I stand at the kitchen counter, looking at the array of pills laid out next to the sink. It’s dawn. My hips, aching with bursitis, have forced me out of bed once again and my RA is making my body feel as stiff as thick cardboard. Moving takes effort. It hurts.

I stand there, blinking at the pills. What do I take? My brain must be stiff too. Oh. Right. Take the ones from the daily pills thingy first. The morning RA drugs: sulfasalazine and plaquenil. They keep the rheuma-dragon drowsy and slow. There’s Ranitidine, to quell the nausea the plaquenil invariably causes. Then the rheuma supplements: calcium and Vitamin D for strong bones (cross your fingers) and a multi-vitamin. Finally, a teensy loratadine tablet for the year-round grass allergy that living in the valley with Mom has so rudely reawakened in me. (At my home up in the mountains I only took the allergy stuff now and then. Here with Mom, I either take it every day or live with constantly clogged sinuses and itchy, red, watery eyes. Bleh.)

I run a glass of cold water, snap open today’s pill compartment and shake the fistful of pills into my palm. I swallow them all at once, then force myself to gulp down the rest of the water. There. Now for the pain meds.

My rheumatologist told me again last month that the RA drugs are keeping my dragon quiet and sluggish. I have to believe him–he has Scientific Blood Test Results to back up his assessment. But I ache anyway. My rheuma-dragon may be much weaker than he was, but he’s still pushing hard against the bars of his medicated cage. Each push represents, to me, another throb of pain in my hands or my hips or both.

It may be only a shadow of what it once was, but it’s still pain. It dogs my existence. I gaze at the pill bottles. What to take?

There’s tramadol. It’s my favorite, a benign but fairly effective painkiller with no side-effects that I’ve noticed. Next to it is hydrocodone (Vicodin). It used to be my Number One pain med, an opiate I could count on to push the pain way back and send my mind floating sweetly away. But I didn’t dare take it if I had to drive or work or be responsible for anything, which naturally limited its usefulness.

Today, Vicodin is in definite second place. I’ve taken it for so many years, off and on, that my brain no longer reacts much to it. Its rarely any more effective than tramadol, and even the maximum dose doesn’t send me floating gently away from my misery anymore. My pain and I remain rooted firmly in reality.

This is the trap that narcotic painkillers set: to keep them working, over time you have to take higher and higher doses. Eventually, you’ll take a dose that will kill you. It’s the main reason doctors are so cautious about prescribing it, along with the fact that it easily makes the patient dependent on it.

I wonder, uneasily, what I’ll do if my dragon grows immune to the rheuma drugs and he wakes up? What will I do if my pain becomes huge again and the tramadol and Vicodin don’t work anymore? The thought itself makes me fearful. Memories of disabling pain flood my mind.

I push them away impatiently. Come on, Wren. Back to the here and now. We’ll deal with that when it happens. If it happens. Right now, though, your hips hurt. So, take some pain meds. Which should you take?

I refocus on the array of pill bottles in front of me.

Tramadol, Vicodin, and, finally, acetaminophen. You know that one: it’s Tylenol. I keep two strengths handy: extra strong (500 mgs per tablet) and arthritis-formula-strong (650 mgs per tablet). Alone, neither strength has any appreciable effect on even the sleeping dragon; I might as well pop a lemon drop and wish on a star. But they do boost the painkilling effect of the tramadol a little.

So, which is it to be this morning? Tramadol or Vicodin? Hmmmm. My mind does one of those odd little sideways slides: how about tramadol and Vicodin, it wheedles. And a couple of super-strong Tylenols, too? You know–the old one-two punch. That oughta shut the old dragon up for a while!

I actually consider it for a moment. But then I pull up short and tell myself not to be an eejit. Those two painkillers, taken together, could cause far more trouble than some bursitis pain. Both of them do their main work in the synapses of the brain, blocking different pain receptors, and each in their own way. Taken together, though, they could clash violently. They could cause my personal train to run right off the rails.

Visions of seizures and comas flood my imagination. Gods, no, I think.

