The Girl With Arthritis

Living with chronic pain doesn’t mean learning to ignore it. Listening to your body can help you figure out what works when managing pain. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Push through the pain. Pain is weakness leaving the body. No pain, no gain. These are just a few of my least favorite sayings. The meanings aren’t lost on me. I get the point. But as someone living with psoriatic arthritis (PsA), dealing with pain is not that simple.  Living with PsA does mean having to push through a lot of pain to get through each day. To an extent, you get used to it because it just can’t be avoided. It’s true that sometimes “the only way out is through.” But to say “no pain, no gain” is not just an oversimplification — it’s not true! Yes, there are many times when we push past it. Sometimes, it feels worth it. Sometimes, it’s a matter of survival. Either way, our bodies may say differently and punish us for ignoring their warnings. Read the full article at Bezzy PsA.

 Flare-ups can be hard to deal with. Some are aggressive, while others are more bearable but still unrelenting. They are all important in relation to your baseline health. After I was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis (later, juvenile psoriatic arthritis or JPsA), I started to hear the term “flare-up” used at my doctor’s office. While I understood its gist, I didn’t use that term long ago. Initially, I thought I wasn’t having flare-ups at all. When I was little, I had been hospitalized due to severe arthritis pain and symptoms. After having been so sick and in the worst pain of my life, I hesitated to call anything else a flare-up. I would tell my doctor how I was feeling worse or in more pain, but I couldn’t bring myself to call it a flare-up. Read the full article at Bezzy PsA.