Living

The doctor who just performed my reverse shoulder replacement is new to me. He is in the same practice as the excellent surgeon that did my other shoulder replacement and...

Raise your hand if you’ve ever brought up fatigue with your physician? Raise both hands if there was not a lot they could do to help you? Yup, me too...

Resilience is the ultimate life skill. We are all innately resilient; life on earth wouldn't prosper without it. Take a walk outside and you will see resilience everywhere you turn...

I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when I was 20. I recently turned 28. Do you know what this means? I spent half of my 20s asleep. If I really...

It may be a shock, but I never intended to get married. By age 30 I realized that I was a happy person, that I wasn’t looking for anything else...

...The one who tells the whole gruesome story of how they twisted their thumb or sigh dramatically when they trip on the pavement and “twist” their ankle. And all the...

Keeping my weight under control (if not as low as I’d like) has been an ongoing battle for me since I was a teenager. In the beginning, it was just...

...with ourselves. During the time of the year where everyone focuses on their relationships with other people or frantically tries to find someone to share the Hallmark holiday with, we...

Whoo Hoo!! Little things can make me so happy. After leaving the local pharmacy, I just had to take out my medication and capture a photo to document the source...

My hands were giving me some guff recently (as they do). I was wearing my favorite compression gloves already, I’d applied over-the-counter lidocaine cream, and I’d swallowed a dose of...

Establishing and maintaining solid, supportive relationships while juggling the demands of a chronic disease like RA is challenging to say the least.  The repercussions of this are many and worthy...

One of the things people without rheumatoid arthritis may be surprised by is that getting dressed with RA can be complicated! I know that I may be a special case...

That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Will it get worse? Will this rheumatoid disease (arthritis) I’ve got, which has so rudely and inexorably taken up constant residence in my life...

One thing that happens to me when I go through a lengthy period of not feeling well, is that I develop a feeling of negativity. Instead of a whole world...

I used to be a world-class sleeper. Once I was visiting my parents, sleeping on the couch in the living room. A tornado warning came up in the wee hours...

Raise your hand if you wish there was an easy way to weed out the “fake” friends. There is! Relationships are hard. Friendships are even harder when one person has...

It has been my experience that humans tend to be harder on themselves than others, to the point that we often become so enveloped in our negativity, we are paralyzed...

About this time a year ago I wrote about how I was changing to a different biologic as my first medication was no longer working as well. I had had...

We’ve all heard it over and over (and over and over) again: it’s so important for people living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to exercise. Physical fitness can be extremely useful...

This greeting has become so commonplace in our day-to-day interactions that somehow it has lost its true meaning. That is, to actually inquire how a person is doing. I know...