Plus, I remind myself, taking that much Tylenol all at once (Vicodin combines 500 mgs per tablet in addition to the opiate) could do some serious damage to my liver. That poor, workhorse organ is already under stress, dealing with my RA meds as it does every day.

You don’t want to kill your liver, I mutter to myself, shuddering. Kill your liver and you die.

I decide to take the safest combination: the maximum dose of tramadol (two tablets) plus two extra-strength Tylenol tablets (1000 mgs total; 4,000 mgs per day, total). At this dose, I can take both pain meds three more times over the next 24 hours if I need to.

I usually do.

I take the painkillers with another full glass of water. And then I wait for the pain and stiffness to fade some. In an hour or so, I’ll be walking normally instead of stumping around like a miniature Frankenstein’s monster. The bursitis pain in my hips will still be there, but it will feel less intrusive, and the stiffness will mostly be gone. I’ll almost forget both–until I sit down for more than a few minutes and then need to get up. When I stand and move, the pain and stiffness will remind me yet again that I have an incurable autoimmune disease.

Both pain drugs will have mostly worn off in roughly three hours. I’ll start glancing at the clock, wishing I could take another dose. But I’ll have to wait six hours before I can, and by that time, the hip pain will once again be jostling for a place at the front of my mind.

Damn, I hate that.

All of what I’ve written about here took, maybe, a minute and a half in real time. Living with RA and its co-morbidities, such as hip bursitis, is a real, constant challenge. Even when the RA is “under control” there are symptoms of the disease that break through–and they’re just about impossible to ignore.

But I don’t want you to think I sit around every day whining and sniveling over my lot in life. I really don’t. Most of my days are just like anyone’s. I don’t work in an office anymore, but I do provide daily care for my elderly relatives. I plan and prepare meals, I shop for groceries, stop at the drugstore, run other errands as they come up. I take my mom and my uncle to appointments with their doctors and specialists and for blood and other tests. I spend, every now and then, hours and hours in the hospital emergency room with them, pacing or sitting on a hard metal chair. I take care of their pets, make their beds and carefully administer their medications.

And I try to make them happy. To make them laugh, often. I admit that it’s all a lot easier to handle with my rheuma-dragon dozing. I don’t know if I could do it if he were wide awake, snapping and breathing fire in my joints. So I get on with life, telling myself it’s only the dragon’s dreams that ache in my hipbones and twinge in my hands.

I’m grateful.

The top layer of leaves is dry.

Lots of them are five-pointed like hands; back in late December they waved gayly at the breeze before dropping forty feet from the top of the skinny liquid-amber tree. Others are small, fat autumn teardrops from the ubiquitous, weed-like buckthorns, beloved trees of cedar waxwings, quick gray squirrels and women called Wren.

The fallen leaves have filled up a corner of Mom’s back garden, carpeting the ripply pavers.  Messy, she says. So messy! So I reach out with my late father’s old steel rake and drop the tines where the wooden fence meets the ground. The leaves, five-pointed or teardropped, roll up as I pull the rake back.

The scent of rain and earth and clean decay rises to my nose and makes me suddenly, sharply homesick. My eyes tear up. I blink. Shouldn’t I be over this loss? The home I miss is twenty years behind me and hundreds—even thousands—of miles away. It’s history. That old world, filled with rain, wind and fog and green is long-gone.

Three weeks ago it stormed gently for three days. There was a mild wind and some rare, sweet, soaking rain. The TV weatherpeople were breathless and excited, and there were SEVERE WEATHER ALERTS on the computer. Most of the leaves fell from the trees back then. But it’s been California-dry ever since, so the top layer of the leaves I’m raking is crisp and crunchy.  The older, underlayer leaves are wet and heavy with rain-memories.

I scrape up three big piles with the old wooden-handled rake. Then, with rubber gloves protecting my hands, I scoop all the leaves, wet and dry, into three black plastic bags. I put those into a tall, green plastic bin with wheels. A truck will soon come to empty it.

