Lose A Stone In Just 8 Weeks!

I really don't like having to rely on chemicals. I thought I'd get through this with simply Epsom salts and weed but they're no longer touching the sides (Epsom salts to bathe in you understand, not to ingest. Christ I'm never doing that again). It's back with a bit of a cunting vengeance, and not only that, it's starting to invade my left hand side now. Until now I’d been fairly lucky in that only my right hand was affected. But now my left shoulder feels heavy, my clavicle, once so light and graceful, seemingly replaced with an iron bar that presses mercilessly down on my scapula. When I shrug my shoulders the pain flashes the clichéd image of a milk maid through my brain, the one where she’s smiling in a meadow, probably the same meadow The Laughing Cow grazes in. Of course her buckets are filled with creamy cow juice, sloshing around by her knees as she races back to the farmhouse. Whereas mine are filled rocks and sand and molten lead. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for my battered feet.

No, I tell you what it feels like. Imagine some sadistic kid somewhere has found a soggy voodoo doll of you and is gleefully setting about you with his collection of rusty bulldog clips. You can try and shake them loose with some shoulder rolling and toe curling but they don't budge one bit. So you reach in your big paper bag of pills and take one more than you should of the ones that sound the most heroic (Tramacet is my favourite, he sounds like a Viking king!) and eventually the grip loosens a little and you’re left with just a dull ache where before there were tightening, vice-like talons. Of course it doesn’t last, and all the while it does you’re too spaced-out to do little more than watch TV through one eye and dribble into your tea. Which I suppose is fine if you like that kind of thing, but I think it’s giving in too easily.

On the plus side I have lost weight. About a stone. Don’t get me wrong, I was never what you’d call a ‘big man’, not ‘hefty’ nor ‘stocky’ nor ‘beefy’ nor any of those other bovine euphemisms that naturally attach themselves to males who look like they may do you in just for glancing into their tattooed eyeballs. I am and probably always will be my ideal weight for someone of my height and build – the lightest my adult frame has ever weighed was 9 stone, and that was during what I like to call my ‘Amphetamine years’ (1996, in case you were wondering, when that look was last in). So now I’m about 10 stone. Not unhealthy, and to be fair when people started asking ‘have you lost weight’ I found it quite complementary. ‘Cause you’re supposed to these days, right? I found myself saying, ‘Why yes. Thanks for noticing. I’ve been on a strict diet of analgesics and anxiety. It’s taken years off me’! It’s only when people stopped asking and started actually stating ‘you’ve lost weight’, usually prefaced with a ‘fuck me!’ and ‘Christ!’ and ‘ooh dear’! that I really started to take notice. But hey, what I am I supposed to do? It’s not like I can actually start eating food or anything like that. You’ve got to be hungry to do that. And anyway, what’s the point in eating food when all it does is make you too tired to operate even the simplest mechanical device. Like corkscrews, bottle openers and lighters. No. Far easier to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast then conveniently forget to eat anything else for the rest of the day. So at the end of all this I’ll have this skinny frame onto which I can build the man I’ve always wanted to be. Actually no, because that’s probably Charlie Brooker, and he’s a fat cunt. Charlie Sheen in ‘Hot Shots’ maybe? Or Ed Norton in the new Hulk film (not when he’s green though, that would be ridiculous). Right now that seems a long way off, but I have bought myself an exercise bike so that I can get my knee working again. I ain’t got a lot of room for it but wherever it’s going, it’s going in front of the TV. It’ll be like my own personal gym, but instead of annoying MTV shite bleeping and bashing away in the background I’m going to have Columbo, The Sweeney and Italian Zombie flicks providing all the encouragement I need. Bring it on. Carefully.

Chicks with sticks

It's odd that it's the little adjustments that prove the most discomforting. Take shaking hands, for instance. Do you know how many times a week the average man shakes hands with someone? No, neither do I. But it shouldn't be something to be afraid of, unless you've got OCD I suppose, or you're Abu Hamza al-Masri (not that he'd get too many offers). But for me the offer of an extended hand creates an awkward resentment, often culminating in some bizarre acceptance where left meets right and what began as a greeting ends as holding hands! Or I grit my teeth and loosely flop my fiery hand around theirs hoping for mercy. You'd think by now I'd have some lame excuse primed and ready to unleash at the merest hint of a handshake. So far I've done the 'sprained wrist' (lasted about a month), fell off my bike (what am I, like 12?!) and, best of all, putting it down to a 'bad wrist day'. Who has those for fucks sake? Sometimes though, usually when I've had a few, the ol' denial comes barging through demanding to be taken seriously, only to be left broken and ashamed in the grip of some ex-para who's friendliness reverberates through my squealing bones.

