I hate it too. And when it rains it pours. The loss of independence is so frustrating and depressing. The hardest thing for me is asking for help because I’ve always just tackled anything I can. Had to have my hubby serve me dinner in bed for a week because a flare in my foot made it impossible to even put my foot in a downward position. I won’t even talk about trying to get to the bathroom. We are all here to console one another but it’s good to be able to get it out, knowing we have a safe place to vent. Hugs to you.
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@Kutya Peacocks? Noisey worthless creatures good only for supplying hackles and a bodies for royal coachman which are replace around here by the much better Elk Hair Caddis/ I do miss tying my own flys. Every other creature you mention we have experienced. We got past the miniature horses which refuse admittance to the house because they were cold, BUT now its miniature cows. We still have a pack Llama though.
BTW my boys mad me a GREAT verticle walker based on this one: 
I I have headlights, cup holders and knobby tires though. I can go anywhere
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Dang!!! You guys make feel like a regular wuss. I only lived off grid in the Alaskan bush for years. Frostbite and grizzlies. Just a walk in the park!
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Peacocks are amazingly loud, no doubt about it, but our donkey was louder. I would walk our dogs a mile or more down the road, and you could STILL hear her blatting away. Guinea hens are another sort of screaming mimi, and our beagle can put up a pretty good racket. Peacocks are pretty much entirely decorative, but they are tougher than you would expect of a creature so flamboyant, and they require amazingly little food. We never had llamas, maybe because they are so expensive or because one spit in my face when I was a kid. The only creatures we made any money on were the angora goats. There was a federal subsidy program which paid a ridiculous amount of money if you sold your fleeces for a high price. Because ours were very clean fleeces for hand spinners, we got a lot for them, and the government sent embarrassingly large checks in response. I really was embarrassed to take the money. When I got the first check, I called them and said there had been a mistake: it was too much! They said, nope, that’s what we pay. Idiotic.
As for living without electricity, we didn’t do so as some sort of grand Thoreauvian gesture, We just wanted to keep sheep, and didn’t have much money. This was in 1982. We went to the realtor and said, "Well, we want a house with decent reclaimable pasture and with some woods, and we cant spend more than abour $20,000. I figured the realtor would laugh us out of there, but no. The first place we looked at, we bought: 16 acres, a hideous slumpen mess of a log cabin built by hippies with only half of the windows installed (the rest were polyethylene sheet), anda pretty fair crop of marijuana in the back yard, which the realtor was careful to say didn’t come with the property. BUT it had 16 acres, 4 in (rough) pasture, 12 in pretty woods, and even a little pond. No electricity: the wires ended three miles down the road. It was horrible but idyllic, and I loved living there. I really enjoyed all the challenges the place presented, but my wife got tired of the hassles after seven years or so. We made enough reselling it for a down payment on a decent house.
P.S. We paid $18,500 for the house, a little over half what we spent on our most recent car, and it’s a VERY modest ride!
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Here’s a silly follow-up to the “d—d” discussion. I teach an adult ed writing course at a local college, and my students asked me to read something I was working on. Fair is fair, so I chose to read a little memoir piece I am fiddling with. Unfortunately, it happens to abound with f-bombs which are necessary to the - er - ambiance of the piece, so I had to read them. One time I did a reading and as a courtesy to my audience substituted “flipping” for the true and righteous f-word. It was a disaster, I thought: made the whole thing sound silly. This time I used “fecking,” having learned here that this is the version favored by the Irish. It worked pretty d----d well, though I did mess up a few times and hit them with the genuine “u” version. They survived. Everyone’s fine.
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I did some performance poetry once, supporting a punk band so self-censorship didn’t come into it in any effing, fecking way whatsoever. Weirdly, a teacher at my kids’ school asked me afterwards if I’d like to do creative writing workshops with the 7 year olds. She’d had a few beers.
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LOL. I recognize her generous impulse, having been a drunken teacher myself any number of times. I taught 18-year-olds, so it wouldn’t have been a problem. I told my students, regarding the feck word, "You can write it in your papers (as needed) but you can’t say it in class. That way lies madness.
You mentioned “Methotrexate haze”. Does being on Methotrexate affect your thinking or your feelings? --Nancy J.
