Arthritis journey

The fog of my concussion lifted after four weeks and I developed a painful left ankle.  This was actually my worst ankle anyway and I put the pain down to re-injuring it, even though I couldn’t remember doing it.  When this passed I was left with a deep dull ache. By this time my hands were more sore than usual and I was constantly wearing tubular bandages on my wrists. 

A few weeks after this my hands had gone to the dull aches stage but now my toes were hurting, this was a new area of pain. I had never had pain in my feet before and I was beginning to become concerned.  Around a month later my hands and my feet began to throb along with the aching. It is difficult to describe the pain of inflammatory arthritis but my best description is that it is like when a broken bone is healing. It is that bone deep throbbing, and it is awful.

Along with this my hands and feet swelled and almost overnight I had the same pain in my knees and elbows.  I was also very stiff, especially in the morning and after sitting for too long. I did not know what to do with myself; the pain would radiate through my limbs to and from the joints and it was so hard to carry on as normal. 

My GP was unfortunately useless, and just kept saying to come back in a month to see how things change, but Google was great.  I knew it was inflammatory arthritis, in fact I was convinced it was Rheumatoid arthritis. I had most of the classic symptoms, apart from the main one they look for, the positive blood tests.  To skip through this a little, I suffered for months and after the GP dragging his heals to even refer me, and my referral initially being rejected, I finally had an appointment with a rheumatologist.  This was scary as my symptoms were constant (some days I needed help getting out of bed, or down steps) but my swelling was sporadic.

The day of my appointment was a day when I wasn’t particularly swollen.  With my swelling at bay, a diagnosis of fibromyalgia ruled out and my negative blood tests the rheumatologist said there wasn’t really any evidence, apart from the symptoms to get to a diagnosis of any kind.  She was about to say come back in a few months when she said, ‘let’s just do an ultra sound scan while you‘re here’ and thank goodness she did. She found synovitis in my joints and I cried!  I thought I would be devastated but by this time I was relieved that it was something after all. I had started to believe that it was all in my head.

My rheumatologist told me that from a symptom perspective it sounds like I have Rheumatoid arthritis (thank you Google). However because of my sero negative status (my blood work was normal) she wanted to diagnose me with the umbrella term of inflammatory arthritis. This is because it could end up manifesting into another type, like Lupus or Psoriatic arthritis.  This is why I say I have inflammatory arthritis rather than Rheumatoid.