I know I’ve been saying for a long time that I keep meaning to return to the gym and that it continued to not happen. I jumped on the bathroom scales a few weeks ago and realised that something had to change.
The first thing I needed to do was to cancel my membership of a gym that I didn’t make use of because I actually hated it (smelly, grubby, and a horrible atmosphere. I once found chewing gum stuck to the treadmill and nobody wiped down the equipment after sweating all over it. You get the picture). This encouraged me to make use of the other gym I’d joined: The Old Factory. It’s a lovely place: well-equipped, light, huge, and generally quiet.
I even purchased a giant gym mat for home use. I do a lot of arm and core exercises, which means a fair bit of floor work – with and without my home equipment.
Naturally, my husband was always in attendance as my carer, but during the second week at the gym, he announced his desire to join! He’d realised that I was genuinely having fun and decided he needed to lose weight, too. In his defence, he has “diabetes belly,” and so I’ve advised him not to expect much change from that – but it’ll help.
The Other Stuff
Aside from the fun stuff, I’m being investigated for yet another medical condition! It all started with my sister, who has been a chronic pain patient for many years now. Her GP asked her if anybody in our family had ever been diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis.
He was not expecting an answer in the affirmative – but actually, our dad was diagnosed in his 20s a couple of years before I was born. Nobody had told us that it’s a genetic autoimmune disease. There’s an assessment that a GP has to run through with the pain patient, and my sister, my niece, and I have scored so highly on that assessment that there is very little room for doubt (for instance: my ankles have been fused since my early teens, and other issues make perfect sense, now).
So… I now need blood tests to check my kidney function before they can sort me out with any NSAID stronger than ibuprofen and to see if I carry the HLA-B27 gene. I also have a physio appointment on Wednesday, with a rheumatology referral request sent out. I was rejected outright last time because they didn’t believe there was enough evidence (it took five attempts to find a GP at my surgery who even knows what ankylosing spondylitis is, it’s so uncommon). I am now being treated as an AS patient, as the GP who did the assessment decided that there is very little room for doubt here.
I don’t feel terribly bothered by this, although it might need a complete change to my epilepsy medication to include something such as Gabapentin, which doubles as an anti-inflammatory. Beyond that, it’s just another diagnosis to add to my long list of diagnoses: I’ve been in pain since childhood, and I’m used to it. There are far more concerning things that are wrong with me, and AS isn’t exactly a potential threat to my continued subscription to Being Alive. However, I’m almost 52, and I’m going to be reading all I can find about the condition so that I can plan ahead for what’s to come in my future.
Meanwhile, I became addicted to Kpop Demon Hunters. My niece insisted I give it a go, even though I didn’t think I’d like it – and now I can’t stop humming How It’s Done, Takedown, or Your Idol! 🤣
An Accident In Space And Time 