Trying to not feel sorry for myself! Opportunities are coming up but the utter shambles left behind from me losing earlier ones means I’m scared to pursue these new opportunities. If I’m honest though I just had one of the worst health crashes in recent years. By tearing both achilles tendons- and winding up having EDS finally in my record as a likely contributor- I wasn’t able to properly calculate how to recover ort plan. Injuring one was fairly easy- I could still walk but carefully. Both? My entire general health has just collapsed.

I can finally safely walk around the house. When I do heel raises I can feel two things at once. One is the obvious- loss of tone. That’s fine. That’s just being persistent. But I can also feel the same kind of sharp pulling that indicated pushing too hard and reinjuring myself. It’s also been a cold winter, so warming up muscles before stretching/moving has meant something else.

RA is a bit like having an an acute injury but also like disorganised healing all at once. For me ice makes my hands so much worse, but heat helps. I suspect it works because heat dilates small blood vessels and so inflammatory molecules get flushed out. Ice contracts those same vessels preventing inflammatory molecules getting in. And with the petechiae in my feet responding to oral prednisone and the high likelihood of having EDS that makes blood vessels fragile? I think that’s why for me heat helps even when my hands are hot.

Ice on my tendons whenever I retriggered the injuries did make a difference. So it may also be that whole disorganised healing issue: there aren’t just one set of inflammatory molecules. In RA it’s like an injury yes, but also like an infection. Either way I’m just glad I actually noticed the difference.

It’s hard to recover/maintain health with chronic processes, which is anything lasting more than 3m which is wild to me as someone with … well.. many years of both RA and fibro. But it’s made easier if you have a treatment plan.

I’m also missing Carlo so much. IG and my phone both remember the #SpottyCatsOfInstagram tag I used for him, and when I tag Fluffy and Missy it comes up. My heart breaks every time. I used a few tags for Boo that seem to no longer be recognised as frequently used. And that’s hard too.

I’m genuinely consolidating my research though. Which is where these opportunities come in. Three of my papers could fit in two conferences. But I’m scared. Both my tendons and petechiae rely on prednisone, actually my fibro does as well, and it messes with natural cortisol responses to stress.

And I can’t just avoid the stuff because what happens externally might also be internally.

It really messes with you when you fail other people. Failing myself pales in comparison.