I was surprised to learn that our local garbage collection company won’t take the garden leaves for composting unless they’re first bagged in plastic. It seems odd to me. Even counter-intuitive. Do they hire people to empty all those leaf bags into the composter and then send the bags away for plastic recycling? Or do they just grind the plastic bags up along with the leaves?

Someday, maybe the Earth’s soil will be made mostly of plastic. What will grow then? Will the waxwings have buckthorn berries to feast on each autumn? Will there even be waxwings?

When it rains, will the air smell of plastic instead of home?

Oh god.

In about three hours I’m having a tooth pulled. I’ve never had that done before, but I’ve had nightmares about it for several years—actually, ever since the night the tooth actually broke. It’s a molar on the bottom right; I was crunching on an antacid tablet, and suddenly there was something foreign in my mouth that I couldn’t crunch. It was too hard. I took it out and… wow. Part of a tooth.

I was shocked. There was no pain. I went into the bathroom and peered into my mouth. Sure enough, there was no tooth surrounding the visible side of one of my bottom right molars. The old filling, done at least 40 years before, was still there, though, standing tough and alone.

I’d been laid off from work a month before. I had no dental insurance and my budget was already as tight as it could go. Screaming, actually. I didn’t have the spare hundreds I’d need for dental work, and all dental work, even the most routine, costs hundreds.

The broken tooth didn’t hurt. I could live with it. Once I found another job, I reasoned, and had medical and dental insurance again, I’d get it fixed.

I’m embarrassed to say that was several years ago. I never found another job. I was able to get medical care through the VA, as I’m a veteran, but they don’t provide dental care.

So I waited, hoping that the tooth would just endure.  And it did—until about two weeks ago.  The pain was minor, at first, but as the days passed it got worse and worse.  Finally, I broke down and went to a dentist.

Let me say here that I have a lifelong terror of dental work. It’s lame, I know, but along with the cost, it’s the reason I let that tooth go for so long. I’d break into a cold sweat every time I thought about getting that tooth fixed. I had long, lurid nightmares about it. I’d wake up gasping.

And now, well, the tooth is sick. There’s an abscess at the roots. It hurts like you-know-what. So, the day has come. I’ll get through it; millions do.

Wish me luck?

For the last three days I’ve been, like a lion-tamer with a whip and a wooden chair, fending off a real lion of a cold.

The creature ambushed my aunt on Christmas Eve. She’s still got the cough. Then it jumped my mom on New Year’s Eve and flattened her for a week, making her feel so awful she was barely able to get out of bed. Today marks her first decent day since then.

So, hoping to keep myself from catching it, I’ve been drinking lemon-lime Airborne three times a day. I figure the mega-doses of vitamins, in addition to the multivitamin tablet I swallow every morning, can’t really do me any harm and maybe, just maybe, they might keep the cold virus from setting up housekeeping in my respiratory system. I’ve been drinking lots of water and washing my hands frequently, too. I’ve been doing my best to get plenty of sleep. I’m staying nice and warm.

But I have a sinking feeling that it’s all for naught. This afternoon my throat feels sandpapery. My head feels like it’s packed tight with cotton batting. I can visualize my sinuses. My eyes feel hot. My voice is going squeaky. And I’m tired for no good reason.

Sigh. It got me.

May the blessing of light be on you, light without and light within. May the blessed sunshine shine on you and warm your heart till it glows like a great peat fire, so that the stranger may come and warm himself at it, and also a friend.

And may the light shine out of the two eyes of you, like a candle set in the two windows of a house, bidding the wanderer come in out of the storm, and may the blessings of the rain be on you — the soft, sweet rain. May it fall upon your spirit so that all the little flowers may spring up and shed their sweetness on the air. And may the blessings of the Great Rains be on you, may they beat upon your spirit and wash it fair and clean, and leave there many a shining pool where the blue of heaven shines, and sometimes a star.

