Chronic Medical Conditions – Yarn, Books & Roses

The Scleroderma Chronicles: The Ankle Adventure

The last few weeks have been hard : rain, snow, an exceedingly badly behaved ankle, and all the fun of never-ending chronic complaints. Ugh! The weather fronts just kept rolling in, sending the air pressure swinging wildly and my breathing and joints into their own little crises. “Will it never end,” I asked my ankle and MacKenzie? “Nope!” said the ankle with a little sneer in its rotten little ankle voice. “Don’t count on it,” said MacKenzie as he squirmed deeper into the current knitting project with one paw extended, claw flashing, reaching for my yarn.

As you can guess, I’ve developed a nasty mood of my own.

There was a nice week with sunshine that made me and the ankle feel better: I got some yard work done and planted flowers. Then the weather turned on me and once again I was in bed, listening to audiobooks and knitting with my ankle propped up.

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning I woke up to the crack of breaking branches. Six inches of heavy spring snow (the latest storm this bad in 17 years in the Denver area) had done my tree in. No wonder my joints are cranky… even the tree gave up! I took this picture the next day after most of the snow had melted.

What is up with this ankle, you ask? Good question! Three weeks ago it suddenly developed a hard, red, and hot lump that radiated pain ruthlessly. The infection began spreading under my rhino-hide scleroderma skin. I was started on antibiotics, but the pain continued, the redness continued spreading around the outside of my ankle, and a dent in my leg appeared where the redness was. I chatted with a doctor online and she decided that I should be checked for cellulitis. Cellulitis?! Off to urgent care I went, and as soon as that doctor saw my ankle he ordered testing: another blood clot hunt and x-rays to see if the bone was damaged. Limping and in pain, I headed off to get the testing done. As I drove home from the ultrasound a call came in with the results of the testing: a benign tumor was found, and I was being referred to a dermatologist for treatment.

It’s like they forgot about the cellulitis! “Where are my new antibiotics?” I asked MacKenzie when I got home. MacKenzie just carried on for attention and cookies, so I made the appointment for the dermatologist to look at my ankle before returning to my knitting and propping the ankle back up. I made a little cage out of a box to put in my bed so I could sleep without the covers touching the ankle… “I have a tumor,” said the ankle in its nasty little voice.

The next day the redness and heat were a little better, but the pain and lump on my ankle remained. I resolved to head back to urgent care if I got worse, and carried on with my knitting. Tumor, whatever. I have scleroderma and I was betting that was what made the lump appear unusual in the ultrasound. I was pretty sure this was just another chapter in the scleroderma adventure.

Two days later I got in to see the dermatologist. Wow. Just wow. I am in love with this doctor. This is the doctor that I have been waiting for since my first diagnosis FIVE YEARS AGO!

Aside: I have been battling eczema for months. All of my doctors have seen my eczema face. Since I have noticed that a dose of ibuprofen (which I’m not supposed to take because of my iffy kidneys…) will give me 24-48 hours of happy joints with no fatigue or brain fog symptoms, and some eczema relief, I have literally begged for some type of anti-inflammatory drug to help me. Even though I am taking drugs that are crushing my immune system unto submission, there is something else that I need. I have cried in my internist’s office. Evidently there isn’t anything that can be given to me that won’t hurt my kidneys…

This dermatologist entered the office, took one look at my swollen, red and itchy face, and said that this was unacceptable and she was going to put a stop to it. Then she said that she had looked at the ultrasound and that there wasn’t anything that worried her there: scleroderma had caused fibrotic tissue to form. Then she wondered out loud why they had forgotten that I had cellulitis? Then she prescribed antibiotics that are also anti-inflammatory along with an anti-inflammatory cream to get my eczema whipped into shape. I was told to email her in a couple of days if there wasn’t a dramatic improvement to my ankle and face because she was going to make more referrals to get to the bottom of the eczema with an allergy specialist. And that the ankle should continue to be watched.

Look at how well my flowers came through the snow storm! I put a plastic garbage bag over them to keep them warm propped up over a tomato cage. You’d never know that they had 6″ of snow dumped on them! Just like my flowers, I came through the ankle adventure storm looking pretty good!

By the next morning it was obvious that I was better. Much better. Within a week my face was clear and the eczema was gone. My ankle is also much better, the lump is gone, but it continues to ache and carry on when I walk. My brain fog is gone. Fatigue? What fatigue? It’s like I needed an anti-inflammatory antibiotic or something…

My new, most wonderful in the whole world dermatologist is going to maintain me on the antibiotic. I’ve been on this drug before so I’m not worried about my kidneys at all.

