This is My Father

He's coming out of surgery yesterday, and my mom meets him as they're rolling him to his room
He says, "Piece of cake!"
Mom says, "Oh, good, it was a piece of cake?"
He says, "No, I want a piece of cake!"

Like The Back of My Hand, part 2

I've always had an active fantasy life. (Not like that... well, yes, like that, too. But anyway.) In my head I've always been an athlete, a tall, competent, coordinated athlete who can dodge a bullet or take down a mugger with one punch or perform heroic leaps to catch falling babies. In reality, I'm a stocky, uncoordinated, awkward desk jockey with years of experience playing sports badly and staying out of trouble. But there was always the thought that if I won the lottery, took myself off to some mysterious island, and trained diligently for a couple of years, I could become the ass-kicking Amazon of my fantasies.

The hardest part of dealing with my joint issues is coming to terms with the fact that that is no longer true.

It's not a loss of something tangible. I'm not even all that upset about some of the nastier possible consequences of this incurable, degenerative condition. It's more like the "loss of hope" described here - I have a surprising amount of emotional energy invested in my athletic potential. Untangling that is taking a lot of time, and I find myself resisting it very strongly - it's much easier to just forge ahead and take my pills and go to my PT appointments and not think about it too hard. I don't know if that's healthy or not. It seems like something is sort of broken with my self-image, and I should probably figure out what's wrong so I can fix it, but I'm having trouble sitting still long enough.

Speaking of which, I'm going to continue musing in later posts.

Like the Back of My Hand

I have had mysterious joint pain since I was about fifteen. At first I just assumed that years of spraining my fingers playing goalie had made them sensitive to weather changes. My pediatrician, after the blood tests came back negative for anything interesting, said "yeah, lots of girls get growing pains, take some Advil and don't worry about it." So I didn't. The pain got worse, and the joints in my feet started to ache, too, but it still wasn't critical.

Moving to Texas definitely seemed to help - warmer weather and less rain made the bad patches less frequent and severe. So for several years I didn't think much about it at all. I asked one doctor about it when I had a chance, but all he wanted to know was what painkiller I was looking for. I wasn't, and shrugged and let it drop. Maybe I shouldn't have, but it still wasn't bad enough for me to worry about.

A year or so after that, I had one brief really bad spell - the pain had spread to all my joints, and was severe enough that I took a few days off work to stay in bed. Finally my roommate bullied me into going to a chiropractor, and that seemed to help, but I didn't much like the doctor and I definitely couldn't afford to go as often as he wanted me to. Fortunately, the pain dropped off pretty quickly after that and I was back to normal. From there on my bad spells were no worse than before, although they would now involve all of my joints.

This winter, everything changed. I went from a little achy to unable to function in about a day. I spent the holidays in a hot bath, and had to take a month off of karate because I just couldn't make it through. It was finally bad enough that I couldn't ignore it. I started googling, and found pictures like this. I got my insurance in order and found an internist.

After all of the bloodwork, tests, x-rays, and everything, the verdict is... I am blindingly healthy. Except, of course, for my swollen and painful joints. The rheumatologist is going with a verdict of rheumatoid arthritis, which seems likely enough. I'm currently on three different medications, seeing a physical therapist, and, for the moment, cutting wheat out of my diet to see if it has any effect at all. The pain and swelling still vary pretty widely week to week, but I'm doing much better than I was in January.

So that's the backstory. Looks like this one will be a multi-post effort - stay tuned.