I certainly know the benefits of doing the exercises. I wouldn’t say that I’m motivated to do them at all but I know the benefits of keeping everything mobile and you know, I, I do tend to, to do that specifically like at wor; you know, get up and go down the office to do a bit of photocopying and rather than perhaps do it all in one go or saving it up and doing it in one go. Then I’ll, I’ll make sure that I get up and go down a few times.

Just keep myself moving and I do find that does tend to be a lot better, to keep that mobility there. And certainly I like to try and move around in the summer and potter around do a bit of gardening and things like that. And I find that the more you can move, move around, the better, again, that, that helps with you sort of thing. It does makes you a lot more mobile and the joints aren’t as stiff and awkward as they can be at times;

And so when I’m on the drug it’s, it’s not about taking away the pain but it gives you energy and when it gives you energy you have energy to exercise. And exercise will take away the pain, it’ll make you stronger, make your muscles stronger.

But also, I would also advise to, to do what they ask you to. You know, do, do your exercises and I know it’s laborious and you have to fit it into your day but it’s, it’s really, really worthwhile because without exercise then I may have lost a lot more of my joints. And I think it’s quite important, even if it hurts.

Like I say, you have to try and fight through the pain and sometimes you have to know when to do that and when not to. If it’s a tired pain, then you’re not going to work through that but if it’s a pain from maybe after an operation and it’s hurting and it’s feeling stiff, you just have to go through it and exercise it as much as you can within reason not, not so you’re damaging it. And just keep working through it because it will get better and you’ll see the benefits of it.

I wish I had known that my exercises were so, so, so important because I didn’t exercise my left arm properly and now I can’t tie my hair back and I can’t wash my face with it. And a lot of things that I would be able to do if I had of, have kept on with it. Because I don’t really remember anybody saying to me, ‘You’ll lose the movement in your shoulder if you don’t exercise it. Because you don’t really want to scare people in saying that kind of thing. But I think sometimes they need to be told.

I did a course Tai Chi for arthritis in London. I went to Swiss Cottage which is quite a nice area and I did Tai Chi there with a German lady and she, I think she lives over here now, but she’s from Germany and she’s, she was great. She was really lovely and she doesn’t have arthritis herself. But she did a course taught by a man, I think he’s from America, Dr Lamb, and he came up with the idea of Tai Chi for arthritis because Tai Chi’s good for everybody.

But for arthritis it’s difficult to do everything that everybody does because there is a lot arm raising. But the way you do it is if you can’t do something in your body, you do it in your mind and I’ve always said that’s, to be honest that’s how I seen myself. In my mind, my wrists do bend and they do move and they do look like other people’s.

But in actuality they don’t, and the Tai Chi was, was really great for that because it, it really does show you that we are all the same inside and I think it’s easy to forget about that because we do become preoccupied with our physical selves, our self image and our body and, like I said, the material things about ourselves and you do forget that inside, we’re all the same really.

And it’s, it’s nice because you focus on that and it’s a lot of energy and it’s all to do with a, your Chi and positive energy and your negative energy and the way it flows through you and giving off energy. And that was really good and I’d recommend that to to anybody, not just with arthritis but to anybody because it really does I never quite got to the stage where I felt that energy rush but I feel that I was getting there, I was starting to feel something.

But, and then I think it was about two years ago now I started swimming and that has just been fantastic. Because that is something I can do and I do it five days a week, every morning. I started off it, doing, it was this time of year, October, I got into the pool and I could do 35 lengths and I thought by Christmas I want to swim a mile and at Christmas I did. I was doing my 64 lengths in the hour.

And now theres a new pool opened, and the same group of people go, and we all sort of, I mean they’re not all sufferers, some just go because they enjoy going bu; we all sort of support each other, if you like, and I haven’t been for two days this week so I’m already in trouble;

But I can swim now for about an, well I could swim for 2 hours if I wanted to but I don’t because I have other things to do, but I, I have found that that has helped and my consultant, you know, just sees me, says, ‘ah my swimmer. You know, hes, hes really impressed tha; of the you know, the way I’ve sort of dealt with it. I didn’t think, ‘Ah, my life has ended, I’m never going to be able to do anything. I just thought ‘Well OK, this is what it is an; I’m not going to let it beat me, you know. So I don’t, I try to do everything as I did before, but in moderation and that seems to have worked quite well so far. I do still have bad days and sometimes the medicine upsets me ;

But I would say in general I feel better now than I did, you know, sort of 4 or 5 years ago. S; and I think that it’s really. That’s sort of, you know, I mean when I tell people I’ve got RA, they, I mean it doesn’t really come up in conversation, but if, if it does, and I say, they say ‘I can’t believe it, you know, you don’t look as if you’re suffering. But I do, you know, I can’t walk as far as I used to be able to .