And may the blessing of the Earth be on you — the great round earth, may you ever have a kindly greeting for those you pass as you’re going along the roads. May the earth be soft under you when you rest upon it, tired at the end of a day, and may it rest easy over you when at the last, you lay out under it, may it rest so lightly over you that your soul may be off from under it quickly and up and off, and on its way to God. And now may the Lord bless you all and bless you kindly.

– Traditional Irish Blessing,

from Wren

Wishing all of you, my friends, a happy Solstice season!  May this quiet time be filled with warmth, comfort and a full measure of joy with those you love.

To my surprise, the editors of Healthline have nominated RheumaBlog for their second annual “Best Health Blog of 2012!”

According to the website, Healthline’s mission is to improve health through information.

“We focus our efforts on offering readers and visitors to our site objective, trustworthy, and accurate health information, guided by the principles of responsible journalism and publishing,”

states the text on the “About” page.  It continues:

“Our editorial philosophy is to use relevant and accurate content to promote a healthy lifestyle and facilitate disease prevention, as well as to offer clinically significant, medically reviewed information for those who are seeking answers to their health questions. All original content is produced by highly skilled writers or experienced health professionals who are adept at researching a variety of topics and delivering concise, accurate, and engaging information in an easy-to-understand format.”

And so it does. I’m honored to be nominated for Best Health Blog of 2012. The contest runs from now through Feb. 13, 2013, and the winner is awarded $1000. Second place wins $100  and third, $50.

You can help me win by clicking on the “Cast your Vote” icon near the top of the left hand column. Under the “Alphabetical” listing you’ll find RheumaBlog on page 14.  You can vote one time per blog per every 24-hour period.

While you’re visiting Healthline’s website, do check out the many excellent articles about health (many subjects!) they offer. They’re right: Good information can improve your health.

In all the years I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis, I’ve never been able to get anyone to understand just how thoroughly the pain from the disease affects my life.

Sure, I’ve told my family and a few close friends about my flares, large and small. They know my history—the decade I spent nearly crippled and the one following, during which I enjoyed a long, near-complete, inexplicable but relieved remission. They know that the pain is back, too, and that while it’s frequent, it’s comparatively mild. Mostly.

But they don’t, of course, know my mind. They don’t know—or rather, they don’t comprehend—that the pain is always. Terrible or mild, it never really goes away. Even in the rare moments when the pain does actually disappear, there’s always that niggling question: when will it be back, and how bad will it be when it hits?

With rheuma, one is always in the various stages of girding one’s loins for the next skirmish, aware that it may quickly become a full-fledged battle. And while I’ve never lost a battle against RA, I’ve never entirely won, either. More often than not the rheuma-dragon and I limp, exhausted, to our opposite corners to take stock and rest up for the next fight.

And that long remission? Wasn’t that a win? Oddly, to me, it wasn’t. The dragon simply went into hibernation. He wasn’t gone. For about six years I got to live, pain-free, on borrowed time. But I knew down inside that he’d be back one day. He wasn’t done with me.

No one in my family is aware of how I perceive this disease. What I just wrote above would probably surprise them, even if only for a short time.  I don’t blame them for their lack of deep concern; after all, the Wren they see day-to-day is the Wren who’s coping with the pain quietly and getting on with things. You know: Keep Calm and Carry On.  (I’ve adopted the words from that famous British poster as my RA mantra.) Since my pain is (knock wood) rarely disabling these days, my family’s reaction to me and my RA is normal and acceptable.

And now I come to the point of this post. It’s hard for me to describe how glad I am to have found all of you, my fellow rheuma-fighters. It is such a comfort to read your posts and comments and realize that you get it, that you know the pain I’m writing about intimately, that you understand how embarrassing and even demoralizing it is to have to ask for help opening the jam-jar or, in bad moments, cutting up your meat.

You understand how the rheumatologist becomes the Rheumatologist, almost the most important person in your life, save significant others, and sometimes he eclipses even them. You get the resigned acceptance that comes with knowing He will not see you again for three months, and that feeling of hope, laced with despair, that comes with starting a new treatment. You understand the frustration of knowing that the new drug probably won’t show any results—except unpleasant side effects—for at least six weeks, and probably a lot longer, even as you hope against hope that maybe you’ll be the exception to the rule. Maybe by this time next week your pain will be gone and the disease under control.

