An ending

Hi friends. It's been a very long time since I've felt inspired to write. Much has transpired in the many months since my last post, but nothing stuck in my mind and heart like this has.

The BF and I were together for six years, though he had been in my life as a friend and support system even longer than that. In those years, we had some really, truly beautiful times. We talked about marriage and a family. We made plans and commitments. We lived and loved like crazy. Our relationship stuck it out through some heavy losses, the weight of which still bring me to my knees at times. He stood by my side during my diagnosis, and the terrible months that followed. When I couldn't bear to drag myself out of bed, he was there to lift me. He stuck it out for three long years, as my arthritis got worse and my ability to care for myself dwindled. Even though a deep depression, a multitude of medication changes, and a sorrow so massive I'm not sure how I survived it, the BF stuck with me.

But our relationship ended. It crumbled around the hefty roadblocks my disease imposed upon our life together. Even more than that, it started to decay as I withdrew into my own little world of treatments and side effects. I lost sight of us and, even more importantly, I lost sight of myself.

My world feels very empty as of late. I haven't been alone for one single moment since my diagnosis, and now I feel like I have nothing. My life has been so reduced to one single bedroom and one single disease, and I failed to look beyond my self-imposed blinders. I struggled to care for myself, support myself and feel positive even with the BF in the picture. Without his help, it feels impossible.

Life goes on, though. If anything, this is an emotionally exhausting, expensive lesson on how to treat the people in your life, and how to appreciate them. The last six years of my life have been a learning experience and a growing experience. I appreciate our time together, and carry with me into the future a collection of fond memories. This chapter of my life is over, so I write this post as an epilogue of sorts. Here's to my future.

What the pamphlets didn't teach me

Some of you are probably familiar with the story of my diagnosis. The day I met with a rheumatologist, he sat with me in a cold, clinical waiting room and read to me from a selection of pamphlets with cheesy names like, "So You Have Rheumatoid Arthritis," and "Rheumatoid Arthritis: An Overview." The doctor presented this literature as if I were a kindergartener circled up for storytime - facing the cartoony pictures of people in pain towards me, he hovered over each word with his pen as he read out loud.

I still have those pamphlets somewhere, and I am often tempted to dig them out. Those little handouts with their idiotic drawings did absolutely zero to prepare me for what was to come. I expected to feel pain and stiffness in the mornings. I expected to work with my doctor to find a medication that would solve all my problems and let me live "a perfectly normal, active life," as one pamphlet cheerfully promised. What I did not expect was to live in constant pain for two years, watching my life crumble into pieces as I struggled just to get through a normal day. Nobody mentioned that I would need my boyfriend to lift me out of bed, walk me to the shower, dress me, and tie my shoes. That I might not be immediately "fixed" would have been nice to know.

Backwards and Side to Side

I've spent hours every week trying to write a blog post. I have six partially-finished, wholly abandoned drafts sitting in my posts list. Somewhere along the way, my motivations and inspirations fell off the face of the earth, and try as I might, I can't seem to recover them.

Today my inspiration stems from my heavy, heavy heart. I witnessed the end of a very close friendship, with a person I admire and adore with everything I have (I will call him Friend). He was probably the first person to become a constant reader and vocal supporter of this blog, though I don't believe he is a follower any longer. He has never been anything less than an unwavering foundation through some of the worst of my struggles with this stupidly persistent disease.

I am in awe of the process of a decomposing friendship. All I can do, lately, is watch as my personal relationships crumble around me. I had some vague feeling of dread about this particular friendship, as if I were watching it burst into pieces but possessed absolutely no useful abilities for stopping the inevitable explosion. Explode it did, into a million childish, horribly intimate jabs at each other, a thousand terrible names and words and feelings.

Defeated

After my Rheumiversary in August, November 8th served as the next most important date on my RA calendar. On November 8th, 2011, I seriously began RA treatment under the watchful gaze of a rheumatologist. As that date approached, arrived, and sped quickly away this year, I found myself falling further and further into what often feels like an endless pit. After a year of treatment, shouldn't I feel better? After a year of pumping all these injections and pills into my body, shouldn't my RA show some kind of response? 

I've spent the last three months lost in my own thoughts. I have slept, awoken, learned, traveled...I have lived in constant physical pain. While this is not unusual for me, the pain has become so much more than just a frustration. As I counted down to my one year treatment benchmark, my pain turned into a menace. It haunted all my social interactions, alienating me from almost everyone I value. It trailed behind me as I tried to enjoy my travels, and all the experiences and vacations I had the pleasure to embark upon in 2012. It kept me from doing the simplest things -  taking notes for school became a discouraging impossibility. Getting up to turn in my daily assignments felt like a monstrous, hopeless effort. Worst of all, I didn't have the positivity, the hope and the spirit to continue pushing forward. 

When I started this blog, and started my journey through RA, I insisted continuously that I would never let this disease define who I am. I declared that I would not let it beat me. 

It has. I haven't written a blog in three months because I am so ashamed to admit, to myself, to my readers, to my friends and loved ones, that I feel utterly and completely defeated by my illness. One day, struggling to work on an assignment for my philosophy course, I turned to DJ and cried, "I hate how my arthritis has taken over my whole life." He looked at me for a moment and said, "It IS your life."Nothing has ever been so torturously true. 

Guest Post: Healthline.com!

I am so honored to feature a guest post from one of the fabulous writers at Healthline. Healthline journalists have been featured on the Washington Times and Natural News websites, and I'm thrilled they've picked my little blog! Please welcome Valerie Johnston's factual take on living a symptom-free lifestyle. I still struggle every day with symptoms, so I know these suggestions are so relevant to my life right now.

Learning to be disabled: feeling like less of a person

I recently took a brief trip to California to visit some beloved friends. As you may or may not know, I've been struggling a great deal with pain 24/7, as my RA seems to have outpaced Humira's magic touch. I use my cane whenever I'm moving around, whether I'm just headed to the kitchen or I'm out and about (which happens less and less often as the pain keeps driving into my joints). It's only in the past few months that I have begun to accept a new label for myself: disabled. I use ramps or elevators instead of stairs. I let myself think about the possibility of applying for disability, and all that the process entails.

And, for the first time, I called the airline and requested wheelchair service. I have been regretting this choice since my first flight out of Denver International Airport.

Putting Dreams to Rest

(I have been avoiding writing this particular post (and thus, avoiding writing anything here at all) for about a month now. It's a particularly emotional update for me, which can be so scary to put online for everyone ever to read. But here goes.)

Waking up every day with RA is the hardest thing I've ever done. In the last month or so, I have gone from feeling as if every small victory counted to feeling like I have no small victories at all. Living every day in this body is an uphill battle, and a discouraging one at that. Sometimes, after an entire night of fruitless attempts at sleep, I'm so physically exhausted that I lie in bed until 4 in the afternoon. Sometimes it takes that long just to convince myself to get up and face the pain. I'm wearing a pretty dress right now, not because I feel particularly attractive in it (let me assure you, I don't) but because it's so much easier to throw a dress over my head than to try putting pants on for two hours.

In the midst of all of this, I started school once again. While I am thrilled to focus on something besides how utterly horrible I feel, I can't help but miss campus a little bit. Online courses are a WONDERFUL resource for a student like me, but being trapped in my apartment because I can't get up the stairs has begun to bring me down, down, down into the depths of RA depression.

As I try and shuffle through each day, I've begun to think about my options for the future. Because really, what are they?