Favourite shops & restaurants

Survival with arthritis is made infinitely easier with shops and restaurants where you can get reliable food stuffs.  I am beginning to try some gluten-free muesli as an alternative for breakfast.  Like all foods if I find something that works then I will move heaven and earth to find that item again, and again.  So here are a list of shops, cafes etc that I consider arthritis friendly.

• Cornucopia (Dublin): a fabulous cafe where you can get reliable good arthritic-friendly food and the staff will help to adapt items to your needs and tastes.
• BioCoop (France): a chain of supermarkets serving organic food.  One feature is a good range of fresh gluten-free breads.  We lived very happily from their food for a week.
• Eden Cafe (Witney): a lovely cafe serving vegan and vegetarian food with a good range of gluten-free choices.
• Market Garden (Eynsham): My local organic green-grocer.  Fabulous.

Flying to Dublin & back in 24 hours

If you have Arthritis going away anywhere and any-time is a challenge.  You find yourself in situations where your diet is difficult to control, where your sleep is difficult to control and your rest is difficult to control.  This makes journeys such as this one very difficult.  The prospect of eventually being sat in the cramped space of a small airline seat, the long walks from car to departures lounge, from there to aircraft.   Not much fun.

But I survived and more than that, I survived more than I dreamed possible.  I came home and found, after waking up from a twelve hour sleep, that I had no inflammation and my pain was in control.  This is in stark contrast to previous trips away where I have needed several days to recover.