First Friday Equals My First Blog!!

Have you ever felt that you have nothing to do with your time? I am one of those guys! The last year of my life has taken a toll on how my perspective looked at life and the blessing life gives you. First lets start with a little background shall we.

So I spent seven years in the Army doing what I felt was my duty to give to my country what so many have given me when I was growing up. Who doesn’t like Freedom right? Well within the seven years I found myself in a couple roll overs that led to Traumatic Brain injuries, I’ve broke my ankle a few times, and during deployments developed some PTSD! Not a problem sure. It wasn’t until august last year that everything changed my life after I had been out of the Army for two years.

In August I was working for the United States Post office and some weird symptoms started developing. First, it started with my wrist swelling up to the size of a softball literally. They did some tests to rule out some possibilities of gout which involved them to inject a needle and suck the fluid out. OUCH!! So anyways they doctors told me to come back if I develop some similar symptoms in any other joints because that would indicate that it would be something more serious than they were looking for. Well six days later all my other joints to include my knees, ankles, bottom of my feet, my spine and hip joints were all swollen and I couldn’t walk. I was only 28 at the time so this was a serious turn off for me. I was used to being active with my kiddos and going to the gym to work out.

The next thing that I knew I came up positive to carrying a genetic code for a group of immune diseases. At first they told me that it was most likely Ankylosing Spondylitis. So they started me on a bunch of anti inflammatory drugs as well as methotrexate to help my joints function properly so that I could start getting some kind of movement back. It turns out that all my test results point to Ankylosing Spondylitis, a little bit of reactive arthritis, Spondyloarthritis, and psoriatic arthritis. The good news though is that since I have gotten the test results they were able to put me on a treatment plan that targets my disease(s) directly (since methotrexate is more common for people with rheumatoid arthritis) and now I am slowly getting back my ability to move around and feel young again.

I hope that you all have enjoyed reading about my experience. I am super new at this since this is my first time and first day at this. I don’t quite understand how to customize everything yet, but I sure do like to write about my experiences/ thoughts.