But I do think that swimming ha; has helped and I know that if I don’t go, I miss, I miss not only the sort of social side; but the fact that I’ve had an hour or an hour and halfs exercise, that’; you know done me sort of good overall, not just my, my joints. ‘Cos swimming keeps the muscles strong and of course the muscles support the joints, so it has to be good.

So you continue to do physio exercises when you are at home?
I try, but if I did all the exercises every day I wouldn’t do anything else, because my disease is in every joint in my body. An; there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the exercises. And with the best will in the world, this level of ongoing grinding pain de-motivates you, it’s depressing, you don’t feel like getting up and doing your exercises;

This is why the, the, the focus of having a session in a hydro pool means that two or three times a week I know that I’m going to be exercising all of my muscles, And it’s also pleasurable. So it helps psychologically as well as physically. And I think that also having a relationship with a particular physiotherapist, it, it would be much more encouraging than seeing the clinic once every six months and then being sent away to get on with it;

I mean we can still do the swimming but I have to go to a sheltered disabled session, I can’t go to a normal swimming session because people in a normal general swimming session don’t give each other space I need to go to a sheltered session where people give each other plenty of room where I know I’m not going to have somebody heading straight for me or jumping in right next to me;

I will swim again and the warmth of the water resembles a hydrotherapy pool. So if you do your gentle warm-up in the, just stretching your joints and your muscles and then I could, I would swim twenty lengths or so, if I was feeling good. But not in a competitive way, a relaxed stroke, plenty of rests an; then just some gentle stretching at the edge before I got out and it’s brilliant. I think it’s, whether you like swimming or not, I think, I used to take a friend of mine who also had rheumatoid, who couldn’t swim and she walked under the water for maybe 6 or 7 lengths, just doing a breast stroke movement with her arms.

She couldn’t get her feet off the ground but it was wonderful exercise for her in the water. And so I feel theres some, a bit of swimming for everybody really, as though whether you like it or ‘unfortunately a lot of people find it very boring to swim. But if it’s a means to an end, to put your joints through a good range of movement, I think it’s an excellent thing to do in an lov, if you’ve got a good warm pool. I’m a great believer in, in that.
And having done a swimming session would you then sort of feel any effects of it, in terms of tiredness or feeling better or’?

No. I’d feel good that I’d managed to do it because of my personality. I’d think, well, ‘I’ve done that, I’ve achieved that. I wanted to be like everybody else. If the next day I felt stiff, then I thought ‘well I’d overdone it’ ‘cos I always counted the number of lengths that I did so that I was in control. It’s like when I walk, I try and walk for a period of time, you know, at a sort of pace where you get your heart rate up a bit, otherwise if, if you feel stiff the next day, you think, ‘well how long did I, how many lengths did I do’;

So I think if you’re gonna get a therapeutic benefit out of it, you need to be quite careful with your exercise, ‘cos if you over do it, theres no point, if you’re just causing another inflammation I mean the trick with rheumatoid is to try and get the amount of exercise just right for your joints so that you keep the range of movement that you’ve got but you don’t go into the over exercise bit where you cause an inflammation. But you know in, you get to know your own body and it’s a, you have to keep working at it all the time [laugh];

And I actually got the taste for, which is really stupid, I got a taste for going to the gym, you know to the normal gym and that’s where I didn’t do myself a lot of good, because I improved all my muscles and then because my legs and muscles were a lot stronger I started to walk about more and my hips packed up.

So I mean, I had been brought up as a child to, you know physio, physio, physio, physio, physio and I think you do become obsessed with physio and I still look at muscly arms and legs and think, I’m paranoid about them you know thinking, ‘Oh God, I wish I was as muscly as that, because strong muscles make healthy bones’, and that’s what I was told, its like an inbuilt indoctrination of it. So I did go to the gym for nine months and God I did feel well and my muscles were dead strong and then I went a bit mad actually I went like one of these adrenalin junkies and that’s when my hips started to, sort of not be very happy.

And what were you doing at the gym?

I was doing sit ups, up the wall, I was up the wall on the. I used to go out with the lad in the gym and he got me into it really and I went along to the gym with him, I couldn’t do much, I mean you know, but I was there with all these big muscly men doing little tiny sit ups and me you know, but I loved it and it did make me feel well, because my legs were stronger because my muscles were stronger and I felt really good and I did it for nine months and then I got stopped, told it was bad, very bad for me, which it was because I was putting excess weight on your joints that can’t really stand it.

So I must, I must make, I must make the effort and do it more often because it’s important to get the exercise. I’ve got exercises to do at home as well, which I do morning and evening normally yep.
So you feel quite motivated to do them do you?
I do normally, I’ve just had, I’ve just had a drippy cold and I did make an excuse with that not to do them, but normally, normally I’m quite good and they don’t take very long and its well worth it.

And what sort of exercises are they?
Stretching, moving my feet up and down, its a pedal movement, leg raising that sort of thing yes. Nothing to arduous, it’s quite pleasant, it doesn’t hurt [laughs].