Hi.  My name is Scott Christie.

I live in a village just outside Edinburgh.  I’ve been married for 21 years and I have three daughters.  My life revolves around my kids, my wife, my work, my ukulele class, cooking for the family and my band, a covers/pub/club/party band called Van Kleef.

I’ve played drums since I was 11.  I’ve been performing in bands since I was 15.  Playing and making music is in my soul but drumming and rheumatoid arthritis don’t always go well together.

I first had symptoms of rheumatoid when I was 19.  The symptoms gradually increased in their frequency and severity until I had my first serious flare-up when I was 21.  I dropped from 13 to 7 1/2 stones very quickly and ended up in hospital.  It was the late 80s when HIV and AIDS was a scary and unknown thing.  My doctors thought I had it and I’d had it.  I was scared shitless.  If you’ve faced your own mortality you’ll understand.  I was 21 and I though I was dying.

Luckily, I just had arthritis but it had made me very unwell.  I slowly recovered from the flare-up with intensive treatment.  Beyond that, I had 14 years of drug controlled remission from age 25 to 39, when I had my 2nd serious flare-up.  It put me back in hospital just at the time my twin girls were born.  I was more than useless and my wife had to take on a good deal of the work unassisted.

I had my 1st hip replacement when I was 25.  I’m now on my 4th and I’ve had two major pelvic reconstructions.  My 4th won’t be my last.  As well as an artificial hip, I have a gnarly right hand (which I don’t like very much) and 3 permanently dislocated toes on my left foot.  I’ve had bone removed from my left wrist to save my tendons.  I could have more surgery to ‘correct’ bits of me that don’t work too well, but I’m resisting.

Without drugs, my disease is very active.  For the last 9 years I have been self injecting 25mg Methotrexate and 40mg Adilamumab (Humira) variously every week, 2 weeks, every month, etc, etc as I experiment with what works for me with the food I eat.  If I stop injecting, however, which frankly lost the novelty factor within a couple of weeks, I can start to feel like a clunky old engine quite quickly and can be in considerable pain.

I’m trying to manage my dependancy on drugs with food.  At the start, I really believed that following a paleo, or primal, eating plan is how we should all eat to feel good, lose weight and be the healthiest we can be.  I still do, however, I’m now attempting to follow a mainly raw vegan diet following a recent life changing experience with some amazing people on a retreat called Laughter Cleanse.  I’m still going to eat a little meat because, lets face it, we’re omnivores and who doesn’t like bacon!?

I started this blog as I wanted to keep a track of my own progress, but simply keeping a private diary didn’t really light my candle.  If I could tell a story and maybe inspire other arthritis sufferers to try something different, it would be worth committing myself to keeping a blog and posting regularly.  Much better than a diary, I thought.

Thank you for having a look around – I hope you find something to interest and inspire you.

Scott   😛

You can also find me on Twitter.