I’m sorry I said all those nasty things to you, ankle. All in all, you were a blessing in disguise.

But anytime you want to stop with the achy hurt, that would be fine!

Goodbye “Science and the Scleroderma Girl”… I’m Heading Back to the Garden

Today is World Scleroderma Day. Gosh, there should be a huge post today that pulls together my whole monthly effort… nope. That sounds just exhausting, doesn’t it. How about we just head out to my garden to see what’s up. After that I can show you the big picture on what I’ve been doing all month in “Science and the Scleroderma Girl”.

Getting into the garden has been difficult for me since the sun and I are not friends. Last week I went out for a couple of hours to weed in the morning in the shade, and yep… I developed a rash on my arms and then the flare arrived. I was holed up for days getting over that little misadventure. After I recovered I tried out weeding after dark. Gosh, I’ve had more fun moping floors. It just isn’t the same if you can’t actual see what you are doing. I wonder why that is?

Arm — But look at what I scored today while I was out shopping!! Do you see that the pattern is teal colored butterfly wings? How more appropriate for World Scleroderma Day can you get?

Sun protection! — Do you see what is written on this arm? This is a outfit designed to provide full sun protection for people playing in the surf. It is cool, wicks moisture, and will protect me from the sun. This is exactly what I need!

Jacket — Check out the whole top. This plus a hat should set me up for morning gardening, don’t you think?

There are leggings too to provide complete sunblock for the surf enthusiast, but that probably is more than I need to tend to the roses. I usually get wet while I’m watering in the evenings, and once again this baby should handle it fine. I am so set up for the rest of the summer!

Let’s see what is still alive in the garden after a week of amazing, blistering heat. Yesterday it was 105°F; these plants are no longer happy.

Purple flowers — The flowers in the tub on the back porch made it…

Veronica flowers — So did this Veronica. I’ve been transplanting this into several flower beds since it does so well.

Strawberries — Even the strawberry plants are producing well. Look at the berries that I had Tuesday afternoon. I decided to wait until Wed morning to pick them…

Bare strawberry plant — Unfortunately a squirrel beat me to them. This is all that was left, and I’m sure that he left this half eaten berry just to taunt me!

This weekend will be cooler, and I gave all the plants a good watering this evening so that they will recover over the next few days. Poor plants. Life has been tough for the last couple of weeks: heavy rain for a week followed by triple digit temperatures and blazing sunlight.

Now that we are leaving the garden here is my Scleroderma Month of June:

I introduced the series with this post called Introducing Science and the Scleroderma Girl.
In A Series of Serendipitous Events I related how the events of my life prepared me to take a scientific approach to my autoimmune diseases.
Then I took a detour to explain what science is…
…and how I am taking better control of my scleroderma by acting like a patient scientist.
Every scleroderma patient has to make hard choices about treatment options. I talked about some of mine in this post.
Then I became all teacher-ish and presented the characteristics of controlled experiments.
Once you feel like you understand the design of experiments it is time to hunt for answers to your own questions in published research studies. I explained how to do this and shared some of my favorite links in this post.
The reason I talked about research and the tools you need to look at what is published out there is because I had to make more hard choices about my own treatment. Having more information helped me with these decisions.
Almost all scleroderma patients have more than one doctor. In this next post I shared how I arrived at a team of collaborative doctors.
Ugh. Then the rants began. So many treatment options. So much false information. What should I hunt for research info on?
Well, I started with the one bit of false info that drive me the most crazy. Here was the dairy rant.
Followed by the sugar rant.
And the supplements that I take and the one that damaged my kidneys.
Closing down the show was AP Therapy and leaky gut. I’ve been informed that there wasn’t enough venom here for a rant, but I did try.

What I didn’t put into this was a lot of actual information about what scleroderma is. Oops. This post that I wrote for Rare Disease Day should cover that glaring omission.