It’s difficult to say because the PsA itself makes me tired, in large part because it can be exhausting dealing with pain. Even if you succeed in ignoring pain, there is a grinding effort in doing so. I do think, without any defensible empirical evidence, that methotrexate does in itself make me tired - I know it makes me nauseous - but I can’t be sure of that. Now that I am on a reduced dose of methotrexate, I do seem to be less run down, but I am certainly not what I once was. My GP has sent me to physical therapy because I am “deconditioned,” among other reasons, and he has a point: I cannot sustain effort anything like I used to, but I am trying. I suppose, given that we are all mortal, that any effort to overcome medical problems is doomed to failure, but we can put up a d----d good fight anyway.
I know about dealing wiht trees, my house in the middle of a forest. Due to the PsA and cervical fusions I can no longer operate a chainsaw. Since the PSA got bad I have to hire someone to do everything. I can’t use a weed-eater, or mower. I can’t driv emy tractor anymore to clear brush and fix my driveway. I pretty have to pay someone to do about everything.
After several storms I have gotten up inthe morning and had a tree lying across my drive. I hae to call someone to come and cut it up before I get out of the drive.
I am so sorry to hear of your frustrations, the likes of which it seems I’ll face myself one day. I am trying, with modest success so far, to be satisfied with work on a smaller scale, but it’s hard to give up the notion that you ought to be able to figure out how to get stuff done without help, hard to accept that there are some things I simply can no longer do. My mother, who lives alone and independently at 97, tells me that she can’t believe that she is as old as she is and is dismayed at how little she can accomplish in a day, and I am beginning to understand what she means. My up-front assumption - irrationally enough - is that with some extra effort I ought to be able to do now what I did 30 years ago in my 40’s, but with PsA on the scene, this is an illusion that is quickly fading. My wife and I today cleaned up about half of the 20-inch-through white pine that fell on our dog fence last week, and rebuilt the fence. I KNOW I’m gonna barely be able to move tomorrow. When I first cut up the main leader of the tree, I cut it into the sort of lengths I used to carry with ease. Then I had to cut them in half again, and it was still hard to get them stacked. Pounding in t-posts, which I used to do without a thought, is now at the ragged edge of what I can do, which means that the day is coming when I won’t be able to do it at all. Even twisting rebar ties feels like actual work. I’m not sure just what sort of talent I am going to have for being old and infirm, but I’m certainly going to find out, it seems. My wife says I have to be satisfied with doing what I can, to let go of my old sense of my abilities, and she’s right, but it’s not easy. I’m a very stubborn person: I push through things. But it seems that down the road all the stubbornness in the world won’t make a bit of difference. I hate that.
Kutya, I don’t think this has been asked so far, but is there a chance of more aggressive treatment? I’m thinking biologics of course.
We all respond differently, but on Methotrexate I functioned considerably better (i.e. at all) than I had without meds. But with Humira life approached something like normality fairly quickly. Actually rather better than ‘normal’ these days because I think PsA had been undermining me and my health in general for quite a few years before I was diagnosed & basically I’d got used to feeling lousy. Not everyone has quite such a good result as I’ve had (crossing fingers) but every time I feel like ditching the drugs I remind myself how much healthier I feel now overall than I did 10 years ago, in addition to the improvement in the PsA-specific symptoms. I still can’t lose 20 years though, biologics ain’t that good.
Sorry for my rather pessimistic post. I suppose I was just reflecting on the fact this is always referred to as a “progressive” disease, and that as spring arrives I have a goofy habit of thinking I ought to be able to do what I did at 25, though all the evidence suggests I am 72!
My rheumatologist is quite aggressive, I think, so that only months after (finally!!) being diagnosed, I am on both metho and Enbril. The combination is working pretty well. I think, and the side effects are much easier than they were with metho alone. Still, a year ago I was climbing mountains and able to do heavy work, both of which are probably beyond me at the moment. In a week or so, I’ll be starting physical therapy. So, I can’t complain about my treatment but, as you have read, I am well capable of complaining about this blasted disease!
Ah! Reading back I’ve spotted mention of Enbrel now, should have looked harder!
