Baclofen fun

Well it’s the new year (happy new year!) and after over-indulging over the festive period, my thoughts have naturally turned to new year’s resolutions. Normally it’s something to do with losing a bit of weight and becoming fitter, even if it’s just a little bit fitter and being able to take my belt in a notch, or maybe even two notches if I’m lucky.

I’m not talking about joining a gym or going on a crash diet, because that’s just not me. It’s not something I can sustain or commit to. I know I can shed the pounds I need with a few sensible lifestyle changes. I’ve done it before, and that’s what I intend to do.

Also, the trouble is, I’ve come to the realisation that if I need to get fitter I need to build up some strength in my wobbly legs first.

There’s a brand new branch of the co-op just over half a mile from where I live. This has provided a good excuse to nip out for any supplies we might need. The co-op is about as far away as other local shops, but the walk involves a traverse of a local park so it’s much more pleasant and enticing than nipping to the local Spar or the Morrisons supermarket. If we run out of milk, or if I need some green pesto (co-op do a very good pesto), I treat it as an excuse to get some fresh air and a change of scene.

By the time I get home, though, I find it becomes a real effort to coordinate putting one foot in front of the other, my legs will be in the process of turning to jelly and I’ll clumsily fumble with my shoelaces like a crap Houdini once I’m through the door.

The truth is that I can barely walk a mile these days without the need of a ‘good sit down’ straight afterwards. This is a far cry from the five miles I used to run around the neighborhood until relatively recently, or the eight miles I used to walk every day while working in the east end of London some 15 years ago. When that mile is up, I’m already off balance; I feel like I’m leaning forward, waiting to collapse into the friendly welcoming arms of my sofa.

And it’s not just walking: I went to see one of my favourite bands – Mudhoney – in Leeds towards the end of last year and spent most of the gig worrying about my ability to stand up for long periods, only for someone else’s legs to give out in front of me.

So what’s the big difference between then and now?

Like any human being looking to lay the blame fairly and squarely at someone else’s doorstep, I’ve laid the blame at the doorstep of Baclofen.

Baclofen is a muscle relaxant that I take a couple of hours before bedtime to alleviate nighttime leg spasms. These spasms can literally kick me awake in the middle of the night and then repeat on a cycle every 20 to 30 seconds over a period of an hour or two. On the rare occasion they don’t kick me awake straight away, they’ll kick my wife awake who then obliges by throttling me into the world of consciousness.

Initially my dosage was a single 10mg tablet, but this stopped working as well as it had in the past and I upped the dose to 20mg towards the end of last summer. Over the last month or so I’ve noticed that the 20mg dose had stopped working as effectively, and now, when I wake up in the middle of the night for whatever reason (and I wake up every night), I know I’ll get a spasm by the time I count to 20.

I rang the MS nurses for advice. Should I seek an alternative drug? One that will not only prevent the spasms but also not cause the muscle weakness during the day?

Well, the short answer to that question is ‘no’. I seem to be prone to side effects, and they all have their side effects.

Twenty milligrams is also still quite a low dose and I can apparently increase this to 80mg if I need to. The leg spasms could also be kicked off by factors other than the medication losing its efficacy, or disease progression (my other worry).

Questions that the MS nurse batted my way included whether I’d had any infections… None that I knew of, although, being a catheter user, I could have had a mild infection without being aware of it. Also, I’d come down with a heavy cold in the previous 48 hours.

Also, have I had any major stresses? As I can confirm from my relapse history, stress can apparently influence MS as strongly as any infection.

Apart from my dad dying a month ago, his funeral occuring a couple of days previously and Christmas in the intervening period, I had no stresses that I could recall at all. Maybe the normal day to day stresses of being a parent to one teenager and one nearly-teenager, and being married to someone who takes a not unreasonable dislike to being kicked awake at 2am, but hey!… apart from all that, life is generally sweet.

The upshot is, I’m increasing my dose to 25mg until life gets a bit more tranquil. I’m starting to introduce more gentle exercise in my daily routine and I’m keeping a close eye on any changes for better or worse. Hopefully, when things are a little more settled, I can reduce the dose down again.

