My Diagnosis Story with Rheumatoid Arthritis

hi everyone welcome back to life with ra plus my name is nicole and today we're going to be talking about my diagnosis [Music] so i was diagnosed back in august of 2010 i was act it was actually two weeks shy of my 20th birthday so i was 19 when i was diagnosed um and it all started when um i used to run so the year prior i went on this health kick and i became a vegetarian and i started to run um not at first but eventually i was running two to four miles a day one day my right knee started to hurt and i wasn't sure exactly what happened because i would stretch before each run and i would do my little at-home workouts before i would run so as i was running i felt this uncomfortableness in my right knee so that day i couldn't even run comfortably and i had to stop and go stop and go and then eventually when i came home you know i i wrapped it and i put some ice on it but um the next day was still uncomfortable so i stayed off of it for about a day or two and i tried again and it wasn't the same so eventually you know that uncomfortableness turned into a throbbing and i had to go to the emergency room because it was just bugging me so much and they do an x-ray and the doctors tell me that they didn't really see anything so it could have been a hairline fracture and so they just tell me to stay off of it for six weeks so i say off of it for six weeks and you know it kind of sucked because when you first start something you're like oh i have to do it you have to kind of push yourself and then once you do it more frequently you start to love it and you start to enjoy it and then it turns into a routine so at this point it was a routine for me to want to go and run all the time so that six weeks was kind of you know it was hard for me because that's what i like to do you know i would like to run and just be free and run my little life away and so after the six weeks i did try again but it was not the same you know i stretched i tried to do everything you know i was trying to do everything i could so i can run so i would wrap it um i would ice it put some what is that bengay the bengay or the icy hot i used to put on and i couldn't run the same it was still uncomfortable and so i stayed off of it for another week or so but then eventually that egg just turned into a throbbing unbearable pain so my mom and i we went back to the emergency room and they did another x-ray and again they didn't see anything so they told me it could have been a number of things but they did give me a paper and they referred me to a rheumatologist and at that time i'm like what the heck is a rheumatologist you know i've never even heard of that and so i was reading the paper and it's talking about rheumatoid arthritis and how you know single rheumatologists can help you know like when they discharge you they give you all the papers about how to treat your wound or treat so that's what it was and so when i was reading the paper i was like no way i can't have this you know first of all i'm too young i can't have rheumatoid arthritis you know you hear arthritis and you just think about older people having arthritis and so my mom and i we make an appointment and we go and see the rheumatologist and at first you know he checks out my knee and he says you know it is swollen try wrapping it um and he then he tells me you know is it possible for you to have any stds and the reason why he asked me was because i guess some certain stds can affect your joints like if it was arthritis so i told him that i'm in a monogamous relationship but you know i it could be possible you know i'm over here thinking i'm not gonna miss a relationship and so he runs the test and he calls me and tells me you know that's not it you know you don't have any stds your test came back negative we need you to come back in and do a specific test for rheumatoid arthritis i go back and my knee is still my right knee is still swollen you know it's still achy it's uncomfortable i can't really move it the way i used to so then he does the blood work and he tests me for rheumatoid arthritis he calls me he schedules me an appointment to go back and so i go back and i'm sitting there and this time my mom actually didn't come with me because she had to work so she didn't go with me to this visit so the nurses they call me back and i'm waiting in the room and i'm getting anxious because i'm not sure you know what this could be i don't want it to be rheumatoid arthritis you know from the things that i had read you know i'm too young i can't have this and the doctor comes in and you know he sits down and he's opening my chart and i felt like he was just going so slow and i'm like come on man just give me the results and so he tells me you know unfortunately you do have severe rheumatoid arthritis he also told me it was hereditary so that was news to me as well because i hadn't heard any of my family members being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis you know i heard my my great grandparents having arthritis like but like only in their hands um in their knees especially my great-grandpa because he used to work at the railroad and so um but it was nothing as severe as rheumatoid arthritis and all i heard at that point was severe rheumatoid arthritis and