Those Aches and Pains

Arthritis – “Painfull inflammation and stiffness of the joints”.

My story of contracting Rheumatoid Arthritis.  The start of a journey that will redefine virtually every aspect of my life.

Hi, I’m Ronald.  Fancy meeting you here.

As of this writing, I’m 53 years old.  I would consider myself to be an average guy, sort of a jokester(I like making people smile) and I have Rhuematoid Arthritis.

I believe that most people who have any form of arthritis would say they have no idea just WHEN they contracted the disease.  Most of the time it just sneaks up on you and one day, you realize that you hurt more than you should.  As for me, that wasn’t the case.  It all happened in one night…

Life changed for me, rather suddenly, in February of 1989 in a single night.  I remember it all so well.  I can’t remember the pain of all of the scrapes and cuts I’ve had throughout my life but I remember, quite vividly, the pain I experience when Arthur (my arthritis) decided to make my body his home.  I’ve been told that women forget how intense the pain is when they have a baby, that’s why they’re willing to have another one.  HAHA.  But, after all this time that memory is still very vivid.  Even now, as I’m typing this, it’s getting quite emotional for me….

February, 1989…

I’m working night shift.  We’re on 12 hour shifts, 6:00 – 6:00.  I’ve been fighting colds for about three months now.  I’d be sick for a couple of weeks then okay for a week.  Sick for a couple of weeks and okay for a week.  I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Well, it’s 2am and I’m feeling like I’m coming down with something again.  Nuts!  You know how it is.  You start feeling achey, throat is getting scratchy and just feeling all bleh.  At 4am I’m really starting to hurt, all over.  I’m starting to think this isn’t just another cold coming on.

It’s 6am (quitting time) and my whole body is on fire.  As I walk outside, I find out it has snowed about eight inches.  Great!  Now I get to scrape the snow off my car while I’m in agony.  Just moving my arm sends searing pain into my shoulder and I have no clue of what’s going on.

Luckily, I only have one mile to drive home.  As I climb up the stairs to our 4-plex apartment, I’m crying from all of the pain.  I open the door just sobbing and my wife asks what’s wrong.  I relate to her what’s been going on and we decide I need to go see a doctor.  Well, DUH!

It’s funny how we expect doctors to know everything.

“Hey Doc, I have this ‘thing’ going on.  What it is”?  After a rather lengthy visit I realized not much was accomplished.  He had no clue why I’m in so much pain.  He just prescribed 800mg of ibuprofen to help ease the pain.  I think I could have used something a lot stronger, at this moment, to ease what I was feeling.  By-the-way, the ibuprofen didn’t help at all.

I was told to call a Rheumatologist.  Yeah, like I know what a Rheumatologist is….  Soonest opening is in two days, an eternity.  So, now all I do is wait for that appointment while I have no idea of what’s going on.

Here’s the fun part….

It hurts to move and I mean it hurts.  If I sit still the pain’s not quite as bad.  Problem is, if I sit still my joints start to ‘freeze’ up and it hurts even more to break them loose than it does to move around.  So here I am with a delema.  Do I endure the constant pain of moving around or do I sit still so I don’t hurt as much and then have the excruciating pain of breaking loose when I do need to move?

The next morning my wife had to pull me out of bed.  We had a water bed (it was the cool thing to have at the time) and it was impossible for me to climb out.  When I shimmied out to the front room I started feeling a bit queezy so I laid down on the edge of the couch.  I’d been there for several minutes until I started feeling better.  When I tried to get up I realized I was stuck.  I hurt so bad that I couldn’t even make myself push through the pain to simply roll off the couch.  Rather pathetic, don’t you think?  LOL

OK, I’m finally at the Rheumatologist.  I’m sitting in the waiting area with all of these old people (remember, I’m only 27).  But, when they called me to come back I think I moved like I was older than all of them.  They had me fill out this huge questionaire.  I checked the box that said it burned when I urinated.  Well, it did.  I guess when the doctor saw that he came right back in and asked me how long I had been experiencing that.  I told him just since I’ve been hurting all over.  A while later I realized he must have thought I had prostate cancer and wondered if all of my pain was  being caused by my body being full of cancer.  I wasn’t sure which I would have rather had, at the time.

They took a few gallons of blood (okay, not quite that much) to run tests on and said they would let me know when the results were in.

More waiting….

I got a call to come back in and I was told that I have Rheumatoid Arthritis.  I’m thinking GREAT!  I have something that old people get, now what?  The doctor told me about something called a SED rate (stands for Sedimentation rate).  He said that indicates how much inflamation is in the body.  He told me the normal person’s level should be at zero.  Mine was at 32.

I’ve researched the definition of SED rates at various medical web sites and they indicate that people can be between 0 – 20 and be a normal level.  Pffft!  Knowing what my levels have been and reading that I can confidently say that 20 is not a normal level.  I’ve been at 19 during one of my checkups and I was hurting.

The doctor gave me two double dose shots of a steroid in each butt cheek.  Man, talk about having a huge knot in each one.  They hurt like crazy.  “Just rub them in”, he says.  Yeah right, rub on something that hurts.  Good idea.  LOL.

The doctor, also, sends me home with a couple of prescriptions, one is an NSAID(Voltaren) and the other is a steroid(Medrol).  He has me on a fairly good size dose of the steroid.  Not knowing any better I take it without any issue.  Too bad it isn’t the kind that would get me all buffed up.  HA!

So, here I am just waiting for the medication to kick in.  I’m back to my walking/sitting routine.  Not able to go to work so all I have to think about is this crummy situation I’m in.  Times like this a person gets to feeling rather pitiful for themselves.  I can’t run away from my problem.  I have this new friend that calls himself ‘Arthur’ that will be my life-long buddy that goes everywhere I do whether or not I want him around.

I guess a person could start wondering what they had done to deserve something like this.  Luckily, I’m not the kind to stray toward that.  Crap happens, deal with it.  Humor has always been my way of dealing with things.  So, I guess I started telling a lot of jokes about now.

It took several weeks for my inflammation/pain to get down to a manageable level.  The Rheumatologist gave me a couple more steroid shots in the butt to help things simmer down.  Eventually, I was weaned off of the medrol and the voltaren is the only Rx that I’m taking.

I had heard of people aching whenever a storm approaches.  I didn’t really understand this until my RA hit me.  I’ve talked with several people that have broken a bone and has since healed.  They indicated to me that the healed area tends to ache whenever a storm approaches.  I became my own weather forcaster as I’m sure you could relate.  About a day-and-a-half before the storm front hits my joints begin to ache.  I didn’t figure it out for a while but after a several storms I started to do an ‘ah-hah’.  What would really hurt is if several storm fronts came over a day or two apart.  That’s when the aching turned to burning.

Now, 26 years later, I look back on how things have changed because I have this systemic disease that tries to remind me it’s here every day.  I’ve read that having constant pain can cause a person’s tolerance for pain to go down.  Quite the contrary, I believe that mine may have gone up.  I do believe that my patience has greatly increased.  It does take me longer to do certain things.

In a big nut shell…

There’s my story of contracting Rheumatoid Arthritis.  I’ve had many ups and downs while dealing with RA.  One good thing about it hitting me in one night is that Arthur didn’t have time to deform my joints before I realized what he was doing.  I have friends that weren’t so lucky and they deal with the challenge their hands pose due to being damaged.

I hope you stay tuned because I’d like to visit more about the pain caused by arthritis and inflammation, in general.  I’ve discovered several things that have reduced my aches and pains and want to share them with you.

P.S.  Smile, people will wonder what you’ve been up to…