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It’s about quality of life

As hinted at in my previous post, after a couple of nasty infections, my dad’s in his final days.

At the time of writing he’s being made comfortable. He’s not in any pain and he doesn’t really have the strength or inclination to eat or drink, other than a couple of spoons of mashed up weetabix he had yesterday and enough water to keep his mouth and throat from drying up. He barely has the strength to lift his head or even open his eyes.

This doesn’t mean he’s asleep though. I was talking to a doctor by the foot of his hospital bed earlier in the week and I’d mentioned my MS in passing. The doctor had started telling me about a disease modifying drug he’d read about in the BMJ: “Ock… Ockra…”

“Ocrelizumab?” I ventured.

He looked surprised, “Yeah – that’s it.”

Having MS sure makes you do your homework.

For some reason, my dad chose this moment to lift his head and eye us suspiciously; he lifted his right hand like an imaginary gun and shot me twice before nodding back off.

Good old Dad, he’s had a long life, he has never done any harm to anyone  and he still has a sense of humour.

Now, I’ll lay my cards on the table: I’m an atheist. Plenty of people have tried to convince me otherwise: evangelists, jehovah’s witnesses, you name it, but it’s like water off a duck’s back to me now. I’ve considered the evidence and I’d say I was solid in my (non-) belief. It’s not like I can say I wasn’t taken to church as a kid or anything. I’ve done it all. I’m even a Sunday school drop-out.

It comes from having a vicar as a dad.

I lived in vicarages for the duration of my childhood until I was within grasping distance of my teenage years, and then we moved into my gran’s old house and that’s where we settled.

Dad gained a job as the first full-time chaplain in the newly built local hospital, building the role up from scratch.

I don’t meet that many people who remember him in this role as it was a long time ago. The ones that I do, however, always take pains to tell me what a lovely man he was and how he had time for absolutely everyone.

He really found his vocation in life, and made it his mission to keep his finger on the pulse of all the staff as well as the patients.

Whether it was meeting or sharing jokes with the cleaners (or the ‘pink panthers’ as he called them, due to their pink uniforms), the consultants, or the mortician (who memorably tried to get the measure of my dad by inviting him to a post-mortem, expressing surprise that he hadn’t fainted during the experience), he listened to them all, and he let them all unburden their stresses, complaints, fears and sorrows onto his shoulders.

He respected no social hierarchy. We were all human. We were all made equal. We were all loved.

I remember him telling me that he’d been to see a patient who’d listed wicca as their religion. I’d expressed surprise that he’d been to see someone who wasn’t a christian. He put me right – it didn’t matter what your religion or lack of religion was, we all need someone to listen to us and that was why he was there.

When I was diagnosed with MS, I had, and still largely do have, a light-hearted attitude towards the disease and everything it throws at me. I guess it’s my way of dealing with it. No matter how breezily I’d mention anything to do with it to Dad, he’d always take me off-guard by stopping whatever he was doing, removing  his glasses and giving me his full attention.

He was retired medically in the early ’90s. A dodgy ticker wasn’t being helped by the stress of his job. He’d had pressure from management at the tail-end of the Thatcher years. He said they sat in offices away from the rest of the hospital and their main concern seemed to be balancing budgets above all else. He felt that his was a role that had no empirical value in their eyes, though I’m pretty sure one or two of the senior management team sought him out when they eventually needed him.

I also remember that he’d found it especially hard dealing with stillbirths and bereaved parents at a time when he’d become a grandfather for the first time.

Years of happy retirement followed in which he became a devoted grandfather to 6 and, in the last year (to his enormous glee), a great-grandfather. When my mum (who was born into a typical methodist mining family) died 12 years ago, on her encouragement, he ‘crossed the Tiber,’ and joined his friends in the Roman Catholic church. This was a move that eventually and inevitably led to him achieving ordination as a catholic priest, teaming up with an old hospital colleague at a church in a working class suburb of town. He retired for a second time only a handful of years ago.