the rest was just like you know it took me a minute to process the rest of the things he was saying because i'm sitting there thinking how can i have for one rheumatoid arthritis and then he tells me severe so it's gonna progress fast like i'm thinking all these things in my head and then he starts talking about medications and i'm like what is going on are you sure so i asked him are you sure that's it and he said yeah you know your markers came back high you know you have a lot of inflammation going on i'm gonna get you started on humira he's telling me it's a self-injection so then i'm processing self-injection now i gotta give myself a shot and you know he's talking to me and just all this stuff is going on in my head how did this happen what did i do what did i do wrong and how am i gonna fix this and so he tells me he's telling me about the medications you know we're gonna get you started on humira once every two weeks so he's giving me two syringes for the month starts me on methotrexate and that's to stop the spreading of the arthritis from going throughout the rest of my joints and at that point actually my wrists had started to hurt as well so it wasn't only my right knee it was my wrist so before he even told me that i had rheumatoid arthritis i was thinking it could have been a number of things you know i used to sleep on my stomach and i would sleep with my arms under my pillows so i was thinking oh i probably slept on it wrong and now it hurts but no now i knew that my wrists were hurting because of the arthritis after he says that he's going to start me on the methotrexate he tells me that i need to take birth control as well because if you do get pregnant your baby can have severe deformities so we said um to use contraceptives as well because you know we don't want to take that risk of you getting pregnant while our methotrexate and then he also starts me on naproxen which is an anti-inflammatory and it's just like a stronger form of ibuprofen so after he tells me about my medications he checks out my right knee again and he tells me you have some fluid in your knee and we need to get it out so i said okay how do we do that he's telling me we gotta stick a needle in your knee a needle in my knee and he says we gotta stick a needle in your knee and we just pull it out with a syringe so i'm not exactly afraid of needles but like the way he was describing it i'm like okay like i was kind of freaking out so he tells me so we gotta stick the needle in there we know we just pull it out with a syringe so he sprays this cold spray on my knee and he you know it didn't the cold spray didn't hurt you know it's just cold i didn't want to look but i did look because you know i was curious so i looked and he's shoving this big needle in my knee and he's pulling out the fluid and he pulled out about i believe it was 50 cc so it's like one of those big fat syringes and he said okay that's all the fluid you have in your knee and he showed it to me and i was just in i was like wow like i can't believe that was there and so the way i understand it is uh with rheumatoid arthritis it starts to eat at your cartilage between your joints and so the bones are rubbing up against each other and it's causing this friction and friction builds fluid so that's why there was fluid between my knee because my you know my cartilage was starting to wear off and my joint with my bones were starting to rub up against each other i believe that's how it is so he takes out the 50cc and he he takes off the syringe you know you unscrew it and then he put on a cortisone syringe and he injects my knee with some cortisone and i couldn't believe how fast cortisone worked i never heard of cortisone before it's a steroid they're not good for you but in my case it worked and it helped me you know so if you guys have questions about cortisone um ask your doctor and see what they say they're not good for you because it is a steroid and you're not supposed to take them all the time but that definitely helped me at the time and the nurse comes in and she's gonna show me how to do the self-injection for the humera so she's telling me you can either do it in the back of your arm now if anybody's ever pinched you in the back of your arm you know that hurts so i was like heck no i'm gonna do it in the back of my arm then i would really have bruises so then she said you can also do it on your leg or like on your thigh and up on your upper thigh or you can inject it on your stomach so because it was summer i didn't want to have bruises if you know it just in case i did it wrong and so i did it on my stomach at first so she's showing me that you gotta wipe it with the alcohol prep wipe first and you pinch your little lanca your stomach and you just push down on the it's a pen so you push down on the pen and you push the button and so you hold it there and once the button pops back up then you can take it off you take out the needle it did have a little pinch you know there was a pinch of course it's a needle um you know it's just a little piercing pinch and then it goes away and they also gave me a biohazard container so i can shove my needle so i can put my needles in there when i was done using them you know you don't want to throw your needles in the trash we get started on