So, this is World Scleroderma Day. All over the world people have posted the pictures of their smiles in an effort to make an invisible, but pretty darn serious, disease have a face. My smiling face is above: a little crooked these days, my lips have gotten too thick to smile right, and my hair is falling out, but I am doing well. Every day brings a new challenge, but still, with good luck, humor and a touch of science, I rise.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: The AP Therapy Rant

Antibiotic Protocol is an alternative medicine therapy for autoimmune disease. It certainly has a following. Check this out. There is more information on it at the Arthritis Foundation. It seems to be loosely associated with “Leaky Gut” as it links chronic autoimmune illness to microbial sources originating in our intestines. The shaky model and vague language involved in leaky gut has landed it on the pseudoscience list at Wikipedia.

This has been a really hard post to put together. I have all these little memories and reactions rolling around in my mind, and I struggle to link them together in a meaningful way. Here are some of the things that have happened and my gut reaction (did you see what I did there?) to them:

I have a friend with lupus. She has been struggling for years, is on disability, and is clearly in trouble. She is losing weight, her hair is falling out; she is in the care of a nutritionist who has her on severe dietary restrictions and antibiotics to treat her condition. She eats no dairy, gluten, meat, alcohol, or sugar, and continues to take her antibiotics without fail. She is not getting better. My heart breaks every time I see her.
My dermatologist placed me on doxycycline (one of the antibiotics used to treat scleroderma in AP Therapy) right after my diagnosis. A year later my lung disease was moving so quickly that I was actually referred to palliative care. I stopped the doxycycline, my rheumatologist boosted the immunosuppressive drug dose, I was given a new drug for my vascular disease, these new drugs kicked in, and today my lungs look great. Good bye, palliative care!
I visit an online support group for scleroderma patients where some people are just devoted to antibiotic therapy. They can be very aggressive in promoting their message and have even private messaged me trying to convince me to switch treatment protocols. Huh? This is kind of extreme. I’m always wary of fanatics because it is more about “winning” and gaining converts…
The Mother of Cats has an active early warning system for fanatics. There is no evidence on Earth that will change their minds…

So, I already have my back up about AP Therapy. The diagnostic antibodies that I have are to a specific region on my chromosomes (centromeres and kinetochores) that is involved in cell division. Bacteria have their genetic machinery organized very differently from me; why would the defining antibody in my illness be towards an antigen not found in bacteria? (Goodbye leaky gut… it was nice to know you!) That doesn’t mean that I can’t have the medical condition of increased intestinal permeability; correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. It also doesn’t mean that antibiotic use doesn’t help some people as the drugs also have anti-inflammatory and cartilage protecting properties, and there is research that shows it helps some patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Here’s the deal: there are better drugs and treatment options. If you have a mild form of the disease, maybe AP Therapy is what you need. On the other hand, systemic sclerosis is a potentially fatal disease and if it is advancing rapidly the correct response is to go big: use the drugs that have the highest success rate. I feel like I’m a walking poster child for the success of current treatment options. The three drug cocktail (Myfortic, Plaquenil, Losartan)that my doctors are maintaining me on has reversed my lung and heart damage.

Crap, do I sound like a fanatic? Darn. I was worried that this would happen.

I told you, this is a hard post to write. Let me just say I would never, never PM someone insisting that they need to change their treatment plan. Who am I to project my reality onto another person?

What I really mean to say is to think like a scientist: collect data, keep a symptom log, ask questions, assemble a team of doctors to help you, and pursue treatment options that have solid research-backed results that you are comfortable with. Keep collecting data, and don’t be afraid to change if things aren’t going well. There is no best one-size-fits-all treatment plan, but play the odds that are the highest until you get better information. If what you are doing is working, keep going!!

Tomorrow is World Scleroderma Day.

This is a hard, hard disease. All of us with this disease face hard choices.

Hugs to all.

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: Supplements and Me

Let’s be honest: everyone with scleroderma wants to feel better. We trade info constantly, and almost everyone has a supplement that they have found is really helpful. It’s tempting to load up on everything at Vitamin Cottage that might be helpful, but you should know me (geeky science girl here!) by now… if it doesn’t have promising research studies to back up the claims, I’m going to pass it up.

Tumeric (and Curcumin)

So many people have advised me to try turmeric. Cruising the internet I found lots of information from sites that are devoted to nutrition, health, or supplements, but I wanted to see hard data. Yep. Pretty darn easy to find. This controlled experiment found curcumin worked better than a traditional pain med following a dental procedure. Another study looked at migraine pain and the levels of two inflammatory markers (IL-6 and C-reactive protein); the result was that curcumin and omega-3 fatty acids did reduce inflammation. Wow. That sounds pretty promising. Finally, since one article I read suggested that curcumin could help with renal disease I hunted for that…this research showed that curcumin is beneficial for kidney disease. I scored myself some curcumin and I think that it is helping, but I have to be careful with my gastritis-prone stomach lining.

