Medical trial

Session two of my medical trial is tomorrow and I am not looking forward to it, this is due to a couple of reasons.

1: Whilst the doctor is nice he is pants with needles and I am a big wimp. This means there will be pain and discomfort.
2: I have to walk around nude in a medial gown (except for nickers) and then have stuff put on my chest, so embarrassing and generally unpleasant.
3: The medical trial will in no way help me medically.

So why do I do it?
Well because it might help someone else and I guess that makes it worth it in the end. After all if no one had done medical trials for the stuff I take I never would have gotten the medication and wouldn't be getting better, so I can't really turn down the chance to help other people and still face myself in the mirror no matter how uncomfortable, painful and embarrassing it might be.

So it's 2012

So it's a new year, 2012 has arrived with economical crises, the Olympics, the Queen's jubilee and probably a whole list of other things I don't find interesting.

On a more personal front the year has started with my health slightly deteriorating again and joblessness.
As for the health there isn't much I can do except keep up with the things I think helps and try new things. At the moment I am considering a dairy free diet though I must admit I would find that hard, a lot harder then the gluten free diet I tried in the beginning of 2011.
As for the job I did resign, not get terminated so I can't really complain about that. Even though I do worry about these things I know it was the right thing to do.
I have a friend at work who has loudly proclaimed that she thinks I was doing the wrong thing, whilst I am all for people having there opinion I wish she would be a bit more on my side in this, as whilst I know it was the right thing to do, it was also the hard thing to do.
So why did I resign? Well I guess the reasons are always personal and whilst I don't mind explaining I am not sure most people understand my reasons.
I am a very hardworking person and to conscientious for my own good, I want to work but work was turning into a chore. I spent almost all my time there every day and I worked so very hard but didn't get anything out of it. No appreciation for the hours and with no future prospect with anywhere to go within the company.
On a more basic level it's got to do with me being sick. I got the job before I got sick and I never intended to stay, it was meant to help me save up so I could do what I wanted to do - travel. But then I did get sick and for the last year and a half I have been too sick to look for work anywhere else. And as much as I hate it I will probably always be too sick to just pack my bags and go. I can't just decide I want to move to another country even temporarily, because I need to think about getting my medicine and the fact that in most counties I wouldn't keep getting them, at least not my injections.
So suddenly I do need to think about making a carer for myself and that sucks big time! All I like to do is write, travel, make jewellery and sing. And whilst I would love to be a journalist working as a war correspondent abroad that isn't going to happen now is it!? And my illness means I have not made jewellery for one whole year. As for the singing I am nether good enough or pretty enough to make it.

But I need to start somewhere and at least try, so I am trying. I am trying to find a job I like and I am thinking very hard about something I would like to study (sadly I am coming up with nothing so far), I am trying to write and I am even going to try to make jewellery again.

I quit work because now I can look for another job, and for the first time in what feels like a very long time, I have options again.
Mostly I am painfully aware of the fact that life is too short and too fickle for you to waste your time being unhappy.

I am trying my hand at writing

Before I moved to the UK I used to write a lot. Mainly just poems and fairy tales, all of them ridiculously romantic and hopeful. Then I moved to the UK and there was no time to write, no energy left to try and put thought down into words.

The years past and I started to write again. It was no longer poems or romantic fairy tales but darker and slightly more explicit. And whilst some of them were OK they have definitely lost something that I used to have when writing back in Sweden. Partly I think it's because I changed language. I was always were good at words in Swedish, both spelling and knowing the meaning of words that most people didn't (though I have always sucked at grammar) and now I write in a language that isn't my first language and were I do not know the meaning of as many words, and my spelling generally requires spell check.
I think there are other reasons too, such as the person has changed and so has the stories I want to tell.

As part of needing to rethink what I am going to do with the rest of my life (thanks to the RA making it very clear that I can't do the things I wanted anymore) I bought a book about writing and already in the first chapter I realised something else which I have lost, I realised I don't do descriptive writing anymore. I specifically recalled a fairy tale that my Friends really like because of the description of the girl in the beginning, "with golden hair, like a field of corn in the sunshine" or something like that, so right now I am practicing descriptive writing.
The bit below I wrote about a can of red bull during my lunch break at work. I thought I should try to pick something very random and see if I could write something about it:

"The can stood on a dirty canteen table, crumbles of food and sauce sashes scattered around it. The can was open and empty, it's content drunk and the can forgotten. It's metal blue and silver shine in sharp contrast to the dull magnolia of the table it stood on."