And oh, your empathy. It radiates through the ozone from your supportive, encouraging, often humorous blog posts and comments. How do we do that? Where does that humor come from? Here we are, hurting and sometimes disabled (often permanently) yet we find the humor in the situation and share it with our fellow rheuma-fighters, hoping to buck them up a little, knowing how much it helps. What is that?

Grace?

I ‘m so glad I decided that day, about three years ago, to search “rheumatoid arthritis blogs” on Google. I never expected to find so many—and not just the blogs, but the living, breathing, people-just-like-me who write them. I count you as my friends, now. My fellow-travelers.

Thanks for being there for me. I’m doing my best to reciprocate.

Author’s note: I wrote this over-long post a few days ago during a bout of irritated, daughterly love. It’s part rant, part crisis negotiation with myself. I thinknearly all adult children who care for elderly parents go through this inner struggle from time to time, unless they’re freaking saints. Anyway, I’m over it. This time, at least.

Morning.

I wake, swimming up from deep sleep, and open my eyes. After a while, during which I sort out the achiest spots on my sleep-stiffened self, I get up. Say “mornin’” to Mom in her room. She’s sitting up in bed with her coffee, newspapers and cats scattered around her, contented. Like a lot of elderly people, she wakes up terribly early in the morning, so although it’s barely dawn, she’s already been up for a couple of hours.

I stump carefully downstairs.

I pour myself a cup of coffee. Mmm, how I love that first cup in the morning! I used to drink coffee throughout the day, blithely going though three or four pots by bedtime, but now I drink only four cups a day, two in the morning and two after supper in the evening. The first cup has always tasted especially good to me, but now, well, it’s precious.

I swallow my morning fistful of pills, nearly all of them rheuma-related. I get a cup of yogurt out of the fridge—all those pills make for a cranky tummy if I don’t eat something with them—and a spoon to eat it with, and head for the living room.

I sit down, sighing with relief (my bursitis-hips have joined the rest of my joints in the cranky, daily, early-morning protest) and chuckle as Mouse jumps into my lap for her morning schmooze. When she’s had enough and hops down, I put my laptop in her place and power up, looking forward to reading the morning news.

Outside, it’s storming. The short, cool rainy season that follows summer here in California has finally, finally arrived, and the second in a series of four big storms off the Pacific Ocean is generously watering the drought-parched earth. I watch the rain run in rivulets down the windowpanes, watch gusts whip the branches of the twin-trunked redwood tree in the front garden, and listen to it moaning softly around the eaves. It’s so peaceful. It’s as if the rain, so long awaited, is watering my parched spirit, too.

There’s no woodstove radiating warmth in mom’s condo—a woodstove would be overkill, what with central air and heat and this ridiculously mild valley climate—but I still feel nice and cozy. I think maybe I’ll make a pot of soup for our supper tonight, even though this is a warmish storm. The daytime temp isn’t forecast to drop below 55. If I were to go outside, I’d barely need a sweater. Soup sounds good, anyway. And Mom, who’s always cold, will like it.

 It’s deliciously quiet. My rheuma-aches begin to ease a little along with the stiffness. I sip my coffee and open the browser on my laptop, preparing to settle in and read all about what’s happening in the world.

Mom suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, swaying. Under her arms are tucked clumsily folded newspaper sections. Her coffee cup is balanced on her cinnamon roll plate in one hand; she clutches her reading glasses, her crossword puzzle pencil and a pair of slippers that for some reason aren’t on her feet in the other. She starts gingerly down the stairs.

I hold my breath, riveted. There’s no point in saying anything about the scary precariousness of her descent; I’ve asked her countless times before to leave her left hand free when she comes downstairs in the morning so she can hold on to the banister rail for safety. She just won’t do it. Her argument is that this—not holding the rail—is how she’s always gone up and down the stairs, for years and years on end, both in this place and in the old house, the one she and my late father lived in for more than 30 years. Never mind that she didn’t have sciatica back then. Never mind that age and increasing deafness and recent illness have all left her with a really dicey sense of balance.

