How did I get diagnosed?
I got diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis while being diagnosed for psoriatic arthritis. My rheumatologist realized looking at the scans and my symptoms that there was more cause to worry than just the psoriatic arthritis. I had more symptoms than what came with psoriatic arthritis such as fatigue, pain in all of my joints and iron deficiency.
My experience with treatment
Right after I was diagnosed, I went gluten and dairy free because my doctor had read that it helped long story short the natural route with food and supplement hasn’t helped my condition, I wrote about it in detail in my psoriatic arthritis post. Right now, with rheumatoid arthritis I’m more concerned with stopping the disease and the pain. I am in ongoing aquatic, physical and occupational therapy to help me build the surrounding muscles in order to compensate for those bones that cannot work as they once did.
How has it impacted my life?
I’m not going to sit here and say arthritis hasn’t completely derailed my life because it has. Chronic pain has completely changed everything. Rheumatoid Arthritis has also eaten away at the bones in my spine and caused a curvature towards the end of my spine and my bones falling to the side instead of lining up on top of each other causing another chronic illness called Spondylitis. Currently, I’m at what they consider Grade A Spondylitis which is still extremely painful. This causes my discs to sit on my nerves, which in turn causes nerve pain down to my knees so when I’m sitting for long periods of time, I have trouble walking, I have trouble bending over, I have trouble standing, and getting up from chairs.
My main advice to people is to keep up with their pain management whatever it may be. My course of treatment or maintenance for my body I like to call it was medical treatment, acupuncture every 4 weeks, chiropractor visits ever week, and massages once a month. This course of maintenance kept the flares at bay majority of the time. Because of the pandemic, my treatment was stalled, and pain management locations were considered non-essential, also I’m considered high-risk, so I was quarantined. This past year I have been in one of the worse flares I have ever experienced which caused immense trauma to my body.
Support:
t’s very hard for family and friends to understand what you are going through. I have learned is keep educating yourself, educate them if you have to but eventually they’ll come around. You can’t blame them, it’s very rare for you to go from being “normal” to have your whole life fall apart. Depression runs very high in chronically ill patients especially those with excess inflammation, because of the excess inflammation of the brain. The things I’ve looked to for support is my immediate circle, I wasn’t as fair to mine and didn’t open up to them all. I’ve also found a lot of help in talk therapy; it’s helped me with managing my pain threshold and advocacy. I’ve joined several online support groups because honestly sometimes the pain is too much to show up anywhere in person. There are so many people around the world dealing with these same issues and they’re all willing to talk about it and help each other out. It really is a wonderful community.
