my hands

It's been 5 months since my initial Okra-or-Placebo infusion. The next one is a month from now. I've been taking MTX and Folic Acid for almost 6 months. The doc gave me Tylenol 3 for any aches that weren't being handled. It made me groggy so she gave Ultram instead. I've only needed anything like that a couple of times, and honestly I just took it because it was there; I could have dealt with it but was really just not motivated to do that. I am seriously considering taking myself off the Ketoprofen for a few days to see if I really need it. I hope I don't. I feel so much better now than I have been in early spring in 4 years. Feeling better isn't always the same as getting better, though.

(4 years and 2 months after diagnosis)

I noticed that some of the surveys I have to complete for the study have pages of questions about emotional aspects of my life. The practical side of me suspects these are C-Y-A questions the drug manufacturer must pay attention to, given the dramatic mental/emotional side effects of various drugs. The Bohemian side of me wants to believe that they are asking because they care about my well-being, that they know what it feels like to look at my 35-year-old hands and feel like I do. Isn't emotional distress a given with this disease? Being the over-thinker that I am, I am constantly questioning whether The Blues I feel sometimes are as natural as my disease (did I just say that?), or a side effect of medicine, or my age ("Advanced Maternal Age" as I'd be defined in an OB's office, as if), or something else I can't even think of.

I am concluding that my ever-growing interest in and need for body art is not only cathartic but grows from the demise of my hands. Long story short, my father was absent a big part of my life, but told me he'd always remembered my "lovely hands" during his absence, that they were etched in his memory because that was the first part of me he ever saw when I was born, that they hadn't changed in all the years. Somewhere along the line, I stopped thinking of my father every time I looked at my hands, and instead of feeling love and sadness for him, I am embarrassed and weak, and ugly. If I can counter that with a meaningful, permanent and beautiful reminder for myself, what's the harm? It can't be any more offensive than my knobby claws.