So today as I was surfing the web looking for things other than myself to talk about on here I stumbled on the spoon theory. Basically a woman who has lupus describes what it's like to live with a chronic illness to her friend. The spoon theory is a perfect way to describe the way I feel to my friends and family so they can understand my disease better I'm going to put the link to the article below so you guys can check it out.
thespoontheory
Hello! TIGF right? My school is having a half day tomorrow so that's pretty exciting! Lately I've been having a lot of arthritis pain in my jaw. The pain has been going on for a little over a year now without improvement which is a little discouraging. Over this past year I've had two steroid injections in the joint which required me to go under anesthesia and were extremely painful. The injections haven't seemed to help though so I recently went through iontophoresis therapy. The picture above is what the patches I had to put on my jaw for the therapy look like. Basically in this therapy the patch uses negatively charged ions to bombard the joint, in my case the jaw, with medication, for me they used dexamethasone which is a corticosteroid used for its anti-inflammatory effects. I finished this treatment about two weeks ago and the therapy hasn't seemed to help. Today I e-mailed my rheumatologist to tell her I am still in excruciating pain to which she replied that she would be ordering yet another MRI (this makes four on my jaw) and referring me to the University of Pennsylvania. Hopefully they know what to do to help this pain I'll be keeping you all updated. Have a great weekend!
The purpose of this blog isn't just to tell you all how horrible my life is with JIA I've been given many amazing opportunities since diagnosed with JIA that I other wise would not have had and I'm going to use this post to tell you about one of them. The first experience has probably had the most impact on my life and that is the opportunity to go to a camp specifically for children with some form of arthritis. Camp JRA last one week once a year every year and i have to say that week is typically one of the best weeks of my entire year. At camp I've met amazing people and formed life long friendships . I've been attending camp for the past five years and over that period of time I've made many friends but one in particular stands out to me her name is Maria and we've been friends even since my first year at camp (the picture above is the two of us).
First of all I'd like to welcome everyone to my blog! In this blog I'm going to tell you all what it's like growing up with juvenile idiopathic arthritis or JIA for short. Just looking at me you wouldn't be able to tell I'm chronically ill so it's hard for a lot of people to actually believe me when I tell them I'm not feeling well. When I tell someone that I have arthritis their first reaction is to be like "I thought only old people got that?" and I have to explain that people of all ages have arthritis although the kind I, along with thousands of other children have is not you're typical grandma's arthritis. The point of this blog is to educate people about the disease and give other teens who have arthritis someone to relate to.
