Hello my fellow RAers :) I hope everyone is having as pain-free a day as possible. I wanted to reach out to my RA family to let you know why I havent been as interactive & vocal lately on the forum. I am always open & honest w/ you all & I truly do consider the forum my second family & so I am comfortable sharing a difficult time Im encountering, especially after so many of you have done the same & entrusted your personal struggles openly & honestly as well. Im in the midst of an ugly divorce after a shocking discovery that my husband & caregiver had been stealing & abusing my pain medications for over a year before I discovered it. This is the reason I had to leave my husband & I was not sure if I was comfortable sharing this detail at first but I decided to share it because my husband was so much more than just my spouse. He was my best friend & confidant who I shared everything with. We never fought & were always together... Discovering that he had been stealing my pain medications, for @ least a year & became an addict right under my nose & I was oblivious to it, was beyond shocking & very difficult to even comprehend initially...and embarrassing that I was clueless to it. ... I shared this with you all because, unfortunately, there is a major issue, worldwide, of pharmaceutical drug abuse right now & those of us who are on pain medications need to be on our toes & accept the possibility of anyone potentially taking our prescription(s)... aware but not paranoid is the best way to put it. This all occurred sometime ago but his filing for divorce has been recent and ugly, to put it mildly. The reason its affecting my ability to be on the forum as often as I usually was is because he went against court orders & cancelled my health insurance. Will he be in trouble for this? Yes! Very much so. But, as anyone here in the States will attest to, court time is overbooked & requires time, even in an emergency hearing as my lawyer has filed due to the vitality of the meds needed to treat my conditions...and, regardless of our demographic location, as RAers, we all know time is something we dont have much to spare when it comes to being without medications needed to make this horrible disease tolerable & delay its progression. I have multiple auto-immune diseases with my RA being the primary one. The cost for my meds out-of-pocket is astronomically high. I have had to stop the expensive ones like my biologic & cut out any others I could w/out imminent life-threatening consequences. The result has been a horrifically painful, immobilizing, intensifying by-the-day flare-up of multiple aspects of my disease(s). Aside of the normal flare-up of grossly swollen joints, the issue inhibiting my ability to type is a condition that the doctors cannot diagnose, as none have ever seen this. My fingertips, fingers & knuckles break out in mass quantities of painful lumps that feel like shards of glass. They appear in a matter of hours, one fingertip alone having upwards of 10-18 of them & they take days to cycle thru their painful self-healing process. They also appear all over my forearms & random other areas but its my fingertips & fingers that prevent me from tolerating typing, as this has taken me 4 days thus far to write. With that short version of a glimpse of what my life has been like these past two months I hope to have this all behind me as soon as possible, with my healthcare coverage rightfully reinstated so I can be back on my meds w/ hopes they will still be effective after having to stop them for two months. I am eager to resume RA STRONG articles & being able to help my fellow RAers w/ words of encouragement & knowledge about this complex disease we all battle each & every day. Here is a pic of the painful lumps that are riddled throughout my fingertips, to give you an idea of what they are. Take care my fellow RAers & may we all continue to find the strength to Stay Strong! Kellie
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 02:27:19 +0000
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