Articles

Does this sound familiar? You wake up one morning with an unusual and random spurt of energy. It's still not very much energy, of course, and definitely not a long...

Living in pain has been my reality since I was two years old when I was first diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. It has been a state of being, instead...

I’m debating whether I even want to delve into this topic because I don’t know if it is possible to understand this disease. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is so unpredictable that...

When I was a child with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, now called juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), the mental and emotional aspects of adjusting to and living with the disease were very...

Okay, quick: you have 1 minute. Think of the stuff you would grab if the building were on fire or if there was a gas leak? I will wait. Would...

I am a good patient. I work with my rheumatologist and follow my treatment plan. The first call I made when COVID-19 appeared in my state was to my rheumatologist...

We’ve all be wondering: when will this pandemic be over? What will break the thrall of this virus? To some degree, it is time. To another degree, it is the...

I have had dry skin for most of my life but did not know, until several years after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), that I also had a very...

Ugh. Pain. It’s... painful! As I write this, I’m sitting here in the special kind of pain that affects people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and chronic illness more than most...

Recently, I wrote an article sharing my over-the-counter toolbox of items that help me manage life with rheumatoid arthritis. One of those items, specifically, garnered a lot of questions and...

I’m kind of known for napping. Online and IRL (in real life). If I don’t text back or I don’t get to an email immediately, it is because I am...

Pain can disrupt normal life in a way that can be devastating. Pain can also just be an annoyance. Sometimes pain can make you cry and, sometimes, it can only...

Joint pain didn’t just show up one day and surprise me. In fact, it’s honestly hard to remember a time in my life when I didn’t ache. It started during...

One definition of productivity is "the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input." That sounds like a...

Living with rheumatoid arthritis is incredibly tough at any age. But for kids with the disease, there are unique challenges to face. Navigating things like sleepovers, first dances, and school...

It strikes me that people with chronic conditions like rheumatoid arthritis (RA) have to endure a lot of fights. It’s not because we choose them or are especially argumentative people...

On Friday, February 19th, 2021, I got my first COVID-19 vaccine dose. It was an exciting (and, honestly, a rather odd) time. I'm very, very fortunate to have gotten a...

In January 2021, the RheumatoidArthritis.net Editorial Team wrote an amazing article, “What Is the Autoimmune Protocol Diet?.” It was a fascinating article that focused on nutrition’s potential role in helping...

…the medication saga continues! This past December (2020), we didn’t see any improvement with the Orencia so my rheumatologist and I decided to switch to another medication. I fully stopped...

Time. It’s something all of us only have a limited supply of and there’s nothing on Earth, short of a DeLorean going 88 miles per hour, that can give you...