Flare Ups are Unpleasant
It’s been ages since I’ve felt a flare up in my Rheumatoid Arthritis but, I guess they serve as a reminder that this disease never really goes away.
Got up out of my chair last night after finishing Good Omens (a fun show!) and noticed my ankle was giving out. It’s painful and I liken that pain to the feeling you get trying to walk when you just rolled your ankle. It feels like a sprain. You kinda have to test different angles in foot placement to learn how you can bare weight with the least amount of pain because if you hit that pain spike, your joints can completely give out, causing a fall.
I was able to make it to bed, still aching but nothing major. I have a habit of spinning my ring before I go to sleep to make sure I can remove it from my knuckle… and it’s a good thing I did, because my fingers had swollen and I could barely get it off. So it’s on my nightstand until this goes away, which it will.
My RA is pretty well in drug controlled remission and I trust in the medicine. So this flare up could be indicative of something else:
Infection; a virus gets in and triggers and immune response. This can send RA into hyperactivity (auto-immune diseases treat healthy tissue as a foreign intruder and attack).
Overexertion or Exhaustion; I’ve been having some trouble sleeping over the past few weeks, so my money is on this reason.
Stress; I mean *gestures wildly at everything*… this also makes sense.
This is a Predictable Flare because it came from one of the above. I will be laying low (even lower than I have all week, which has been Lazytown, IMO). As for the potential of viral infection, I really haven’t left my house! None of us have. If flu like symptoms show up within the next 12-24 hours, I will get swabbed.
The Unpredictable Flares are more damaging and don’t always get better. Sometimes, hospitalization is needed to intervene before your immune system kills itself.
I recently did a quick video explaining autoimmune diseases in simple terms. I encourage you to watch it.