Doctors don't always know best - an excuse for the lack of posts recently

For about a third of my life, I've dealt with debilitating arthritis attacks that come out of nowhere. Depending on the area of my body that is affected, I often can't walk, can barely dress myself and many times have problems with simple tasks such as opening a bottle of pain pills. I have been to doctors all over the world trying to find a remedy. I've tried acupuncture, massage, numerous drug treatments, vegetarianism and some even more obscure avenues trying to find a way to stop these attacks from happening. My most current effort is to stop all intake of alcohol, cut red meat from my diet and to really curtail my ingestion of wheat-based products. After the last attack that I just experienced and am still suffering through, I am highly-motivated to stick with this diet to see if it will work.

Last Thursday I woke up at 1:30am in horrible pain. My elbow was throbbing, I couldn't bend my wrist, both of my ankles were hurting and two of my fingers were extremely swollen and very, very painful. I very gingerly worked my way down the stairs to the kitchen where I grabbed a couple of ice packs and some anti-inflammatory pills. Because of the pain, I couldn't sleep and ended up watching a movie then some TV. I was miserable. It then occurred to me why this had happened. I had been to the clinic two days before to get some more medicine for my headaches (from the broken jaw). While talking to the doctor, he noticed my slightly swollen finger and I told him about my arthritis. He then recommended I try a certain medication and said it should work in curing me of this malady. I proceeded to tell him that I had been down that road before and it didn't work. He then went and looked up my records and said that they had never given me a high enough dosage of the meds to really work.

Anyway, the way the meds work is by increasing the arthritis-inducing bad stuff in your blood stream so that your body will react by eliminating the excess bad stuff. This is supposed to bring the levels of the bad stuff down to normal. Once you reach this normality - no worries beef curry - the arthritis is gone. I should have known better. The doc gave me such a high dosage of the meds that it kicked off a horrible arthritis attack. My body wasn't able to handle all the excess bad stuff which manifested in to me being in a lot of pain.

The worst part is, the doctor is no longer at the clinic so I won't be able to go down and there and yell "told you so!" while I kick him in the shins.

So, just in case anyone was wondering why there have been so few posts lately, this has a lot to do with it. Today is really the first day I've been able to type in a while. Before that, I had such bad headaches that staring at a computer any more than necessary just wasn't going to happen.

Yes, this has been a trying two months. Dawn is a very, very patient woman!