First of all, apologies for not having been around for a while. I always feel guilty when I disappear for a while - sometimes I vanish from here because things are good and I don’t want to be reminded of when they’re not (I just want to forget about PsA!), and other times its because different things are bothering me instead of the PsA, and it takes a back seat. This time around, it was the latter, with the stomach issues still continuing from last June. But onwards and upwards…or downwards! But I just wanted to start by sending well-wishes to everyone, and I will try to pop in more often in the coming weeks!
I’ve been having problems with my shoulders the last few months. The right one mostly. It started with it aching in bed, not allowing me to sleep on my right side. So, you know what happens next - I start sleeping on my left side, and so that shoulder plays up instead. But much of the pain in both cases has moved towards the biceps, which seems a bit odd.
Coinciding with all this (and maybe linked), is an issue with tremors. Some of it makes sense. My fingers tend to shake a bit when I do certain things - like hold a book open. You know the ones, those damned paperbacks that won’t stay open and the writing goes right into the centre margin! So you either have to grab the edges for all their worth or bend the book open so far that the pages pop out! But I know that this is possibly linked to RSI, too. My thumb started quivering in the run up to the UK election in December. I realised that I had been scrolling through Twitter and news websites on my phone too much. I stopped and it got better. Not perfect, but better.
I also feel as if my arms have a tremor when I make certain movements or put pressure on them in a certain way. For example, if I’m sitting hunched forward with my elbows on my thighs, I feel as if the top of my arms are quivering. They’re not. But it feels that way. It’s like that feeling you get when you’ve done too much - like moving house and you’ve been emptying boxes and you realise you should have stopped three boxes ago, but didn’t, and now you feel like you’re shaking because your muscles are knackered. My assumption is that this has to do withe shoulders/biceps issues, right?
But there’s more. I tend to have a sleep in the afternoons. I hop into bed, set the alarm for an hour later, and have a kip. But, starting around November, I began to get a kind of internal tremor when doing this. It’s like your whole trunk is vibrating or shaking, but it’s not - not that I can see anyway. I didn’t find out what it was, but it was happening quite alot - but only in the afternoons. Trust me to be weird. It’s only in the last week or two it has happened at night.
I have a scenario in my head, and I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. My assumption with the afternoon issue is that I don’t really go to sleep properly, it’s a kind of half-sleep half-awake issue and the “tremor” is a kind of reaction to being half awake and half asleep. I’m rather prone to that situation where you feel being sucked into sleep and then become conscious but can’t move anything for a number of seconds. I think it’s called sleep paralysis. It’s quite common with bipolar. And in my mind I’m assuming it might be linked to that - or perhaps my brain is fighting against sleep because of the fear of the paralysis. Then came the other twitches I mentioned from the mobile phone usage, and then after that came those that presumably are linked to the shoulder. As I type this, my biceps feel heavy, tired, and trembly. I think, with my bipolar and hypochondria, I have become fixated on the idea of twitches and tremors after these three things, and my brain is possibly playing tricks on me and making everything seem worse. When I had the various stomach tests last year and they came back clear, I told my GP that at least it would be putting the hypochondria to bed, but he warned me that it would probably just fixate on something else. And I think this is it!
But does any of that sound familiar to anyone? Does anyone else get trembling with their arthritis. It makes sense, I guess. If I try to straighten my knees out full, my legs shake, for example. The trembling hand when I’m trying to do a wide movement is actually not my hand, but my shoulder jerking as it attempts the movement. If I do the same movement by swinging my body instead, the jerks don’t occur.
But any comments, as always, are very welcome