Last October, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. That was kind of a bummer, because last summer, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. And prior to that, I was diagnosed with chronic migraines and IBS and herniated discs and occipital neuralgia… ya that’s all the physical things in a nutshell. Okay there’s some others but I can FEEL you getting bored.
So you can see how I was a little… disturbed. A normal person would be disturbed by that diagnosis. But I’d spent several years getting increasingly sick and isolated. I spent a lot of time on my couch, not seeing my friends. Canceling on plans I’d actually managed to make with friends or family. Becoming a hermit. Not going out to restaurants with my boyfriend very often (if ever, okay, to be honest). Doing almost nothing outside other than playing pinball occasionally and traveling to and from the office, which was a rarity because I worked from home most of the time. It was exceptionally depressing.
When I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, everything fell into place. Why were my headaches getting worse and worse? Not just because of the fall I’d sustained when I was 16, but because my immune system was attacking the top joint in my neck (that’s the only joint in your spine, btw). Why all the gastrointestinal problems over the last several years? Well, people with RA happen to have a lot of gastrointestinal problems. Why did I get sesamoiditis a while back and end up with my foot in a boot for several months? Because it wasn’t sesamoiditis at all. It was a rheumatoid arthritis flare and my then-doctor was wrong… which happens all the time. In fact, having a flare-up in that particular joint is very common as a first-place for a rheumatoid arthritis flare. Diagnosing RA is a real bitch and often takes years. You need to do a lot of tests (blood tests, sometimes xrays, sometimes MRIs, you need to see a few different kinds of specialists to rule out certain things, which I’d already done prior to seeing a rheumatologist). Plus you talk to the rheumatologist about your history, of course. They look at your joints, talk about stiffness in the morning (hehehe). WELL I have it, folks. I have it. It runs in my family, and poof, I have it.
I’d been getting sicker and sicker for years, and now I know why, FINALLY. A DIAGNOSIS. If you are a chronically sick person, you know exactly what kind of feeling I had in that diagnostic moment. Terror? Yes. But relief? Also, yes. It’s horrible not knowing what’s wrong with you. When I found out what was wrong, though, I could finally do something about it. That put me, at long last, on the offensive. I had power. I had agency. Look the fuck out, because I’d spent years being attacked by my body and finally had the opportunity to do something about it. I was about to get very aggressive…
Thrive 