Car Repairs, Cocooning, Blood Check, and Fine Cuisine

A couple of updates since I was tired and didn't post yesterday.
Dale Barnes cleaned an air sensor and drove Evelyn's car for 10 miles and the "Check Engine" light didn't come back on. Cool.
Later yesterday evening when she was driving the car--pop!--here came that light again. :-)
I called him this morning, and he said, "Drive it next week. Drive it for a month if you want to."
"Oh really? It won't hurt the car to drive it."
"No," he said. "You don't have to worry till the 'Check Engine' light starts flashing."
OK. I'm taking it back to him Friday, and I'm guessin' the bill will be a little higher than the $39 we paid yesterday.
Update two: I wrote that column I was thinking about Tuesday when I last posted. Decided to go with the USA Today post about super cocooners and think a little about how the church might react to this trend in our culture. It will be live tomorrow (Thursday, the 21st). Not my finest work, but I was pleased to get some info from Kurt Ervin at Central Christian Church, Las Vegas, about their Internet campuses to include in my little piece.
Today I went to my rheumatoid arthritis doctor. She took blood. She always takes blood. But she said we could experiment with not taking one of the two medicines I've been taking--the more potent one with the possibly more serious side effects. So I'm glad about that. We'll see if the joint pains come back.

Larry and I usually choose fine cuisine for
these high-level meetings.

Had lunch after my doctor's appointment with Larry Collins to talk about the possibility of Christian Standard sponsoring video interviews of NACC speakers during the convention. Like all good ideas, this one is easy to pull off--if you have the money to pay for it. We'll see how this works out!

Thankful for the Drugs

This is the medicine I take once a week to combat rheumatoid arthritis. Actually it, plus six little pink pills, methotrexate, keep at bay the aching shoulders, swollen joints, and other random pain that baffled me for months before I got this help. I've taken the medicine every Tuesday now for, I guess, a couple of years.

The Enbrel is an injection I give myself. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about that, but the other alternative was an infusion at the doctor's office, and I thought this had to be easier. It is. The SureClick Autoinjector is about the size of a bulky pen. The patient removes the white guard (at the right), presses that end firmly into his upper thigh, and pushes the blue button. It clicks once, and you watch it till that window in the center turns from clear to purple. The device clicks again when all the medicine has been delivered. 

The injectors come four to one of these boxes, three boxes at a time. That much medicine is shockingly expensive, but the insurance pays some, and Pfizer pays all but $10 per four weeks of the rest. What a blessing!

At first, the diagnosis made me feel very old, but then I learned that first diagnosis often comes to people 10 or 20 years younger than I. And although I'm taking two meds because one wasn't enough to cure the symptoms, I met a lady who takes three. The goal is to catch it early before there is permanent joint damage, and thankfully, we have caught it that early in my case.

I haven't made myself an expert on the disease. I don't know if it's been around for centuries, or if there is some poison in our air or water or food that has brought it to us in the industrial age and culture. But I do think about people in Bible times and before. If they had rheumatoid arthritis, they may have just suffered with it. (I know there are some foods that help, so maybe they knew much more than I about that.) I wonder if the aged John the Baptist stayed awake at night because he couldn't arrange his limbs in any way to get comfortable in the bed. I wonder if Solomon's description of aging in Ecclesiastes included this experience with rheumatoid arthritis.

Maybe not. But I'm very grateful for doctors and researchers who have found this way to help people like me. (And I try not to remember all the warnings I've skimmed in the small print filling a leaflet that comes with every box.)

Doctor Day

I am not the proud owner of a new crown--on my tooth! I 'm guessing a tiara might not cost much more than this acrylic addition, but I'm glad to have the experience behind me.

This was my view from the dentist's chair this morning.

Then at noon I went to the rheumatologist. You know what a rheumatologist does; a rheumatologist takes blood. Sometime I may try taking a picture of my blood going up a tube into the test tube, but I chickened out today. Maybe it was because I hadn't eaten lunch yet. I never watch the blood flowing out of my body. 

This doctor diagnosed me with rheumatoid arthritis about a year and a half ago, and the two medicines I'm taking have eliminated virtually all my symptoms. 

Being sick isn't fun, and going to the doctor takes time we don't want to give up, but aren't we glad to be living in an age where so much help is available to us! If the apostles or Christopher Columbus or Benjamin Franklin had a cracked tooth or swollen joints, they would have just had to suffer. I'm glad I don't!