No discussion of my varied pathologies would be complete without covering arthritis.
Some years ago, my doctor gave it a bunch of adjectives, mainly because we don’t know what it is, where it came from, or what to do about it. He called it early onset familial degenerative osteoarthritis – osteo because I’m not rheumatoid factor positive, degenerative because I have worn down places where bone meets bone, familial because every female in my family has some form of arthritis, and early onset because the discussion where this name was come to happened when I was in my early 20’s.
I clack. I crunch. Back in the day, I would try to negotiate a stairwell – echo-y places, stairwells – and the sounds my joints would make would surprise people.
So I had arm pain recently and in late January 2017 saw an orthopod about it. He took pictures and surprise, surprise (not), there was joint narrowing. Of course there was joint narrowing. 25+ years of arthritis will do that to a person. He gave me a joint injection which did nothing; it was the subsequent admission to the hospital for something completely different that helped the pain by forcing IV fluid through places that had sealed down in crazy ways. But that’s another post.