Still, handshakes can be avoided. But I'm not sure the same can be said about red wine. I like a nice glass of red. Fuck it, I like a nice bottle of red. But as I discovered this morning the feeling is not mutual. Red wine hates me! It poisons my blood, it rusts up my joints. This fucking disease is losing me good friends and alienating potential ones. And you can forget about pulling, foxy chicks ain't into sticks (sorry, that was awful)! And even when they do talk to me, I'm so acutely tuned that any slight blip of pity is met with my immediate non-compliance. Don't get wrong, of course I've played on it to get a cup of tea here and there, who wouldn't? But answer me this, when you the last time you saw a wounded lion humping his hard fought prize on the Discovery Channel? My point. So I need to watch what I drink, watch what I eat, and watch what I smoke, bomb, snort and inject. I need to come up with an excuse to avoid shaking hands (note to self: invent new religion) and above all I need to start treating RA with more respect. Maybe then she'd give me less of a hard time.

I feel like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly

A few months ago I could turn keys in locks, unscrew lids from jars and hold a four-pint jug of beer in my right hand without pain. I could dash across roads in time to the traffic, make a cheese sauce whilst talking on a phone lodged between my head and shoulder and shake people by the hand without preceding it with an intuitive flinch. So it's fair to say that a few months ago I was a bit more contented with my lot. My 'condition' is still being scanned and x-rayed and drained out of me, but it's rheumatoid arthritis. Whether it's 'seronegative' or 'oligarthritis' or whatever. That's what it says on my sick note. And the letter from my consultant. And the letter from 'occupational health'. And on the front cover of this little book beside me here, part 4 of the 'Coping with ...' series. I'm just going to call it RA, which I know is a very noughties thing to do these days (Team GB?! What's that all about? Very lazy) but it's short, and writing RA reminds me of my pre-teen diaries when I would abbreviate the names of all the girls I fancied to just their initials, therefore should any of my friends happen to find my hormonal scribblings they'd never be able to break such an ingenious code. But they probably would have discovered that I masturbated three times a day.

I digress. So this is basically what you're going to get. Me & RA and our adventures together. There'll be tears, laughter, very long pauses and too many profanities. I know I'm not the only one out there who's suffering from this and I know there are many people out there with far worse conditions. I'm doing this for me, for people who might want to know a little about RA and living with it, but mainly I'm doing this because I don't get out much these days and I'm fucking sick of Jeremy Kyle.

It's not like being trapped. It actually is being trapped. Everything from getting out of bed in the mornings, putting on my shoes and turning on taps is anticipated and assessed. I get out of bed like I'm trying to escape from some regrettable one-night stand, sliding my frame from out beneath the covers inch-by-inch so as not to wake the sleeping dragon with WKD breath. The top of my foot feels like Joe Pesci's gone at it with a hammer, my hand and wrist have matchstick sized splinters of hot metal where there used to be bones, the pain in my neck is a constant reminder of the warnings I refused to heed about headbanging to dodgy metal in the eighties and my knee is swollen like a forgetful bulimic. It even hurts to write this and I will stop when it gets too much. Unfortunately this may lead to my accounts seeming a little disjointed. Disjointed. See, told you there'd be laughter.

So I bought a stick this week. A nice black one with an orangey/marbley handle. I wanted one like Christopher Walken has in The Dead Zone, but couldn't remember what that looked like so I just went for the cheapest one. It's a big thing, buying a stick. At first I saw it as giving in to her, accepting this forced alliance and wearing it like a long wooden wedding ring. But I've come to like it (especially the handle!) and it's not about giving in, it's about overcoming. It's a hovercraft over a minefield, stilts through a field of cacti - if the people stare let the people stare, as a great man once said. I started some new medication this week too after the last lot they put me on - Sulphasalazine - seemed determined to not just lower my immune system, but obliterate it. So now I'm on Methatrexate, which is another Disease Modifying Antirheumatic Drug (DMARD). The way that they treat RA is to give you a drug which lowers your immune system, which may seem strange because surely it's the immune system that's supposed to keep diseases and nasty germs at bay. But when you've got RA, your immune system is no longer your friendly neighbourhood defense mechanism. For some reason (they still don't know folks so if you've got any thoughts they're all ears) your immune system starts to attack various joints in your body. Maybe one at time, maybe all at once. Maybe all over, maybe just down one side. Either way, it starts acting like a bit of cunt. And for no reason?! I mean, I've had these joints in here for what, thirty-one years? The occasional squeak out of them maybe, but they weren't too badly behaved and they didn't whimper too much when I was playing squash and cycling and masturbating three times a day (when I was younger, okay). But now, when I'm finally living the independent lifestyle I'd always dreamed of, albeit without the sexy Polish maid, massive TV and micro-brewery, it starts to attack me. I feel like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, typing clumsily into a computer with gloved hands. It's not so bad that I keep my cock in the bathroom cabinet, but the analogy's still a strong one.

So it's kind of like that. Like a mixture of Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum. Which doesn't sound so bad, does it?