T...aloha
i think sometimes that i am expressing myself clearly...guess not.
look i'm sixty, now...lot of water under the d (obstacle to the normal flow of a water course)...and
i have personally tried just about everything except killing myself...
every Nsaid, all the old dmard (sulfa, mtx ), the pains meds, the muscle relaxers, nerve pain stuff...five rheumy's...
it's a long story...i hate repeating myself, yet we have so many newbies frequently asking the same questions.
by 2004...i was taking about fifteen pills a day( and six more on wednesday)...and wished i had died, so sick.
in sept 2004 i started enbrel shots twice a week and stopped taking methotrexate...( studies posted here previously
report NO improvemnt in folks taking enbrel and MTX together, so my rheumy gifted me the relief of no more mtx)...
by november 2004 my neighbor had invited me to start walking the sidewalk around our complex...and thence somewhere
i learned that less is more...you can't appreciate the deliciousness of a half-mile walk to me...actually moving
as the enbrel started working and boy/girl has it been a winner...i started cutting back on pain pills, decreased the
dosage of neurontin, stopped bextra entirely { NSAID-free for two full years now...WOW!!!! )...no more muscle relaxers.
now, i think i take like six pills a day including frolic acid and calcium w/D (right windy?).
enbrel doesn't fix things that are 'damaged' my ankles hurt all the time, myleft hand is still troublesome, there
is still a little fire in my butt, my scoliosis aches all the time, both feet are bad...I have limitations, life's not 'prefect'...
but biomodified is the way to be...i would not want to repeat the path of getting here. it took almost three months of shots
for the enbrel to kick in- almost gave up on it
i feel alive and voting...i move pretty well somewhat...pain is much better controlled.
NOW, if i could back track, it's not my personal story of note here...what i was preaching was a cautionary-
doctors themselves don't experience the suckiness of arava or the great emotional investment that goes along
with ' mighty zeus, please let this new med be the 'one' that works and doesn't kill me...' and then it doesn't.
and doctors don't experience that desperation behind 'this is so suckey, i can't take it anymore'.
you're the one in control, you've got to take the stuff, it's your decision...not his...and 'you're frontwards, not backwards'
if you slow/halt disease progression...then all the stuff starts to improve as a sort of fringe benefit.
best
aB
(new post). 