that and all of this is happening in my one visit you know i get the shock that i have rheumatoid arthritis he's pulling stuff out of my knee he's giving me a shot i gotta give myself a shot and they give me my prescription for the methotrexate and the naproxen and the birth control as i'm walking out of my appointment my mom calls me you know because she wasn't there and she wanted to see how it went so i didn't know how to tell her i kind of wanted wanted to wait until i saw her when she got off work because i kind of didn't want i didn't want to ruin her day but she called me and i you know you can't lie to your mom i mean you know we usually do but you know i didn't want to lie to her so i told her and i tried to tell her with the most positivity in my voice and i told her yeah he said that i have arthritis i didn't tell her that i had severe arthritis just yet so i told her he said yes that i have arthritis rheumatoid arthritis and she started crying and i didn't there was nothing i could do you know but console her with words so i was telling her it's okay you know they started me on medications i already feel better my knee feels better he took um some fluid out of my knee he gave me a shot so i'm feeling better already he started me on my medications and i just got to go drop off my prescription for the other ones and she was asking me you know are you okay um how do you feel not how do i feel like um pain wise but how do i feel emotionally with what he just told me and i just try to stay positive and i told her you know i'm i'm okay you know it's okay i'm gonna get through this i can you know i can i can do this it's fine i'll be fine don't worry i was trying to console her with my words and so she goes okay i'll talk to you when i get home and she's telling me i love you i love you so it was just heartbreaking you know you know to hear your mom cry or to hear my mom cry it's just so heartbreaking so after that i did feel better because i had the cortisone shot so the next day i didn't go running again you know i tried to lay off running because i didn't want it to affect any other joints you know i don't want my other knee to start hurting so you know i would walk i would um because i used to run on a bike path and i would just walk the bike path you know i didn't walk as far as i would run before but i would walk so after that um i took those medications for about two years and then i actually switched to a different doctor my first doctor had lived kind of far from me from where i lived at the time so i moved to another rheumatologist closer so by the time i saw him my right hip was starting to hurt when i see him he tells me okay it seems like the humera is starting to wear off so i'm just gonna increase your dosage on humera but keep you on the rest of your medications so i'm still going to continue with the methotrexate the birth control and then aproxin whenever needed and the humera he was he prescribed me one self-injection every week so instead of the two once every two weeks i was doing it once a week so i was being prescribed four syringes instead of the regular two my hip wasn't like in agonizing pain it was just uncomfortable after i was sitting for too long it felt like it needed to pop or it needed to like i needed to adjust my hip in order for it to feel better so when i saw him he gave me a cortisone shot in my hip this was my right hip so it wasn't until a while ago actually that i realized that it was my right side of my body that the arthritis was affecting first so i don't know if it's the same for you guys if you guys have if any of you guys have rheumatoid arthritis if it affected one side more than the other or like you notice that one side was affected and then the other side so just let me know if that happened to you because recently realized that you know my right side was affected first so anyway so he gives me a cortisone shot in my right hip so the knee wasn't that bad you know you could feel the needle in there but it wasn't bad but when the other doctor gave me a shot in my right hip that hurt i want to cuss but i don't want to cuss so i want to say that hurt you know um i wanted to cry i didn't but i wanted to and i was like oh my gosh i don't think i'm ever gonna do that again because i do offer you full body cortisone so like they give it to you in your butt but this doctor he wanted to get it right where the pain was at i noticed that when he did it in the joints that it hurt because i had multiple i've had multiple cortisone shots so i noticed that when he did it right in the spot where it hurt rather than a full body cortisone it did work better after he gave me the cortisone shot in my hip he told me that he wanted to do a food allergy test which is through blood work because some foods that i'm consuming could be causing the inflammation and my flare-ups so i said oh heck yeah let's do that i want to know what i should stop eating because you know i was tired of you know i wasn't in that much pain but i was uncomfortable so i just wanted to know what i could do to stop that so we did the blood work so i think he called me back like in a week or a week and a half and he told me to go back to his office and to give me the results so i went back and he told me that i was allergic to bananas