It doesn't exactly make for exiting reading but I though it's a good start.

I even signed up for a evening course at Reading college but sadly it got cancelled at the last minute :-( So I guess for now I will just have to keep practicing on my own.

What's next

I haven't been happy at work for quite some time so the other week I asked for a meeting with my boss and told her that I either wanted a raise or for the agency (I temp through an agency for the agency) to start looking for something else. I was told I wouldn't get a raise and as such the looking commenced. Now I know i could just not have said anything and looked anyway but that would mean that 2 of the companies i would like to work for were out of the question and with the hours I work it would be very hard to go to interviews etc. Also and most importantly for me I believe in being straight forward even if the company I work for isn't, I guess I'm still a firm be liver that honesty pays and sure hope I wont be proven wrong.
As it stands the have now found someone else to do my jobs and in a couple of weeks I will be out of a job, the thing is I felt so much after taking the step so I do believe that was the right choice.
Now the problem lays in getting a job I want, I know from my past work history that I should not have a problem finding another job (the longest I've ever been unemployed is just over 1 week), but I also know that if I take any job to tie me over until I find a job I want, the likelihood is that I will get stuck there. Being a person that detest not working as it means not making any money I do have a tendency in the past to settle.
After getting RA and realising how precious life is I just don't want to waste anymore time.
So the question is what do I do now. Do I take a part time job to help me get along which will give me the time to still look or do I not risk it and take another crappy ass temp job with lousy pay hoping I'm able to still look for something else? Or is there a third option?

Have you tried this?

When you get sick you suddenly find that everyone seems to know how you can get better. People see you hobbling around in pain and they can't help but ask, which is fine but then they also remember that their cousin's husband's ex boyfriend or what not who either has RA or read something about RA, told them that something is definitely supposed to "cure" all RA symptoms.
This whilst understandable does get irritating very quickly.

So what different "cures" are there? well the ones people know about are mainly food related.

These are the once I have heard of so far:

Don't eat meat
Eat only raw food (this applies to meat as well as vegetables) and eat a lot of raw liver and fish
No Chocolate (this one the doctor tells you about)
No Coffee (and this one)
Eat fatty food
No Alcohol (also a doctor one)
Drink loads of milk
Don't eat any citrus fruits
Don't eat gluten (this means no pasta, couscous, bread, soya, pizza etc)
No dairy products (milk, yogurt etc)
things that grow during the night (this apparently covers potatoes and all rot vegetables)
Cook everything fresh, nothing frozen and nothing with additives or preservatives (this one ups the price of a weekly shop considerably)
No sweets of soft drinks unless completely natural
No fish (this one I find strange as it's been medically proven that large doses of Omega 3 helps symptoms)
Eat bones soup every day

As I am sure you understand the main issue with following these are that if you followed all of them you would starve to death! Also a lot of them contradict each other.
Now I have actually tried some, when you are in a lot of pain there isn't many things you wont try.
I have tried the no Coffee, no chocolate, no gluten, no conservatives or preservatives and all raw diets.
All that happened is that I lost a lot of weight, but then starving yourself does have a tendency to do that!

So whilst I appreciate that fact that people want to help, please don't give me diet tips unless you have had the same problem yourself and it actually worked!

Now do I believe that none of the above works? Well no, I actually think they might, after all one of the believes are that Arthritis isn't just a case of your immune system going bonkers but that it is actually trying to attack something that is hurting the body, but that it can't "cure" the problem, and as such end up causing more damage to the body trying to cure it then the actual issue that made it start attacking.

It would then make sense that perhaps you are oversensitive to something already in your body or "allergic" so to speak. If you then stop ingesting whatever you are over sensitive to your immune system would stop trying to attack it and the symptoms would go away. So yeah I believe that in some cases the diets may actually help. But in my case it definitely wasn't anything I ate!