She reaches the bottom of the stairs without a mishap. Again. This time, I think, and I breathe.

And then it occurs to me how early it is and how I’ve only been out of bed for about 10 minutes, and … but … why is Mom bringing all her morning stuff downstairs so soon? Usually, I have about an hour of morning quiet, with me downstairs and Mom upstairs, both of us starting our day in our own way.

Hmmm. “You’re up and about early this morning,” I say conversationally as she bustles past me to the kitchen with her armload.

“Well, I’ve got things to do,” she replies. “I’ve got to get busy!”

Busy? At this hour? It’s barely light outside. I visualize our schedule for the day. Mom’s friend Myrna is picking her up around 11 for lunch and, afterward, a visit with one of their mutual friends, a woman who’s been ill. An AC/heat pump tech-guy is coming later in the afternoon to do some maintenance. But all that is hours and hours away. Busy?

And then, to my dismay, Mom drags her old vacuum sweeper out of the closet in the kitchen, plugs it in and switches it on. The thing’s high-pitched engine shrieks. And there she is, madly vacuuming crumbs off the kitchen floor. She’s got that slightly annoyed, determined set to her face that I’ve known and dreaded since my earliest childhood. She has Things To Do and I should be Doing Things, Too.

The morning peace? Shattered.

Trouble is, I don’t have any Things To Do. At least, I don’t just yet. Glumly, I set my laptop aside and sneak upstairs with my coffee. I’ll drink it in the bathroom, the only place in the whole condo that has a door I can close against the racket except the master suite, which is Mom’s room. Mine is the guest room, situated in the “loft” space. There’s no door. I sleep there, but the only privacy the room offers is provided by a standing screen.

 I’ll admit it: I’m frustrated, even a little angry at Mom for stealing this hour of peace from me. I value it. The television blares at top volume nearly all day every day, staying on until 10 p.m., when she goes to bed and I switch the thing off.  Mom has to turn it up loud so she can hear it. (She refuses to consider hearing aids.) So this early morning quiet, to me, is lifesaving.

And now, it’s gone.

Why, I wonder, is she so wound up already? I sigh, sitting in the bathroom on the toilet seat, warming my creaky hands on my coffee cup. She’s … old, I remind myself. While she’s perfectly lucid most of the time, Mom has moments when she goes odd and nervy. She’s always been the hyperactive type, rarely lighting for long. The last couple of years, as she’s battled such unaccustomed health problems, have literally been the only ones in her entire 81 that have ever grounded her.

She hates it passionately. “I’m so lazy!” she exclaims, frequently. “That’s all that’s wrong with me. Nothing but laziness!” Gads, I think to myself. She hasn’t got a single lazy molecule in her body. She must see me as a slug. I shake my head. We’re so different in so many ways it’s hard to believe we’re related sometimes.

I hear the electric sweeper racket stop, so I go back downstairs. As I write this, Mom is standing on tiptoe atop a chair in the kitchen, rooting through the cabinet over the oven, looking furiously for something. She already washed down the stove top, changed out the fruit basket, scrubbed all the countertops and tossed any elderly leftovers still hiding in the fridge into the trash can, their plastic containers soaking in a sinkful of hot, sudsy water. Mom’s in full toothbrush-the-corners mode. The kitchen TV is on. The Yapping Heads on Fox News are in full crank at full volume.

I might as well do ablutions, get dressed and make myself ready for the day. In the meantime, I’ll muse on my own home up in the mountains, with busy bird feeders just outside the kitchen windows, the warm, glowing winter woodstove and the wind that sighs, constantly, in the tall evergreen trees. I’ll dream about my own home, where it’s almost always quiet.  Where I even have a den, my own private refuge for when I need it.