Vitamin D

“Under no circumstances are you to let the sun hit your skin!” directed my dermatologist. “Are you getting enough sun?” asked my rheumatologist. “You need the vitamin D and the natural kind you make in your skin is best…” Ugh. How am I supposed to figure out stuff like this? Because I keep a symptom journal I have discovered that sunshine makes me sick: rash, fatigue, pain. Sorry rheumatologist, the dermatologist wins this round. I started taking the vitamin D supplement not long after I was diagnosed and noticed that it helped me with depression. Who knew? My internist monitors my vitamin D levels to make sure that my current supplement is enough.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids (Fish or Krill Oil)

I was really late to come to this party. Struggling with an out-of-control Sjogren’s flare last winter my ophthalmologist suggested that I take fish oil to improve my tear production. Okay, my tears are just horrible. Not only do I barely produce any tears, but what I have flash evaporates right off my eyeballs lickity-split. I didn’t even bother to check the internet before I gulped down some fish oil tablets from the grocery store. Wow!! The next morning I woke up to eyes that didn’t hurt. Then I noticed that my neuropathy was better. Oh, yeah. There was that one study that said that omega-3 oils helped with migraines, and my ophthalmologist mentioned that he took it for tinnitus… It gets even better: it helps reduce blood clots too! Every time I end up in the ER they go on a blood clot hunt… this is probably a good supplement to add to my diet, huh. It also helps with Raynaud’s, but the effect was seen with people with primary Raynaud’s. Hey, it was a small study. I’m taking the krill oil anyway!

Tart Cherry

Things were really bad for me last spring. I had brain fog and dizziness that left me afraid to drive. The fatigue was unreal and everything hurt. My BKB Deb advised me to try tart cherry. Off to the internet I went. Oh. It is a real thing. I found this article, and this one, and one showing memory improvement in rats. Since I was miserable and couldn’t remember what a memory was, I took tart cherry out for a spin. Woohoo! I woke up the next morning feeling *normal*. I had energy, and the brain fog was gone. In the days and weeks to come I continued to feel pretty darn good until… the kidney function tests came in. My kidney function dropped 15% in just 6 short weeks and the tart cherry fun came to a screeching halt. The notation “chronic kidney disease” was added to my chart and that was the end of that. I stopped the tart cherry, accepted feeling like road kill every morning, and my kidney function crawled back up to a higher score. Whew! Talk about dodging a bullet!

There is a lesson here. Take the supplements that your doctors suggest. Check out other supplements before you start taking them, and let your doctors know before you start. I talked over the tart cherry with my internist and rheumatologist before I started, and they caught the kidney function drop pretty quickly because I was going for bloodwork every month. Just because I ran into trouble doesn’t mean that you will. Keep a symptom/food log and monitor like crazy. If your doctors know what you’re up to they can order testing just like mine did. Saved by the blood test!

Knitting — Oh yeah. I also do a daily supplement of knitting. 🙂

If anyone has another great supplement I should check out, let me know!

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: What a Cell Wants… (AKA the Sugar Rant)

I’ve been pressured repeatedly to “give up sugar” to control my inflammation. Really, people have been pretty darn aggressive in this messaging both in person and online. To be fair, the people pressing this message must have felt they were improved when they cut back on sugar, but every time it happens I am torn between tears and frustration.

I’m sorry, but this is like telling me that I can’t put gasoline into my car anymore. The car simply can’t run on air alone, and neither can I.

Eukaryotic Cell — Cutest drawing of a cell ever!! This little guy, an idealized animal cell, needs many essential components to stay alive, including a constant supply of glucose and oxygen. That’s what a cell wants, what a cell needs…

Okay, to be clear, we do need a component of air for energy: oxygen. I was running short of that commodity earlier in my scleroderma career and had to be placed on supplemental oxygen for about 6 months waiting for my drugs to kick in and save my ass. If you are short on oxygen, as I can attest, you are also short on energy and you can’t think very well. I was in trouble, as my pulmonologist put it, because my “engine” (my lungs) was too small for my body.

