Hey, folks. Been a while. Haven’t been around, cause, well, I took a break from pretty much everything.
Decided I needed to make some changes in my life, especially as I was still in the middle of a pretty bad flare, so, well, I took time off from everything but work and figured some stuff out.
Started a budget my wife and I are sticking to pretty stringently. Should be possible to pay off the major bills in 10 years or so with the current plan. Even allows room for stuff to go horribly wrong. Pretty proud of it - though it does mean I have to work for at least 10 years longer, so I have to hope things don’t get bad enough to mean I can’t.
Which is looking likely. Unsure if it was the extra 2 MTX tablets or the other major change I made to my diet, or what, but I’ve been flare free (if not entirely pain free) for over a month now. One day I woke up and, well, I could move, so I have been.
Changed my diet significantly. Rather than cereal in the morning, I have a smoothie in the morning comprised of yogurt, 1.5 cups of fruit, 1 cup of spinach and kale, and some almond milk. Never saw myself as a smoothie kind of person, but hey, guess I am. I eat fish and rice and 2 cups of veg for lunch rather than microwavable lean cuisines. Dinner is pretty much the same, but, since I get some incredibly severe acid attacks, I’ve been steering away from an abundance of anything too acidic - which unfortunately includes my wife’s meatloaf, as that has set me off twice now (seriously, feels like a damned heart attack until I inevitably throw up, and then I’m fine. We even called an ambulance the first time, they checked me over).
The pain dispersing and being able to move again has also resulted in me going to the gym every day (except on weekends), 5am every morning for 30 minutes. Alternating circuit training and cardio.
I’m not living my life expecting that I’m going to be pain free for the rest of my life (a couple of minor but still nasty flares tell me that), but I’m not waking up every morning dreading the rest of the day and how bad it’s gonna get, either. Well, cymbalta may be helping with that too, but I’d like to think I have a general positive attitude these days.
Anyhoo, I’m back, and I’ll provide what support I can, even on the bad days, same as before. Good to see you all again.
and lots more !!! Haha. I really hope you can keep the PsA in check like this because if you keep this up you definitely deserve it!