WEEK THREE OF MTX TREATMENT

From Mt. Hood Meadows last Sunday. Beautiful day for skiing! Love swooshing down the mountain!

Another week of improvement on methotrexate. I would say my knees are down to a 2 or 2.5 out of 10 now. I think three additional weeks from now I'll hopefully be at a 0 or 1, which I was hoping to achieve by going on the treatment in the first place. If I can be pretty much back to normal, that's huge! I'm getting more and more confident that I'll get to that point. Once I am there, hopefully I can maintain a normal level of activity and feel good.

The issue I have now when I do anything is sore muscles. I got so out of shape by not doing any sustained exercise for nine months. Imagine that! So I'll have to get back in shape. I'm not going to go back to full activity right away, I am going to kind of ease into it as the weather turns. I'm not a gym rat, I like to run outside or play tennis, catch the football, stuff like that. So hopefully I can ramp things up as the weather turns.

As for winters, it is hard, I never liked running in the rain and the cold. One thing I do love though is skiing and I went last Sunday with Alejandro and his friend. Every year I go skiing, think of how much I like it and how I should buy my own equipment... and then don't do anything about it. Repeat every year. And that'll probably happen again. However, since I probably won't be as hardcore of runner in the future maybe skiing would be a good way to stay active in the winter. If I were to get a season pass, I'd have a lot of motivation to go up and and maybe even work out of the Clackamas office and take off at 3pm some days for some night skiing. Who knows.

Lastly, on the side effect front, my sleep still isn't quite back to normal. Still waking up, I typically only remember waking up around 5 or 6am, so I think I have a solid chunk of sleep, but I might just be forgetting waking up other times. It would be nice to have one of those watches that tracks your sleep here! But I don't feel any more tired than I usually do, if anything I feel more energy. That just might be a placebo effect of feeling like I can move around again though. Thursdays are still rough in the energy department and feeling crummy in the tummy from the dose the night before. Hopefully that'll get better with time. Overall I can easily accept the issues above for protecting my joints and being able to act my age.