By Lene Andersen. Health care writer, RA and disability advocate, wheelchair user and camera nut. Author of Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis: Tools for Managing Treatment, Side Effects and Pain
Chronic Christmas on Fashionably Ill
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I was thrilled when Jessica Gimeno of Fashionably Ill asked me for an interview. We talked about my story, Chronic Christmas, and I shared three tips to survive the holidays with "Today, I am interviewing Lene Andersen, author of Chronic Christmas: Surviving the Holidays with a Chronic Illness (paperback and kindle versions available).
The holidays can be stressful for anyone but they can be especially
stressful for people with chronic illness. Lene Andersen’s blog, The Seated View,
is chalk full of inspiration and practical advice you can use all year
round. Lene is 54-years old but says she feels like she’s only 42!
Jessica Gimeno: What is your official diagnosis and when were you diagnosed? Lene Andersen: I was diagnosed with juvenile arthritis when I was nine years old, although the symptoms started five years prior to that. I also have migraines which started in my teens, and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia 12 years ago.
Lene Andersen, author of Chronic ChristmasJG: How long have you been living with illness?LA: I’m coming up on half a century. It’s a very long time to live
with pain and illness, but it also has a positive aspect. This lifetime
of chronic illness has given me a lot of experience that I can use to
help others in the same situation."
The Seated View has moved . I am still bringing you the information and support you need to live a better life with RA and chronic illness, just on another site. I'd love for you to visit my new website ! - Lene If you want to leave a comment or question about weight gain, RA, and Biologics and are looking for answers or feedback, please jump to this post on my new site . It has the capability for direct replies, this site does not. You can also reach me at leneATyourlifewithraDOTcom. - Thanks, Lene I’ve known from the beginning that Biologics can affect your weight. When I was on Enbrel, I couldn’t keep weight on, and looked anorexic despite eating like a horse. When I switched to Humira, I started gaining weight. I, who had never before spent much time past a size 6, became a 10. After years of being literally skin and bones, it suited me just fine. And then the gaining continued, until finally settling around a weight that requires a 16 pant. Never having been thi
The drug commercials like to show couples walking on the beach with a dog (it's always a beach with a dog), but real RA is not like that. The image of remission is a return to sparkling health with no lasting effects, but real RA is not like that. This is the first in new series of posts about the ways RA affects your life, the unvarnished version. Last week, Kelly over at RA Warrior tweeted a link to a post about the silly things people with RA say . It’s a brilliant list of the overly optimistic things that come out of our mouths, such as committing to being somewhere early in the day (impossible because it takes a while to get going when you have RA) or the "me do it" ridiculousness that inevitably brings about a flare in symptoms. Opening jars - or rather, the inability to do so - is often mentioned as the ultimate example in frustration, smacking into your limits and plain humiliation. For Kelly, it's not a jar, it's a set of heavy blinds.
Joint inflammation or contractures. Nodules (small lumps under the skin or in other tissues). A weakened or hoarse voice. Children with these symptoms may have been diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) or other types of juvenile arthritis . But do they actually have JIA or do they have Farber’s disease? An equine digression When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. This is an adage in the medical world that encourages doctors to not wander off exploring rare and esoteric reasons for a patient’s symptoms. Because most of the time, that hoof beat of a rash likely isn’t the plague, the joint pain more likely a type of arthritis than the bends (especially if the person has never scuba dived) and you get the picture. But once in a while, it actually is a zebra. And even if it’s first identified as a horse, eventually, the stripes come through. It took five years of my parents running around to different doctors before one finally recognized that I had
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