The other essential energy component is sugar, or specifically, glucose. Cells, and by extension, bodies, use an amazing system of biochemical pathways to convert biological materials to glucose, maintain a steady concentration of glucose in your blood, and then pack away the excess for storage in your muscles and liver. If blood glucose levels drop too low your body releases glucose from storage. If the stored glucose gets used up, your body begins to cannibalize other tissues. Why is glucose so important? Because it is used in the mitochondria located in body cells along with oxygen to produce the energy molecules (ATP for you geeks out there) that are used to run the whole biological show. If there is no ATP, the whole show stops. That’s why it is critical to keep people breathing and their blood pumping, but also why it is important to consume glucose.

My relationship with glucose is pretty darn complex. Too much sugar at a time isn’t a good thing: it can dehydrate and damage tissue, and high blood sugar can cause blood pressure spikes. Take home lesson for me: don’t binge on milkshakes, sugary pops, and French fries. Because I had hypertension and a family member with diabetes, I have spent years developing a diet that has a low glycemic index. I eat yellow potatoes instead of white ones, recipes with half the flour replaced with oatmeal, and little sugar. I also eat fresh fruit in my yogurt smoothies, and rice mixed with veggies. I am eating sugar every single day in my meals, and it really is essential for me to function properly; the trick is to try to consume it in a way that helps maintain good blood sugar levels. Frosting loaded cinnamon rolls… NO!! Banana and strawberry smoothie with yogurt… YES!!

So, every time someone insists that I have to “cut out sugar” I can feel my head getting ready to explode. I wonder if they understand that potatoes, bread and rice are also “sugar”. Have they given up fruits? If they are also cutting out gluten they may be actually spiking their blood sugar with rice-based alternatives. It is kind of crazy talk… It also is kind of “it’s your fault you are sick” talk. Not nice!!

The research is mixed on the link between sugar and inflammation. There are lots of articles on healthy eating sites that say it is bad, but I wanted to see actual controlled experiments looking at the link between sugar and inflammation. There are several ways to check for inflammation but most look for inflammatory markers in the blood and cell permeability. This controlled research study found that there was no link between excessive sugar intake and inflammation. It’s kind of a small study, though, so I went hunting for more. This study showed that sugars obtained from food were not inflammatory, but when people consumed free sugars (spooned sugar into coffee or cereal, or drank sugary fruit juice) they did increase inflammatory markers. Cool. That totally makes sense, and explains why other people are reporting that they feel better when they “cut out sugar”. My sugar canister goes months without being opened… I don’t add sugar to anything unless I’m baking. Still on the hunt for info, I found this meta-analysis of research studies that showed that high-fructose corn sugar wasn’t any worse than any other in terms of inflammatory marker increases.

Okay, I think that the rant is over. Sugar is your friend, but don’t get crazy people…

Back to the knitting!

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: The Dairy Rant

It happened again just last month; I was advised by another scleroderma patient in a most assertive and authoritative manner that I could not eat any dairy because it “was inflammatory”. She followed up with a lecture on how cow milk is not appropriate for humans, and that most people were lactose intolerant because it wasn’t good for us once we become adults. In her defense, there are numerous sources on the internet that argue that dairy is inflammatory (like this one, and this one), and many people accept this as common knowledge.

Sigh.

Cat face. — This was not a message that the Mother of Cats wanted to hear…

I get it. We are all in the grips of a chronic disease that refuses to behave itself, and we all want regain some control through our diets. I just have trouble accepting these blanket arguments without working the problem first. Hello, Science Girl! Here’s a little unpacking of the inflammatory dairy argument:

Inflammation: for me, the easiest way to think of this is the heat, redness, swelling and pain that is associated with trauma or irritation. It’s your body’s first level response to a possible invader; the local temperature is raised, fluid moves into tissue to allow defensive white blood cells to move around, and signals are sent out to activate other parts of the immune system. One of these signals is C-reactive protein, which can be measured in blood. Mine gets measured every month.
Cow milk: cow milk is inappropriate? What?! Does that mean I can’t eat chicken eggs, or even bananas for that matter? Moving on…
Lactose: this is a disaccharide, a two-unit sugar made from the simple sugars glucose and galactose. In our digestive system we need to use the enzyme lactase (made in the lining of your small intestine) to break the two units of lactose apart so that the single sugar units (glucose and galactose) can be absorbed. Lactose itself is too big to be absorbed.
Lactose intolerance: if your body no longer produces the enzyme lactase that lactose ends up in your large intestines where it is food for the bacteria that live there. Yep! Bacteria party time! The byproducts that they produce as they grow cause the unhappy inflammatory outcomes (gas, bloating, pain, diarrhea) that all lactose intolerant people know only too well.
Allergies: if you are allergic to casein, found in milks, then you need to avoid dairy as it will be an inflammatory agent for sure!

