[MAT52]

Hi - just had a week in hospital with some kind of abdominal sepsis - either a UTI or Colecystitis. Will be getting my gallbladder removed in July after 15 years of not much trouble from my collection of large stones. While in hospital with acute upper abdominal pain and a temperature my CRP rose to 160 (meant to be 0-10) so I was put on IV Gentamicin 400 as well as Amoxicillin. Came home after an endoscopy on Tuesday and am fine again now apart from the odd reverberation.

While all this was happening I stopped taking the imuran that I had started a few weeks earlier at the instructions of my surgeon. He didn't know much about rheumatic conditions or this latest drug but I do so just stopped. My GP thinks that it should be fine to start again once infection has stayed away for another week as my weekly bloods were coming back fine.

Before this I had a month of flu and a heavy chest infection/ pneumonia and before that I had sickness and headaches with GI problems while on Cymbalta. It has been a pretty relentless few months health wise!

So the reason I am posting is because each time the latest infection takes hold I find the nerve pain and sensory problems seem to die away completely - apart from dizziness which comes and goes regardless. In hospital I didn't have wet legs sensation or feeling I had peed myself or night time nerve pain. Now however, it is gripping me once more in what seems to be a kind of post infection flare up.

Do people here think it's because during the period of acute and localised pain - whether in chest or stomach or head - the brain stops noticing other signals of the usual chronic pain? I find it is particularly severe in my knees and ankles just now although hands are burning too - all this much more so at night for reasons I now understand thanks to Mrs D. I wonder of these fluctuations are more common in an immune mediated small fiber sensory neuropathy?

I see the neurologist for a review/ follow up consultation next month and am trying to gather my thoughts - as he wrote in his last letter that nothing had shown up from nerve conduction, skin biopsy of calves, lumbar puncture or blood tests. So my rheumatologist decided that it must come under the banner of my RA, even though I have no visibly swollen or specifically affected joints any more. My ESR fluctuates according to the severity of the nerve pain though so I can predict it pretty accurately - last reading was a month ago at 58.

This is why I'm now trying Imuran. My suspicion is that I actually have a type of Vasculitis or sero negative Sjogrens that causes my SNSF but it would be interesting to know if others find theirs flares up and calms in this way too.