Monday, November 6, 2017

Now it's Personal



With the release of the book “RA Unmasked” by Kelly Young ( http://bit.ly/RAunmasked), this has been a red-letter week for a group of people who have been the objects of neglect and misunderstanding.  Sufferers of “RA- Rheumatoid Arthritis” have been cast as having simply the same wear and tear arthritis Aunt Tilly had and our constant illness and our desperate attempts to make somebody, anybody to understand, are looked on as hypochondriasis.  We are sick in multiple ways…surely this is not just arthritis but a much more insidious demon, debilitating and causing us harm and agonizing pain.

Because I’ve followed Kelly Young’s blog “RA Warrior” for years, I understood that RA (which now we hope will be changed to “RD, Rheumatoid Disease”) is a systemic, serious, debilitating and often fatal disease… But knowing that didn’t make that as real to me as it was to read one after another description of “Extra Articular” (conditions which involve symptoms and destruction far in excess of “mere” arthritis) –and to say as I read chapter after chapter: “I have that.  I have that and that one too.” It was sobering to read that someone sporting four other such conditions/diseases is at a great risk of not surviving a full-length life…and I had something like 10 of these extra-articulars.  Suddenly, all the confusion of my life and extensive medical history was congealed into one morass of destruction due to RD…not some kind of random, wacky curse that God had arranged for me; not a product of my imagination; not hypochondriasis.   I have a disease.  And it is the one that killed my mom just a year ago. 

This has become personal.  This book has sobered me and made me realize this is no battle for the faint of heart.  I am at the point where I do not want to see yet another doctor.  I already have many specialists and have had numerous, extensive surgeries.  I need a cure.  I need a miracle, and it is only by correcting popular misconception—which exist even among highly trained medical professionals—that we will begin to see the research necessary to someday come to the place where there are viable, effective treatments. 
Kelly Young has made it personal as well.  She is raising 5 children despite great suffering as a result of RD…she has researched, spent endless hours at her computer, talked to thousands of people and she is making a difference.  Kelly will, when God calls her to Heaven (hopefully at a ripe old age), have positively affected the lives of millions of people.  I have purchased several of her book, one of which will go into the hands of my rheumatologist.  Thank you, Kelly for validating the things we suspected to be true and for shining a light onto ways that we can make a difference. 

No comments: