Catch-22

I’ve been quite lucky with my Humira injections, although I’ve had a few infections and bouts of tonsillitis and I get my fortnightly two-day hangover, it means that I can be fully functional most of the time. I’m able to work, get around and generally live life. The injection really does make a difference. (It could be psychosomatic, but I can feel myself getting stiffer and more achy as I reach the Thursday/Friday before my injection day).

And that’s where the invisible part of the illness comes in. I’m very open about my Ankylosing Spondylitis and try to educate people as much as possible. But they see me functioning well and I’m not sure that they realise what a knife edge we Ankylosaurs skirt.

Take this last couple of weeks, I’ve been really busy at work (we all have), so I’ve been turning to plastic spoons to keep myself upright. It’s working, and I only have a couple of weeks to go, but it’s still not ideal.

An Inflammatory Post

I’ve written a lot about inflammation in most of my posts. But I’ve just realised that I haven’t covered what inflammation is. Generally it’s a good thing, it’s one of the immune system’s shock troops, parachuting in to deal with foreign bodies swiftly while the body creates a more specific way to prevent illness.

There’s two stages to the human immune response, the first is called innate immunity and includes inflammation. The second stage is called adaptive immunity. This is the one that you get vaccinated for. Adaptive immunity creates high strength antibodies that deal with specific attacks on the body. The difficulty with this is that it takes some time.