Despite being a non-believer, my upbringing means I’ve always found it very familiar and easy to talk to clergy. Thinking about his last rites, I’d mentioned to my dad that I was going to talk to a priest, and in a feeble whisper he told me it wasn’t necessary. His short term memory had already been blown to pieces by his recent illness, so I assumed it was similar to him telling me about self administering his own communion after his second retirement, but no – the priesthood had been there already.

“He’s all signed off, the Monsignor came to see him… let me see… ten days ago,” the local Dean informed me at the end of the phone, and then in a beautiful turn-of-phrase that made me choke back the tears, “he’s had his passport stamped, and he’s ready to fly.”

It must be a phrase that my dad is familiar with because when I told him I’d heard his passport was stamped, he managed a smile. Then following the Dean’s advice to give reassurance that it was OK to go, and for him not to worry about who or what he might be leaving behind, I added “when they call your flight number, just go for it Dad, just pick up your bags and go straight to the gate, OK?”

“OK” came the whispered reply.

He’s back in his care home now. The hospital where he’d worked has done everything they can for him, and he’s now being treated by nursing staff who visit daily and the lovely living saint who is his main carer. It’s a surrounding that he’s familiar with, that doesn’t involve beeping equipment, the groans of other patients, the pink panthers with their mops and brushes, or having his blood pressure checked at regular intervals. He can be lulled to sleep again by the night trains on the nearby railway, rattling past to destinations unknown.

The future and the wellbeing of the planet has always seemed to me to be on a knife edge with global warming, the ongoing mass extinction event that is the human race, and now the era of Brexit, Trump and the rise of populism across Europe. Dad’s left such a legacy to be proud of, he has touched so many people’s lives, and we need more people like him. More people to redress the balance of an off-kilter world. More people to heal the human spirit.

It’s about quality of life after all.

Yes – I was a porker of a baby and I remember that monkey

Pass the parcel

A week or so ago, I stood at the end of my elderly dad’s hospital bed while he squinted at me and asked “Daddy?”

Just a couple of hours earlier, he’d been rushed from his care home with pneumonia and possible sepsis, and ‘conscious’ moments like this were fleeting and rare. A few days previously, he’d been wide awake, taking several attempts to record a wedding message for my niece. While my eldest daughter held up her iPhone, he amiably stumbled over the details. He managed it more-or-less in the end, with many a chuckle between takes.

I didn’t know either of his parents; both of them had lost their lives in the years before my birth. With my dad’s milky blue eyes struggling to focus on me, I suddenly recalled a photograph from the 1930s of my grandad playing with his son – his only child – in the sand of a Suffolk beach. It felt like he was in the room – a presence handing Dad over in a game of familial pass-the-parcel, saying “Here you go: We brought him into this world, you’re seeing him out.”

Since then, my dad’s rallied a bit. He’s responded well to antibiotics and he’s been moved into a ward with other semi-conscious old men. It’s still early days and he still has a mountain to climb. Whether that climb has an end point that involves falling off a cliff or dozing in front of daytime TV with his care home cohort remains to be seen but the latter’s looking more likely now.

All in all, Dad’s bucked the trend. His parents died in their 60s and he’s overcome a history of high blood pressure, heart problems, and more recently, diabetes and Parkinsons, to come within grasping distance of his 90s.

When he was my age, he was fit and healthy, a former cross country runner, and a fairly active dad with no apparent sign of the health problems to come. Of course, I can see the many parallels between the pair of us already – we both have a compromised neurology after all.

I know any straight comparisons between us will involve lots of negatives for me in terms of balance and mobility, dependence on catheters (a sure fire way to bring microbes on board), a now thankfully distant history of cigarette smoking (including the odd dodgy one), a desk job and the lack of exercise that comes with it, and the timebomb that is antibiotic resistance. I’m not 100% sure how my pescatarian diet and the fact that I have only a dash of semi skimmed in my tea and low fat marg on my toast offsets all that, but it might be high time for me to knuckle down and set about safeguarding my future.

It’s just that right now it’s impossible for me not to imagine a day when I might confuse my daughter for my mum.