While I always have been tired---at least remarkably so the last ten years---the hardest thing about RA is the full halt of some cases. I have read numerous posts on support sites of those mourning the loss of their jobs and families. Divorce rates appear to be high as husbands (as most people with RA are women) and wives give up and "can't take" the person's continuous cancellations of family dinners, dates, everything. The chronic waves of sleeping incessantly followed by insomnia. Complaints of pain, nausea, doctors, medications...the massive changes in activity levels.
I admit it is hard for spouses, family and friends. But it is so hard to be the patient and be unable to do what you did do.
Since I just woke up one morning with glass shards in my hands, knees and feet and within a day hips, it was hard to wrap my mind around it. I kept thinking I would wake up and it would be finally gone----like the flu. Within a month, I stopped working at one of my most favorite jobs: a home health nurse. I felt so horrible, looked so horrible that my patients were asking if I was ok.
Nausea increased as the inflammation in my body cascaded out of control, and began to drop weight because of the lack of interest in food.
RA is hard. It is very hard. It is hard to watch others and feel as if you are 90. For instance, I managed to get to the local pharmacy and thrift shop with my mother...and when we were getting ready to leave the thrift store, I was limping so badly that I was leaning on every surface available.
I am the sort of person that people talking in stores, blocking an aisle, do not see. Boy, people were moving carts for me left and right. So I guess there is a bonus, eh? haha!
So life with RA is hard. But life without RA is also hard. If nothing else, we have the assurance of God's love and presence through our contact with the Spirit. We have the assurance that whatever hardship we face, as terrible as it is, is the better thing that could happen to us. Since the Lord is omnipotent, omnipresent and other omni-words...it is thought that He also knows what would have happened in a different choice made by us, etc. I consider that this is probably likely. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis' Voyage of the Dawn Treader ( a personal favorite) when Lucy is on the island of the Duffers, and sees actions of her friends that distress her. She makes a choice that she later asks Aslan if she could know what would have happened had she not made that choice...and he replies that no, while he did know, no one was allowed to know such a thing.
So, as we face illnesses, deaths, and many other sad, terrible things in this broken world we were never meant to live in, we can rest in the knowledge that we are probably in the better way. We can know that God is always there, just waiting to welcome us Home, and "wipe away every tear". Our entrance into Paradise will so erase the suffering we had....and as Alcorn mentions, we may perhaps see what the other option was to the suffering we did face.
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