Pollyanna Penguin’s RA Blog

Sticks and stones …but mostly sticks

It’s been a week of ups and downs – the ups were two days off, Monday and Friday, for textile/embroidery related things which were great fun – the downs were a ‘flarette’ and … nope, that’s it, just the flarette really! It meant that on Friday, when I visited a textile fair with some friends, I was hobbling around with a stick and slowing people down .. and climbing in and out of the ancient, slightly decrepit minibus, which looked like it had recently been ‘gone over’ by a bunch of worse-for-wear rugby players, was really ‘interesting’! Still, if it hadn’t been for the minibus I wouldn’t have got there at all, so thank you driver! In spite of the flare I managed to have a nice day – and a very sociable one – not just with the friends I travelled down with, but with everyone there. The small size of the event meant that everyone was chatty, which was really nice, especially in the canteen where I spent a rather large amount of time, since I couldn’t walk well!

The fair was in a school, meaning that in the canteen you either sat on the end of a bench or had to climb in – which I couldn’t do. At one point I limped up to the end of a table where there was a lady sitting the other side already, sat down and accidentally bashed her slightly with my stick. When I apologised she just smiled and said ‘which leg is it?’ ‘Left’ I said. ‘Oh good,’ she said, ‘it’s my left too, so if we sit diagonally we should be fine!’ It turned out she was an autoimmune arthritis sufferer too – and a lovely lady, although sadly in a worse state than me, making it hard for her to actually do all the crafts she loved. We had a good conversation though – as I did with several other pleasant ladies I shall probably never see again!

She said she’d decided to leave her stick in the car, because she didn’t want to become too dependent on it. I only use mine occasionally, when flaring, because bits of me give way and then I can’t walk at all but I can hobble if I’ve got my stick; but it raised an interesting point, I thought. Can one become too dependent on a stick? Maybe. I know that when things were getting better yesterday (hurrah) I felt safer with my stick, just in case – but I did I really need it? Maybe not. Does it matter? Well, probably not if I was happy to just carry it and not use it, but that looks weird and then all the old folk in town give you the evil eye, a look that says, ‘Ha, suppose you’re one of them “benefit cheats” I was reading about in The Mail.’ I know I shouldn’t care what they think … but it’s hard not to. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones’ but a hard stare from a pensioner cannot hurt me!*

Perhaps the answer is one of those fold-away canes – but the problem is they’re not exactly feather-light and my handbag is quite heavy enough as it is!

Answers on a postcard please …

* I have nothing against pensioners, and chances are they have nothing against me and it’s all in my head … but we do have a large percentage of pensioners in our town, which is why they are statistically most likely to be the ones giving me ‘the look’!

No hairspray!

This is a very quick update to my hairspray post. Good news – NO hairspray today – so I figure it must have been the sinuses! Hurrah!

Healclick.com – update review

I introduced Healclick last week with this post. In a nutshell, it’s a site that’s run for patients, by patients, and aims, amongst other things, to match people up to people suffering similar problems and symptoms and who are similar all round.

Well … they seem to be having a few teething problems at the moment but I hope people will bear with them while they get sorted, as it does seem a really good idea, if they can crack the technology! When I first signed up, they were matching people with percentages, but getting ’100% match’ for a man who had RA along with a plethora of other things, just because he was close in age (is that really THAT relevant I wonder?) and perhaps because he was geographically close, didn’t really work for me. I can’t be 100% similar to a man, let alone all the other issues we didn’t share – so I wasn’t really that impressed with the matching system. And one of my 80% matches was someone who had migraines – well yeah, so do I, but she didn’t have arthritis at all.

Then they changed the way you viewed matches so that the percentages disappeared – a good move I think. It went to ‘great match’ or ‘good match’ or less. Now I think they’ve changed something again, because when I went back in this morning I suddenly have not a single good match. They’re all labelled as ‘low match’ and the people I was closely matched to have disappeared off my list altogether.

Ha – checked in ten minutes later and my matches are back! I’m still ‘great match’ with the man with lots of other conditions – I’m guessing it’s geography and age that does it, and I don’t agree with that, in this online world – BUT I do think I’m a good match with some of the people listed as ‘good matches’, so I’m feeling a bit more encouraged than I was!

Of course one major thing is that you have to fill in quite a lot of stuff in quite a lot of detail to really see how close a match is – so if you do sign up, be prepared to be bothered or it won’t work for you!