So, here is the take home lesson from my unpacking: if you are allergic to milk or have lactose intolerance, then consuming dairy products will make you sick… they are inflammatory. Cool. I get it. What if you are lactose intolerant though… can’t you just avoid the lactose and keep the dairy? Armed with my food log, more curiosity than is probably good for me, and a tendency to use myself as a one person experimental animal, I kept looking for safe food to eat.

I have to be frank here. My intestinal woes are so bad that I have developed a fraught relationship with the refrigerator. Seriously, I open the door, look inside, and view the contents with a jaded eye as I ask myself: what can I eat in here that won’t make me sick? I keep a food log, and anything that makes me sick more than once gets tossed. I throw out lots of food. I have also discovered that there are some foods that are the safest to fall back on when I’m struggling.

Dairy. No matter how bad things are, I can rely on yogurt and cheese, along with a few other mainstays, to get me through a rough patch and stable again.

Here’s the trick: I choose my dairy very carefully. My milk is the kind that has the lactose removed. I only eat yogurt that has live cultures in it; they already snacked on the lactose and it’s gone before I eat it!

Cheese label. — I only buy natural cheese, and as you can see it is made with almost no additives. The enzymes were used to create curds in the milk, and that cheese culture took care of the lactose for me.

I read a lot of labels these days as I shop, and slowly I have discovered products that are safe and reliable. There is a sour cream with cultures that is safe. There is a safe cottage cheese. I haven’t found safe ice cream, but I’m still on the hunt. It’s best to stick to natural products, but even that isn’t good enough.

For me, always on the hunt for food that I can eat, dairy is my fall back safe zone. It will get me through a bad time, and if I eat yogurt every day I actually seem to improve. My C-reactive protein level drops. It’s almost like dairy is anti-inflammatory…

There are now numerous studies that show that dairy is anti-inflammatory. This review of clinical evidence showed that dairy reduced inflammation in individuals without a milk allergy, and here is another presentation arguing that dairy is anti-inflammatory. Check out the references!

So I told this woman that I had discovered that I needed to eat yogurt every day or I would run into trouble. Her response? You can’t eat that type of yogurt… it has sugar!! Sugar is inflammatory!

Sigh.

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: Research Results

Yesterday was a good day for me. I ran to the library, went grocery shopping, and had my hair cut. The stylist who cut my hair, however, was having a poor day: she has fibromyalgia and was struggling with the pressure front moving through Colorado. I told her about bananas, and she told me about a new product that she was buying off the internet. As we swapped info she pulled out the bottle of her supplement and I snapped a picture of it with my camera. She gushed about her product: it is just great! It cleans toxins from your liver and pancreas too!

Okay, I just checked out this product online, and it will need a blog post of its own. It has 19 different ingredients in it that I have to check out, but right now I think that I will need to stay away from it as it has aspirin in it from a willow bark ingredient. I already know that aspirin is something that can hurt my (already struggling) kidneys and put my stomach lining at risk (the gastroenterologist sent me a strongly worded letter on this topic… I’m complying!) The other ingredients might be okay, however, and I should check them out to see if they are possibilities for me to add to my diet.

So, how do I do this? I do lots of searches with key words like “research”, “evidence”, “inflammation”, “mortality rates”, “efficacy” and the item that I’m searching for. When a friend recommended that I try tart cherry extract to help with inflammation I typed in “does tart cherry reduce inflammation” and discovered that there was an active ingredient in tart cherry that really did reduce inflammation and that it was more gentle on stomach linings than a NSAID. Clinical research projects had been done that showed positive effects by measuring inflammation markers in patient blood. I talked to both my internist and my rheumatologist about it, got their okay with some stipulations, started the supplement with medical monitoring (blood drawn every month), and had to stop 3 months later when my kidney function dropped dramatically. Oops.

There is an important lesson here. Just because something is “natural” doesn’t mean that it is safe. Think like a scientist. Keep a journal of your disease symptoms, diet and interventions. Ask questions and talk to your doctors. Educate yourself as much as you can.

English Rose. — Time for a rose break! Look at what I found in the garden this morning!