eggs cheese and milk and so mind you i was still a vegetarian at this time so when he told me that i was allergic to all this stuff i was like that's crazy because that's pretty much everything i was consuming because i was a vegetarian and i now i find out that i'm allergic to it and i have to cut them out so back then they didn't really have any vegetarian or vegan options like they do now you know they had a boca burger and you were lucky if you cooked it right because sometimes you know it wouldn't taste right so now i'm thinking oh i have to give up all this stuff now what am i gonna eat i actually gave myself a deadline kind of is that what you would call it yeah i guess i gave myself a deadline so i gave myself until this time and i was gonna cut all those ingredients out so i kind of went on a bench you know i was eating what i wanted i didn't um i didn't stop right away so on the last day it was me my boyfriend my sister and her my oldest sister and her boyfriend and we went to olive garden and you know if you've ever been to olive garden you know they pretty they pretty much put cheese on everything and then they come around asking you if you want more cheese so when we went i you know the salad extra cheese my fettuccine alfredo extra cheese i got the fondue appetizer i got a brownie and ice cream and i said this is my last day and then i gotta cut it all out tomorrow so i kind of went out with the bang you know i ate everything that i wanted to and so the next day i completely cut it out and i wasn't even exactly sure if it was just the ingredient itself that i was allergic to or if it was anything that contained it for example like cheetos you know how they have like a milk derivative i wasn't exactly sure if i was allergic to the cheetos or just the milk itself but i wasn't gonna take any chances because i was tired of being in pain so i cut it all out so if it was bread and it had milk or eggs in it i cut it out yogurts i cut it out anything with bananas in it so poor banana bread i cut it out anything to do with those ingredients i cut it out and after that i started to eat meat again because you know i like i said there wasn't that many options before so i wasn't exactly sure what i was gonna eat i noticed that after i cut those ingredients out i did start to feel better it was working for me throughout this whole time i was going to school to be a paralegal and i eventually got my certificate and i did my internship at a law firm and at my internship they actually hired me so all throughout school and work you know i worked there for about a year and a half and all throughout that time my flare-ups were they were okay you know i mean i would have flare-ups here and there um but when it was cold or there was moisture in the air that was when my body would start aching the most also before and while i was on my period and even till this day i still get pain throughout my body when i'm on my period so my hands my knees my ankles sometimes even my toes they hurt my shoulders my elbows everything i just feel like a stiff board that cannot move and i have to get up and push myself because i have a three-year-old that i need to take care of and you know so mom's got to get the work done i worked at the first law firm for about a year and a half and then i went to a different company and i was also there for a year and a half but this company was in a two-story building so on the first floor is the receptionist area the bathrooms the cafeteria area the lounge area where we'd have our clients wait the meeting room and then upstairs was everybody's desks and office so going up and down the stairs to either meet with a client or go to the bathroom go to the cafeteria just to leave or come to work it did take a toll on my hip and my knee that were already affecting me so i started a holistic approach i started to eat organic only i saw an acupuncturist and i started juicing i would juice about three times a day and i would i would just make a pitcher and it would last about three big glass fulls and i mean sometimes it would last me less because if i was juicing at home like on the weekends um you know either my baby sister she's not really a baby she's six years younger than i so she's not really a baby she's my baby but you know she's not a itty bitty baby you know my younger sister i should say um or my mom or my boyfriend whoever was there wanted some i would make some for them so but if it was to myself it would make three big um glass fulls and that all started because my boyfriend lent me a book he had and it was a natural cures for any type of disease that anyone might have and you know just a little disclaimer not a doctor i'm not a healthcare practitioner um you know if you need to speak to your doctors in regards to starting a holistic approach or seeing an acupuncturist you know speak to them and make sure it's okay with you um you know because everybody's different so after i read it i wanted to start that approach and that's how i got into it and that is a story for my next video so if that's something you'd like to hear stay tuned and i will see you then

Channel: LifeWithRA

Views: 39,347

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Id: eWkjchJYK80

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021