"I'm flaring"...."Well, what did you do to cause that?"
More than once I've been asked that question. Once I was asked that by a supervisor who was giving me the side eye and looking to write me up as though I had deliberately done something over a weekend to cause myself pain and excuse my lowered productivity.
It's not like I recklessly jumped off the loading dock, or spent my weekends drinking and drugging, or even planted daffodils to cheer up the grey of a prolonged winter.
As far as I can tell, I don't cause my flares. Flares happen. Perhaps it was an errant virus trying to latch on to my chemically weakened immune system. Perhaps it was my my smarter-than-me phone updating and resetting all of my defaults. I don't know. Nobody knows.
What I know is that I hurt. I can't think straight. I can't cope. My sleep is disturbed. And there is no getting a pass on the responsibilities of the day. I am upright, warm, and breathing. Some days that's all you get.
I didn't "Do" anything. I'm just having a damned flare!
I'm so sorry you are going through that. Some people just don't understand until they have someone they care about go through something similar. Can you transfer out of their area of influence?
Did better than that, I retired. 😀
AWESOME! That made me laugh. Good for you.
I think I"m the one who usually asks that of myself. When I have a flare, I wrack my brain trying to figure out what specific thing I did to cause my ankle to hurt or my shoulder to ache, and then I recall that I did nothing out of the ordinary so this must be the RA talking and that's not my fault.