Where do I go for information? I could have gotten info from sites linked to the company that markets tart cherry extracts, but that information is somewhat tainted by the simple fact that they want me to buy their product. I look for information from major publications and research funded by the public domain. Some of the best places that I’ve found to go are:

The National Center for Biotechnical Information (NCBI) has links to lots of places you can access for information. I used this site a lot as a teacher as students could look at genes and run DNA comparisons. Now I can use it to research tart cherry!
Linked to the NCBI home page is a great resource: PubMed. Everything in the medical and biological universe is searchable at this site; you can see the synopsis with a general outline of the research and results, and there are links to the journals and books along with information on how to access the full text. Some full text articles are free, and there is advice on how to get others.
A subset of PubMed that is extremely useful, both for the search engine and information on how to evaluate information you find, is PubMed Health. For me, this is the mother lode.
I live in Aurora, Colorado. I am lucky in that the CU School of Medicine is located here, and there is a great library there. I went into the library, talked to them, and got an account that allows me to access articles through their licenses. So far I’ve only had to resort to this option a couple of times, but it is good to have it.

Next to keeping my journal, the info I find using these resources has been extremely helpful and empowering in my battle with these ill-behaved autoimmune conditions.

Knowledge is power!

Science and the Scleroderma Girl: The Nature of Science

Logic clearly dictates…

Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn

Science. Everyone knows what science is, right? I mean, we have all been exposed to courses in science that involved learning lots of stuff about rocks, atoms, moving objects, plants, furry animals and stars. There are all of those books and all those facts, equations, and laws to learn. The vocabulary is ridiculous!

Science is also a way of thinking that allows us to learn new information about the world around us. It is a system of reason and logic that helps us understand what we know, and why we know it. Every year I started the biology course with a little unit called “The Nature of Science”, and this is what it covered:

Science is used to explore the natural, physical world around us. The magical and supernatural spheres are definitely off limits. The reason why is…
Science requires that we be able to collect data about a phenomenon we are studying: it must be observable with our senses or instruments. Something may be real, but if we can’t observe it we can’t study it using the rules of science.
In science you cannot whip out a miracle to make your model work…
The data that is collected should be consistent over time. Think about ghost research; instruments that show the presence of ghosts work on some occasions and not on others. That data isn’t reliable because it isn’t consistent. If I drop a glass it will fall to the floor every time, and it will accelerate towards the floor at the same rate every time I drop it. That data is reliable.
It should be possible to make predictions based on observations and prior understandings. We generally call these predictions hypothesis, and they get tested all the time in…
Experiments! The way we expand our understanding of the natural world is through experimentation that tests these predictive hypotheses. Observable data is collected during the experiment that allows us to draw some conclusions about whether the hypothesis was correct or false. Either way is fine. The point here is, we should be able to test the hypothesis to see if the prediction was accurate.
Here is the best part of science: based on what new understandings are generated our predictive models should be able to be adjusted. NOTHING is forever in science when you are dealing with the big predictive models that we call theories. For example, when I was a child I was told that mountains were formed as the earth cooled and wrinkles formed on the planet “like a raisin”. Ugh! Can you believe I was taught that?! Our current understanding of mountain formation involves the movement of large plates in the earth’s crust (plate tectonics), which actually makes more sense as it also explains earthquakes and volcanoes. Is my heart set on plate tectonics? Nope. If some new information emerges that supports an expanded or new model of mountain formation, I have to follow the data. That’s why theories are said to be “supported” by evidence, but never proven.

Science is about using logic and reason to learn new things about the world. Logical safeguards are in place to help make sure conclusions are valid (you know about some of these… I’m talking about controlled experiments, reproducible results, and peer review of published experimental results). Science is actually a form of applied philosophy; early scientists were called “natural philosophers” and today the degree is still called a Doctor of Philosophy. Yep. That’s what Ph.D. stands for.

Why is this stuff important to me and anyone else with an autoimmune disease? Unhappily, we are out there on the edge of the envelope, falling off the map, and beyond solid scientific understandings. We have diseases that developed via unknown pathways and causes, and they are not completely understood. There is no definitive treatment that will “cure” the disease. We are part of a continuing effort to expand scientific and medical knowledge as we progress through our illnesses using drugs and interventions that are the best predictions for good outcomes. We are all walking hypotheses, and what happens to us helps build the body of evidence on how effective our treatments were. As knowledge expands in labs about the biological pathways and the disease mechanisms, new treatments will be developed, they will also be subjected to this scientific process, and the total body of scientific understandings will grow. Someday it will all be “old stuff” and written in a dusty book.

