Blog

Updated May 5, 2021

When your life seems out-of-control, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and every day disasters combining to create chaos, sometimes all it takes is one moment to bring you out of it.

A brief synopsis: it started with my phone crapping out, bringing with it a sort of domino effect of calamities worthy of an irritable and hungover Mercury Retrograde. First, there was the telephone. Once I’d gotten a new phone, my voice crapped out. When I got my voice back, I cracked a tooth. There was a deadline and a nasty case of writer’s block and then my computer decided there was an incompatibility between Word and Dragon (what? Is this the universe’s subtle way of telling me I should give up writing?). I’ll spare you the rest of the details of that week, suffice to say that it went downhill from there and included a number of events that had me convinced that if I did not supervise every single thing that could possibly and remotely impact me, the world would end. I also officially lost my ability to cope with any kind of composure, which naturally just attracted disasters to me as if I were a magnet and they metal shavings.

That is, until I went to see my doctor to get my Humira shot and the results of some blood work we’d done. Nothing out of the ordinary, just to check, because when you have arthritis it’s a good idea to do a regular check on things.

All my life, my blood levels have been weird, especially the ones related to anemia. So weird, in fact, that every new doctor I s went to would get all worried about how anemic I am, while not quite understanding my dismissive attitude. The thing is, when your values have been weird for as long as you’ve had blood test (which in my case has been over 40 years), it becomes normal. Maybe not Normal, but normal to me.

But this appointment was different.

First, my doctor showed me the results on the computer, 4 columns indicating my results at different dates. There were some red numbers scattered about (red indicating abnormal), and then we came to the 8-10 rows indicating various factors of anemia. And they looked like this, with each column being a specific date

X X X X X

X X X X X

X X X X X

X X X X X

All of them are red. Not one black. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember, even when I was taking Enbrel. We then looked at the results from my latest blood test and that’s when it started being fun. My sugar was “perfect,”my cholesterol well within normal ranges, liver function good, iron good, B-12 good and then we came to those eight or 10 rows indicating various factors of anemia. And they were mostly black. There were two red numbers, but they were so close to normal that it wasn’t worth noticing. Black. All of ‘em. Indicating normal, or rather, actually Normal. My doctor told me that if I were to apply for health insurance and the insurance company would only have access to my blood work, I’d be accepted in a snap.

And that’s when I started laughing, barely holding back the tears. After three years on Biologics, drugs that have had these incredible effects on my health and life, after so many moments of having my world rocked by instance after instance where all I can think is the word miracle, I thought I’d reached the point where the miracles were over and now it was time to just live with it. Fully, joyfully, but on a plateau.

And then there was another one. Because according to my blood work, there is absolutely nothing wrong with me.

I haven’t assimilated it yet, still don’t quite grok the magnitude — every time I get close to the edge of thinking about it, I start laughing and tearing up and my brain skitters away from this awe-inspiring thing that’s bigger than anything I’ve ever felt. Because according to my blood work, there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. According to my blood work, I am a very healthy woman.

I have been many things in my life, but never healthy and it blows my mind to such a degree that I can do nothing but laugh with tears in my eyes.