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When you live with a chronic illness,difficult times are unavoidable. And it can feel as if you are walking through the valley of if not death, then certainly  a very dark and dingy place. What’s it like and how do you cope? That’s the subject of my new article on HealthCentral:

“Living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) isn’t fun. If life is a dance on roses, when you have RA it can feel like a dance (OK, more like a limp) on thorns. And it can be really difficult to not get pulled under by the riptide of pain, fatigue, and waking up every day feeling awful. Approximately 30 percent of people who have this condition experience depression, about a third of those so severely that they become suicidal. I’d wager that even those who haven’t experienced a clinical depression know what it’s like to feel dejected.

You don’t have to be in a severe flare to feel the encroaching bony fingers of hopelessness picking away at your composure. I had to stop taking my biologic for a bit over a month right after the holidays and could only re-start the medication after my RA had popped up its ugly little head again. Mostly, I was exhausted, although there was also some joint activity, particularly in my sacroiliac joints.

It was literally a pain in the arse.”

Read the rest of the article about coping with the hard times of RAon HealthCentral.