But today, I’m rocking the edge of the envelope as a walking experiment of one.

I even keep a science notebook on myself.

That’s tomorrow’s post.

It’s June! Introducing Science and the Scleroderma Girl.

Okay, this is it. I’ve been fussing for over a year about writing a series about science, biology, medical decisions, and navigating safely through a world of alternative medicine and treatments. I’ve come close to launching into a block of mini-rants before, but never went there because it would just take too much energy…

June is Scleroderma Awareness Month. As luck would have it, June has also arrived as I sail back into calm waters following a 6 week storm set off by worsening symptoms, medical testing, and finally a collaborative consensus between my doctors and myself based on data that informs a new course of treatment. In other words, science, biology, and data-driven medical decisions have saved the day. I have lived a life of science in my educational and professional life and this training and way of thinking continues to save the day for me. I do have other skills, of course, but the foundation is always based in science.

I guess I think that it is time for me to share in case it helps anyone else.

Hot Cocoa Rose. — June has brought me the first rose of summer, too. Look at this cutie!

This month I am better. This month my energy is coming back, ideas for topics are swirling in my head, and I think that the time has come. I’ve started a planning grid with all of my topics and resources, and things are starting to come together. Since June is Scleroderma Awareness Month, this is the month that I should do this. If I can put this all together, there will be a post each day this month. With Star Trek quotes, of course!

I did tell you I was a science geek, didn’t I?

The Scleroderma Chronicles: I’ll take a side of fibromyalgia with that…

My poor physician team. I come to see them with a whole host of complaints at every appointment. I can see then mentally sorting the symptoms into piles as I talk :

important, needs to be investigated immediately.
sad, but part of the life of a patient with this chronic condition.
these are issues that should be passed on to another member of the treatment team.
irrelevant to the current diagnosis.

For three years I’ve been mentioning my muscle problems. My muscles are sore to the touch, and they just burn sometimes. The burning can go on for days, and I do get a little cranky; okay, maybe some wailing has occurred. Poor cats! It is really painful at connection points around joints. Stamina is poor, and I’m exhausted all the time.

Yellow cat. — I dragged a cat pillar into the bedroom for the cats to sleep on as it too hard to have them in bed with me. There are days when a cat paw on my leg is more than I can handle.

Some of these symptoms can be explained as being part of the whole scleroderma thing. Muscle issues are rampant with scleroderma as some of the necessary enzymes for muscle movement are too low for reasons that aren’t clear to me. My rheumatologist has checked for polymyositis and other serious muscle problems, but my muscle strength is good and my test results have been normal. I’m in pain, but my muscles aren’t being damaged. I have been just managing with heat pads and knitting as there seemed to be nothing that could be done. To make things worse I can’t have anti-inflammatory drugs or painkillers because my kidney function is low. Bad muscles, bad!

Best advice ever for the scleroderma girl. Really, what else can I do?

At my last visit with my rheumatologist I was really sore to the touch, and she suddenly asked if I was experiencing brain fog…

Oh my lord, yes! It is so bad I’m afraid to drive sometimes. I struggle with anxiety and some depression when things are bad. The fatigue is off the charts when this is going on, and I can’t get good sleep. Lately I have developed headaches too…

“Oh. This is fibromyalgia“, she said. Just like that the light had gone off for her; my symptoms were suddenly sorted into another pile that screamed “fibromyalgia”. She did a quick assessment, and the diagnosis was added to my chart lickity split…

I also have Sjogren’s Syndrome, and the symptoms of fibromyalgia and Sjogren’s do overlap, but it would appear that I have both. No wonder my fatigue has been so extreme.

So, nothing has changed, but at the same time everything has changed. I have concrete reasons for feeling so bad. My blood pressure issues have improved, and I am able to walk and exercise more. I’m using my inhaler every day and my blood oxygen levels are coming up. The more I move, the better I feel. Little by little, I am getting a handle on things again. I am sleeping like a rock and I wake up feeling pretty good.

My terrible twosome of autoimmune diseases just became a triad, and I am actually feeling more hopeful about my ability to manage things. Take that, you three! I am coming after you all with a pitchfork!

Err… make that knitting needles. I’m coming for you all the same. Be warned, I am taking you down!

Knowledge is power.