Up bright and early this morning… nothing out of the ordinary there, I’m almost always up obscenely early. But this morning I’m not enjoying it nearly as much as I usually do.
I stopped my Enbrel and my MTX about a week and a half ago… and I’m really feeling it the last day or two. My knuckles are achey… the front half of both feet feel tingly and achey and my toes are starting to not feel right again. I was hoping it would take longer than this to start feeling the “going away” effects of the meds, but no such luck. So I’m taking naproxen to try and ease out the swelling this morning and looking forward to being able to take my meds again.
And according to my surgeons (and I think having doctors with a sense of humor is awesome) I can start taking my meds a couple days after the surgery. It made the PA laugh that I was so surprised…
Yesterday was my pre-op appointment. I found out that it isn’t just in my head that I feel the ends of the bone in my arm moving sometimes. It probably is, since they aren’t connected to each other. And they have apparently never been connected to each other. Nice. At least I’m not smoking anything anything good and imagining it.
The PA told me that they are going to chop off the ulna and wrench my arm to make it able to turn the right way (to pronate, to supinate, to make it work the right way). In my heart I don’t really want to know the details, but it’s good to be told. The answered all my questions about how the chopping off is going to work, what will happen inside my wrist when it happens and they calmly told me all of the ways that this works. In my case it will be cutting off the end. Other people have to have he middle of the ulna chopped out and the end affixed to the end of the radius so the twist happens in the middle of the arm instead of the wrist.
They figure that the surgery will take at least 3 hours (give or take) and it is the kind of surgery that they do all the time.
They took time with me and talked to me. Told me that I need to be taking Naproxen (not the over the counter kind… the holy crap dose they can perscribe) to keep the inflammation down now and for the next month or so so I can heal until the Enbrel and MTX can kick back in. Not thrilled about taking so much, but if it will help and it is just for a specific time frame, I will suck it up and keep my body in as good a shape as I can for the time I need to.
So today I go on a ‘script’ run to the pharmacy and get both pain pills and NSAIDs.
I’m kind of scared of all this. But I probably would be more scared if I wasn’t actually looking forward to being able to use my hand again the right way and all of the weird places and all of the new ouchies are.
The saga continues. I am going to take a nap while this morning’s over the counter meds dose kicks in and hopefully enjoy the biggest part of the day.
A Figment Of Fitness 
Wow, surgery so soon after being diagnosed. I went back to your about me section to see how long you have had RA because you mentioned the wrist surgery. Sounds like you have an aggressive case which is the same as me. One of things that was getting me down on all the tnfs, dmrads, etc. is that although I was taking a mixed bag of meds, nothing seemed to slow down the joint deterioration. Very early on surgery was sugggested for both my wrists and my right elbow. Since it wasn’t going to stop my RA progression I opted not to. I hope your surgery goes wonderful and that it does for you what you hope it will. It is a good thing they have written a script for pain meds as being off your regular ra meds might be really tough on you. Sending out lots of good wishes that will not be the case!
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