay flared up for very long, usually for perhaps one night and one day and then I go back to normal. But I do find that difficult to cope with. |
