RA Post: pain, nausea and prison.

It's never the pain. Pain can be ignored. It's the fact our RA bodies are spending all extra and normal energies on ripping our bodies apart. 
It's the overwhelming exhaustion...the type that makes you fall asleep on chairs at the table while eating, while using restrooms, while standing in showers. 
It's the raging nausea that makes all food turn your stomach; nausea that makes you unaware of stomach flus. Nausea that makes it impossible to even drink water or take meds to attempt the stemming of a disease. 
RA can cause bones and tendons to separate. RA destroys lives. 
I look back at my life and see RA's ugly fingerprints all over it. Nausea induced heat intolerance....leaving friend's homes because I felt so horrible so suddenly. Random exhaustion and random days of feeling really good. Inability to climb onto a horse properly, or to ride correctly. Inability to milk goats or cows, but able to clean stalls. Severe anxiety and panic attacks. Periods of normalcy followed by random excessive ocd periods. Inability to sleep properly. Honestly, RA was everywhere....I doubt I would have been diagnosed, as short of horrid growing pains and a knee that locked up solid, I had nothing that would be seen as symptoms. 
I am desperate for a cure, for treatment that works. Only something like 20% actually get treatments that cause remission. 
This was not what I envisioned for my life. I saw myself as a nurse, a wife, a mother.....maybe eventually involved in research or a nursing professor. I'm stuck for the moment. RA has seized my self as effectively as a prison...with time out for good behavior.