crohnsandarthritis:

The commercials for various medications and conditions only feature people over the age of 50.

(Source: n0isefloor)

Bone scan machine

WebMD and Mayoclinic have a way of both undermining your illness and scaring you by exaggerating it at the same time.

Nervous about my bone scan tomorrow… nuclear dye always leaves me feeling ill. So does the idea of spending 5+ hours in a hospital, 3 waiting around after they inject me with the dye and the other 2 in a machine. But I’m more nervous about the results. How much more awful can I handle at this point in my life?

But I can’t even put deodorant on without pain anymore. Applying deodorant puts enough pressure on the shoulder joint to cause a shocking amount of pain. No matter how bad the news is, surely it can’t be worse than my disease progressing at this rate because I’m still not getting adequate treatment….

In case we forgot that RA sucks… I can’t lift my arms over my head without it hurting and feeling unnatural because of the swelling :(

I have never noticed too drastic a correlation between my diet and RA flares, except for red meat. I don’t eat much because if I try it not only makes me nauseous but flare a bit, too. I also found that when I stopped eating pork a few years ago I had a lot less inflammation, although when I stopped eating pork, the pain wasn’t as big an issue as it is now so I didn’t notice too much of a change in that sense.

Alcohol is terrible for RA! Often, it aggravates the hell out of it, and at the same time, you can get drunk enough to forget how much MORE you hurt because of the alcohol (so have fun the next day, basically).

As for methotrexate? Don’t be surprised if you don’t feel good from it. If you’re doing it by self-injection, don’t be nervous: the needle is tiny, and doesn’t really hurt. Try and find things that stimulate your appetite and help with nausea, because those two things will be some of the big bad symptoms. Other than that, I really don’t know what advice to offer for getting through it: I had to stop mtx because I was losing too much weight, not eating enough, and not getting any better :( Don’t let that scare you too much though: I had an abnormally bad reaction to the drug.

hotboxtheworld:

and I’m just sitting here like, “Yeah, it’s gonna rain, hard. Look at my knees!”

(Source: charleskinbote, via didyoueatallthisacid)

How I’m feeling about my bone scan on Monday…..

(Source: youjustinspiredme, via browneyedsoutherngal)

If this swelling and pain in my shoulder keeps up the way it has been, my rheumatologist is gonna insist that I have a cortisone injection, I bet. Which really, really sucks. Steroids have always been useless for me; I’ve had 3 injections to the right knee, an injection to the hip, one on each jaw joint, and probably one or two other occasions of that that I can’t think of off the top of my head. They’ve never worked. But every time a rheum insists on an injection I let myself hope that maybe, maybe this time they’ll work, maybe they won’t just put me in a flare and make me lose functionality of that joint for an unknown amount of time, and every time, I’m disappointed. I’m too stupid to call it quits on steroid injections and say no when they give me this unfair hope.

(Source: those-ra-moments)

They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, and it’s so true. Until I got sick, I lived life thinking that running, jumping, baseball, equestrian riding, it would be a part of me. When I got sick, I thought that it would be an inconvenience, something difficult but manageable. But the more this illness has caused me to lose, the more I look back on that 9 year old girl and all the things she thought life entitled her to. And when I look on the future, I wonder: am I still as ignorant about my health? I don’t take walking for granted anymore. Some day, I probably will lose that ability. Every day I wake up, I want to cry out in pain. But I can’t. Because with what I have, every day is going to be better than the next, because I haven’t lost everything yet. Because walking, chewing, writing, it’s all hard, but some day, it will be more and more impossible. I can’t take my health right now for granted. I am sick. I have been sick for a long time. I will be sick until I take my dying breath. I might die of this, I WILL suffer more because of this. And what I have left, is what I have, and I cannot let what I have left slip away as ignorantly as I did my ability to live without being in pain. I cannot be that same 9 year old girl that thought my abilities and happiness were an inevitable given anymore.

hotboxtheworld:

But hey, I’m lucky enough to have both so I guess I’m a g like that lol