I have found both Mtx and Humira to work cumulatively. I didn’t keep any kind of record but recall a fairly quick improvement on Humira - most noticeably a rapid reduction in long-term swollen joints - but thereafter more energy etc. over perhaps a year or so.
It seems to me that those of us who have long engaged in elite physical activities such as climbing mountains or a lifetime of hardcore housework or whatever start treatment with the important advantage of strong muscles and tendons and a good level of background fitness. However I did get significant muscle wasting within months of being poleaxed by first flare. That then contributed to rapid knee OA. So your physical therapy is probably timely (not that you sound exactly poleaxed, more frustrated, which is understandable).
Whatever age we are, there are psychological challenges. You anticipated being a certain sort of person at 72 perhaps, and now that all important self-image requires some modification. That’s a blow. It might not sound too bad to younger people, but it is. However there is a good chance you will become more physically able over time. And as someone who sounds like they love being effective, being a doer, taking control, you’ll undoubtedly channel all that into finding ways around the challenges that do come along, which can actually be surprisingly (I don’t like this word but hey …) empowering.
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Yep: all this sounds right on the money to me, I have been remanded (gratefully) to PT to deal with specific joint problems - knee, shoulder, hands - but also for general “deconditioning” due to muscle loss caused by my relative inability to do exercise or to work over the past six months or so. There’s some OA as well, but you kind of expect that at my age, and there’s nothing really to be done about it, other than exercise and NSAIDS.
I try to be realistic as to the seriousness of my disease and as to the realities of aging, but at the same time, I have no intention whatever of giving up on maintaining and regaining function through whatever therapy, exercise, or work can help. I am VERY stubborn, as my wife would certainly tell you, describing this trait as a not entirely unmixed blessing!
As I sit here this morning, I am very stiff, and my shoulder is well and truly jacked, but because I did a day’s work yesterday - cutting up a fairly large tree, dragging and stacking about half of it, rebuilding a section of fence - I feel good. I’ve accomplished something, and I hope I’ll be a little stronger for it. I hear people say, “You have to learn to relax,” and, “Don’t overdo.” I understand what they mean, but the merit in their view is limited and partial: I also have to learn to regain what I can of my ability to work and to do the things that make worth living , and I have never been (and have no wish to be) all that fond of relaxation.
I don’t like those phrases much either. I probably do do these things to a certain extent but the mental image they conjure up isn’t that enticing. Glad to hear you feel good in bold letters lol!
I see you used to be a teacher: same here, English and philosophy. I taught eighteen-year-olds. I miss the kids, but I don’t miss the growing number of bureaucrats in today’s school. Just give me a bunch of students and let me be. I was department head for a number of years. My job, as I saw it, was to protect my teachers from the nonsense such bureaucrats would impose on them. I was viewed more favorably by the teachers than I was by the higher-ups.
I still teach a little adult ed, and I would like to find a way to teach adolescents again. I find them interestingly transgressive and hilarious, and they laugh at my jokes.
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I’ve been doing homebound tutoring through an agency this year. I take as many students as I want at any given time, I set my own schedule. It works out really well to stay in education but at a manageable level.
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What an interesting thread! Over the last year, I’ve noticed that limited activity results in pain–it’s like I’ve run a marathon. I have along history of swimming and in October, I joined a new club. I’m accustomed to pacing myself as I work my way back into fitness. After a gentle swim, spent the weekend in bed with a fever and extreme muscle pain. I have recently returned to the pool in an effort to keep moving. I essentially just flutter around. Without fail, the next day brings a great deal of overall pain. My question is, “Can people with psoriatic arthritis become fit?”
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I’m wondering that myself. It used to be that if I pushed myself, I’d get stronger: simple. Now I’m not so sure, but I am definitely going to work to find the point at which exertion is more damaging than beneficial. I asked my rheumatologist about it, and she said that whatever I can do, I should do, but I’m not sure she realizes just how hard I like to push myself. I like to push myself through pain to get to the other side, but I’m not sure now whether PsA makes that a foolish approach, since the other side of pain may be more the realm of damage than of strengthening challenge. I just don’t know. I’m hoping that physical therapy, which I begin in a week or so, will help me to figure it out.
I really pushed myself pretty hard yesterday, and I feel pretty good today, so that’s encouraging.
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