Home in Delaware...and I'm not stripping wallpaper this Christmas!! Last year my siblings and I spent about three straight days with a wallpaper steamer scraping 50-year-old paper off of plaster walls, and then another day or two with a tub of spackle and various buckets of paint, as we delivered on the promised Christmas gift of a redecorated dining room. Not this year! The dining room is blue and will remain blue for the foreseeable future, thank all that is holy. All very coordinated with a painting I made a while back, and our second Christmas tree.
Adorning our other Christmas tree is a new ornament this year, crafted by hand out of a Humira self-injector pen. My Dad thought the red plastic could have a new life, after faithfully serving its first purpose as a drug-delivery device. Rheumatoid arthritis does Christmas. (Sustainability! Reduce, reuse, recycle!!)
In other news, I got my new blood work back. Negative rheumatoid factor (again), and no auto-immune markers (again). Pretty much normal, except for some elevated liver enzymes, which just means I need to stop taking anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers. And something called C-reactive protein was also high. Apparently it becomes elevated with inflammation, but doesn't give you specific info about what's actually inflamed, so not terribly helpful best I can figure. My fingers got nice and chubby on Wednesday, but all points of articulation seem to be fully functional today. I've been reading lots of medical journal abstracts though, am becoming increasingly convinced that RA starts in your gut with antibodies to food, and am still grudgingly on for pears, trout and sweet potatoes in 2011. Hooray.john mansfield elimination diet rheumatoid arthritis alternative health joint pain arthralgia hypoallergenic diet young female autoimmune
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