When I first admitted to myself that something was wrong, and I started to suspect arthritis as the culprit, I was scared. What if it is Rheumatoid Arthritis? I kept quiet about my symptoms for months because I preferred to play the ostrich with my head in the sand, hoping the stiffness would just go away. Rheumatoid Arthritis conjures up, at least in my head, images of mangled fingers that look rather useless. I admit I was terrified by the thought of such a potentially disfiguring disability.
At the end of 2009, after several months of mild stiffness, I mentioned my concerns to my family doctor while I was there for my annual physical. He did not ask a lot of questions. He never suggested sending me to a specialist. He seemed unconcerned. He did order blood tests for me though.
Weeks passed. Then months. How long did it take to get test results back? What were the blood tests looking for? Would they only contact me if they found something wrong? Oh, the questions I should have asked in retrospect.
Then the stiffness went into remission. I forgot about worrying about the test results and for a few months in 2010 I started to believe that I had beat whatever was afflicting me in 2009.
By the fall of 2010 however, the stiffness had returned with a vengeance and this time it brought with it debilitating fatigue. I no longer had energy for extra-curricular activities anymore. I was visibly suffering at work. My stiff joints began to burn. All I wanted to do was cry all the time, I was so tired. I had no choice but to reiterate the symptoms to my family doctor in the summer of 2011.
By this time my family doctor had retired and I had switched over to my husband's family doctor. She listened to me and asked lots of questions. She came across as more concerned than the first doctor did. She insisted on another round of blood tests and sent me for X-rays on my hands. She also made me an appointment with a Rheumatologist.
Now it took months to get an appointment with a Rheumatologist (where I live it did anyway). During my four-month wait I was self-diagnosing myself via the internet, and reading all the worst-case scenario stories out there about Rheumatoid Arthritis. I mourned my ability to do anything. At the same time I also came across information on Psoriatic Arthritis, a term that I had never heard before.
I had Psoriasis as a child, embarrassingly flaky skin on my elbows, but it mercifully went away in my first year of high school and I had never given it another thought into my adulthood. Until now. How a flaky skin disease morphed into an auto-immune arthritic disease was beyond me, but was it possible that I had Psoriatic Arthritis rather than Rheumatoid? I crossed my fingers. I considered Psoriatic Arthritis to be the lesser of two evils.
When I finally had the opportunity to sit down with my Rheumatologist in November 2011, she went over my test results with me. The bad news: the x-rays of my fingers showed signs of joint damage from my body attacking itself. It was definitely auto-immune. The good news: I tested negative for the Rheumatoid Factor, a blood factor associated with R.A.
It was not Rheumatoid Arthritis. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I was indeed diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis. It was time to fully discover what that meant.