Mom was sick yesterday and the day before, wiped out and stuck in bed with an awful headache and nausea. I know this morning’s frenetic activity is simply her way of making up for lost time. She’s restless. Antsy. Taking advantage of feeling so much better today. In her world, there’s no time to lose.

 I’m glad she’s feeling good today. Really. But I still miss my hour of peace.

 Sometimes I think semi-seriously about going back home. Mom’s health is much better than it was, after all. Her sciatica is mostly under control, her new heart pacemaker is ticking along nicely and her other ailments are being treated as well as they’re ever going to be. She’d probably be just fine without me (though she’d be lonely). I could call her every morning to check in, to remind her to take her meds (and which ones, and in which doses), go over what she’s got on the calendar for the day, and just yack with her for a while. I’ll call her again in the evenings, I tell myself. She’ll be okay, and I’ll be home. I feel like a fish out of water here. I always have.

But just as I allow myself to think Mom could mostly get along without me (and convince myself that she won’t lose her balance and fall down the stairs and lay there injured and in pain and utterly alone, unable to call for help), she has another sudden bad spell. It’s happened over and over again, and a few of them have been life-threatening. Her health is, simply, precarious. Her age is finally slowing her down. And I’m the only one in the family who can reasonably take care of her. My sister would help if she could (and frankly, she’d be better company for Mom, as both of them are birdlike and fidgety), but she lives several states away. And she has a full time job.

There is no one else.

When I decided to move back to California after living far away for so many years, it was because my parents were growing old.  As the elder daughter, I felt it was my duty to be nearby if they needed me. For a long time they didn’t.

Dad died seven years ago. She was okay for several years afterward, but Mom does need me, now. I’m glad I’m able to be here for her and I’m thankful that her health isn’t so bad that she has to live in one of those terrible nursing homes. Most of the time—even with the TV blowing my eardrums out—I enjoy being with her. I know the clock is ticking.

All I ask for is that short, peaceful hour, first thing in the morning, and I’m good to go.

Disquiet: A feeling of anxiety or worry. Synonyms include the nouns unrest and uneasiness; some synonymic verbs are perturb, disturb, trouble, worry, agitate or alarm.

“Disquiet” is the perfect word for the feeling I’ve had lately.

I’m disquieted by my aching feet. Perturbed because there’s no good reason for them to ache. The pain, which resembles (I’m guessing here, thank goodness) what it feels like after having the bottoms of your feet beaten for hours with bamboo canes, troubles me. I’m alarmed because my feet haven’t hurt like this for many, many years, and uneasy because when my feet did ache like this, I was also experiencing frequent, devastating rheuma flares. Disabling, crippling, whimper-eliciting flares.

So I’m disquieted, even though I have not experienced even one Frankenflare from out of the past. Nevertheless, I’m worried that one is lurking behind the closet door of the near-future. When my feet ache in the morning like I’ve been standing on them all night instead of lying in bed, sleeping quietly, it makes me feel sort of anxious.

I can’t help it.

I’m also concerned that by stressing over something that only might be imminent, I’m setting myself up to actually experience it. Is this just another vicious circle, courtesy of rheumatoid arthritis? Pain causes anxiety causes pain?

I think it just might be. You know the usual vicious circle: rheuma pain causes sleeplessness causes fatigue causes pain causes sleeplessness… Or that other vicious circle that goes: rheuma pain causes muscle tension causes rheuma pain causes… You get my drift.

So how do I ease my disquiet? I’m trying to ignore my stupid aching feet, but unfortunately, each time I take a step they remind me of their presence.  They also nag me when I’m sitting still, my weight off them. They grumble at me in a low, constant throb, for subjecting them to such punishment. Bamboo canes!?

But I didn’t do it! I cry at them. Leave me alone! Geez Louise!

I take my daily cocktail of anti-rheuma drugs faithfully, still hoping against hope to ward off  the Frankenflares. I also take painkillers ranging from Tylenol Arthritis formula to Tramadol to Vicodin, all with great care and only as needed, but not one of them has had any appreciable effect on the foot pain.

Which, of course, brings on more tootsie-angst.

Sigh.