My Story

OK.  Here is my story.  Not very exciting, but mine none the less!

I am a 55 year old female with psoriatic arthritis.  This is a weird type of arthritis that thinks your own body is a foreign substance that needs to be GONE!  So your body attacks itself.

Some people call that an auto-immune disease, but I prefer to think of it in my own way!

Usually you get arthritis in your finger, leg, knee, or some other part of your body and it is just there.  Stays there pretty much all the time and wrecks havoc on your life.  Mine is much more sneaky than that!  Today it will be in my hip, yesterday it was my fingers and tomorrow it may be in my knee.  You just never know when or where it will decide to attack.  I mean who in their right mind would wage a war and let everyone know where you were going to attack or when!  So much sneakier my way!

I was diagnosed with this almost 20 years ago.  Originally my doctor gave me the grim news that I would be in a wheelchair within 10 years.  Luckily, there is new medications coming out all the time.  And I guess I have tried just about all of them.

My problem is after a year or so on a med, it stops working, so we have to find a new one to take its place.  Of course, that usually means I have to take two or three pills instead of the one we are replacing, but that is life...at least for me!

I seem to have very brittle bones and like to have accidents.  So, I tend to get fractures easily...and a lot! (see how sneaky my body can be?)  My last major accident was a little over three years ago.  I fell down a complete flight of stairs.  All the way to the basement.  I managed to break my ankle and hurt my shoulder.  It took almost a year for them to decide that I had actually torn my rotator cuff and to get me in surgery for it. (see, insurance works like this...even though we have an MRI that shows you have a torn rotator cuff, we want you to undergo at least six weeks of physical torture to see if you are that one in a million person that doesn't really need the surgery. Forget all about the fact that the doctor had to TALK me into it...literally!)

So let's just fast forward to my new dilemma.  Shall we?

I am a sewer.  And a quilter. And a mom and a Grandma.  And, up until a few weeks ago, a home schooler.  And a bona fide Disney Freak!

I am in the process of making 16 custom dresses and 97 custom t shirts for our upcoming trip in Nov/Dec.  Normally something I could almost get done in my sleep.  But lately not so much.

For the past year I have been having some tingling in my arm.  At first I thought it was my watch.  I thought the watch was too tight and was cutting off the circulation...so I stopped wearing it.  Then I thought it was my wedding rings.  They HAD to be the culprit.  Nope, again I was wrong.

After a few months it got worse.  To the point that I couldn't sew.  I kept pinning my hand instead of the fabric.  Not a good thing to do, trust me!

Last January I talked to my doctor about it, he did some x-rays and said he didn't like what he saw in my neck, and it looked like I might need some surgery.  Yes, he said the S word, knowing full well that I wasn't going to go for that!  So, on my next monthly appointment, it was actually a little worse.  Again we talked about the S word and I rejected it really quick!

At the end of April I was having a bit of problem with my lower back, and having some numbness in my legs. He ordered an MRI.  I had the MRI on May 5.

Now, because I LOVE my doctor, I am not going to go into all the problems I had getting an answer out of his office or to move on to the next step.  Let's just say that I was finally sent to the Pain Management Clinic (they evidently don't have a Numbness Management Clinic) at the hospital...in AUGUST!  That's right, my first appointment there was August 13!  After an hour visiting with the nurse and a few minutes with the doctor, they decided that my lower back was really not the issue, it was the neck area.

The plan was to have an MRI and then use that information to start injections in the neck to deal with the constant pain.  (See, I forgot to mention that I guess)  I had been in so much pain I was considering going to a chiropractor.  My head hurt 24/7.  It felt like it weighed a couple of tons and I could not hold it up.  Late afternoons were so bad I spent the entire time almost laying on the couch.  I had to prop my head up.

I had the MRI on Aug 24, and the doctor called me on Monday.  He said he could do the injections, but they would not work.  My problem was a tiny bit more serious than that.  My psoriatic arthritis was winning a major battle!