What does Rheumatoid Awareness Day Means to Me?

For me this day is long overdue! In the 19 years I've had Rheumatoid Arthritis (aka RA OR RD) there has been little to no awareness for this disease. It is so misunderstood and underestimated. Many associate RA as an "Old Persons Disease" or " only effecting your joints" but it is so much more than that. It is a force to be reckoned with. A beast of its own. RA is an autoimmune disease. What's an autoimmune disease? An autoimmune disease is when,for unknown reasons ,something triggers your immune system to go haywire and it starts attacking otherwise healthy joints,organs,eyes and even the skin. There is no cure and the medicines to treat the disease are very harsh. Some of the same meds are used to treat Cancer patients are also used to treat RA. The pain is like no other I've ever experienced and is quite hard to explain. Imagine the worst car wreck you can think of and how sore and beat up you would feel the next day. Like someone had beat you with a baseball bat while you were asleep and to move,walk,climb stairs or something as simple as picking up a milk jug or getting up from a chair became extremely hard or impossible to do. Every muscle,joint,tendon in your body hurt and how it would scream it pain and how much misery you would be in from such an ordeal. Now image feeling like that for the rest of your life! This is the average day in the life of a Rheumatoid Arthritis patients. Always on the search for the medicine to grant you some kind of relief...a break from the pain...even if it is short lived. Many think of it as " just arthritis" but this is not a kind of arthritis that can be treated with a couple Advil. RA is often confused with Osteo Arthritis ...but the two are not the same. I hope with the 1st Annual Rheumatoid Disease Awareness Day that RA will emerge from the shadows it has been in for all these years and bought to the light. My hope is for RA to be seen as more than" Just Arthritis" and the severity of this disease finally be taken seriously. With awareness comes more research and with more research comes a chance for one day finding...a cure!



~RA Tray~