A food bug caused me to get arthritis
It all started on the last day of my holiday. I’d been travelling for a month; from Spain, home to Ireland, a final stop in San Francisco, before the flight back to New Zealand.
Somewhere along the line, I developed the worst food poisoning I had ever experienced and, in the back of my mind, all I was thinking about was the 13-hour flight the next day. I’ve never been more grateful for an aisle seat in my life.
As the days wore on back in Auckland, the nausea passed. I was eating again, back to my usual self, I thought, but my body was slowly beginning to give up on me.
My immune system was under attack and my joints started to ache, so much so that it was a struggle to get out of bed. Every single fibre in my body was on fire. I needed pillows between my legs to sleep as the mere touching of them together was agony. It would now take me up to 15 minutes to shuffle from one room to another.
What made this even worse was my new partner had just moved in with me from Australia; we were instantly thrown into an extreme, intense co-dependency.
I kept thinking it would pass, but the pain eventually got so bad that at 5am one day he had had enough: ‘‘We’re going to the hospital.’’
Fifteen minutes later I was being seen by a doctor, and I got my first stroke of luck. She looked at my symptoms and said: ‘‘We need to test you for reactive arthritis (ReA).’’
I say luck here because on talking to fellow sufferers, many are misdiagnosed. One spent six months being ferried from one consultant to another before finally getting the confirmation of ReA.
Now, I was in my early 40s when I was diagnosed and arthritis had never even crossed my mind. That’s for old people, I thought. Also, isn’t it meant to come on slowly, not all at once as if a truck had run over you?
Well, not in my case, because after further tests I was told I had a little gene swimming around my body all these years – HLAB27 is its sexy name – waiting for a moment to spark into action, and boy did it spark.
The doctors told me my pain levels were off the charts, and I had a fantastic body rash that some of the medical staff photographed for assignments. But as I looked around at the other patients, I realised that things could be a lot worse.
I can’t sit back and say I didn’t have my low moments in the hospital, or during the next few weeks of constant care, the visits to specialists, the dozens of pills a day, the fear of going to the toilet in the morning because it would take me so long to get from one room to another.
I felt down; I wallowed; I cursed my luck. It just felt like a natural venting. I wish I could be one of those patients who ‘‘never complained, never grumbled’’, but I wasn’t. I detested the start of every day because I knew of the crippling pain I was about to endure.
But as the days went by, littleby-little my tonne of medication began to chip away at the disease. Christmas came, and for the first time in ages, I went to the pub and hung out with mates. My partner bought me a Fitbit. I was beginning to feel alive again.
Then came the blood clots. Unfortunately, during my exceptionally sedentary life, I had been developing deep vein thrombosis in the back of my knee. I didn’t notice it until a couple of months later when I started to gasp and struggle for breath.
It got so bad that I was back at the hospital when it was discovered the clots had travelled into my lungs. For the first time, I saw the fear on my fella’s face. The blood had drained from him. This was some major s ....
I was basically wrapped up in cotton wool for days after, not even allowed to stand up without help from the nurses in case I knocked some clot loose.
But they had caught it early enough, and I was freed again just in time for St Patrick’s Day, although it was a much more muted version than usual.
‘‘Hope we never see you again,’’ said one of the nurses. The feeling was mutual.
That was two years ago. I will be living with reactive arthritis for the rest of my life. Normally, it clears up in about a year, but mine is so chronic that the doctors will keep monitoring me.
Thankfully, my treatment for it now is a simple once-a-week jab that I can do from home. I will also be living with warfarin and blood tests for the rest of my life because, well it just seems my blood is a bit special.
But I am here. I am lucky I live in a country with a health care system that treated me quickly. I am lucky I had understanding bosses and a job I could do from home. I am lucky I had friends who stuck by me. I am lucky I have a fantastic partner who stayed with me after the most extreme start to any relationship.
For more information go to arthritis.org.nz