How I Discovered I Did Not Have Rheumatoid Arthritis

Maybe I had fibromyalgia. Or maybe it was rheumatoid arthritis. Same achy joints deal.

It was May of my sophomore year in college, and the bottom knuckle on my right-hand ring finger had been aching all day long. And before anyone (correctly) crowns me Miss Overly Sensitive, my painful knuckle was only the latest in a six-month string of seemingly-arthritic joints. It was almost funny, if it hadn't been so much of a pain in the left bicep. I would wake up every morning, come down the stairs, and make my mom guess where I hurt now.

"So, guess what joint it is today, Mom?"

My long-suffering mother sighed.

"Your left toe?"

"Nope, that was last week," I cheerily chirped. "It's my left pinky today."

Mom rolled her eyes. Doubtless she had crowned me Miss Overly Sensitive years ago.

However, ever conscious of my extremely low pain threshold, I wanted to give my syndrome a name, so I could chalk up my aching calf muscles to something a little more exciting than Wimpy Disease. MedlinePlus told me that I could have fibromyalgia. Or rheumatoid arthritis. I was fine with either one, as long as it was a medically-recognized condition.

But while it was fun to goof off on MedlinePlus and pretend I wasn't such a fraidy cat, secretly I was a little more worried. What if it was cancer? Could I have a tumor? Could you even get a tumor in your palm?

So I made an appointment to go get my (probably psychosomatic) aches checked out by our notoriously flaky doctor and her notoriously incompetent office staff. You knew my right knee had to be killing me when I willingly consented to play phone tag for three days straight.

I got checked out. After a record four days of phone tag, I was told to go get blood work. Luckily, I'm a huge fan of bloodwork, so this was exciting. I got to see several vials of my blood sucked out of my body at 7 AM on a Thursday morning! What could even beat that? Oh yeah, that one time when I had a root canal done and they put it all on closed-circuit TV and I got to watch the entire procedure. That was even more awesome!

(For the record, I'm actually not kidding about the awesomeness of the root canal. I really did find that enthralling. Oh, and you thought my irrational love of zip codes was off the wall, did you?)

I got my bloodwork done. I treated myself to a McDonald's breakfast sandwich afterwords. I instantly regretted my choice of an English muffin. Way too bland. Five more bucks down the drain.

I waited anxiously for the neuroblastoma diagnosis.

Thankfully, the tests came back negative for the neuroblastoma. Phew. However, I was told (by the incompetent office staff, two days after we had begun our most recent game of phone tag) that the test had come back positive for Lyme Disease.

Lyme Disease is the name for the various problems you start developing upon being bitten by a deer tick. Lyme is a famously elusive syndrome, with no medical consensus on how it develops, why it develops, what is the total symptom range, and if there's really any way to tell if it's ever cured or just goes into remission (like cancer! Cancer can go into remission, too!). Nobody knows much about it, but I've heard stories from people shrugging it off to stories of people permanently disabled by the disease.

We lived in the woods, and we lived in Pennsylvania, so the deer ticks just fell from the sky during the summer. Kind of like rain but with insects and possible pain, suffering, and death. I remember I did get a tick lodged in my chest once, probably when I was about six years old. Lacking tweezers, my mom opted to remove the tick her way. WHICH WAS DIGGING IT OUT OF MY BODY WITH A VERY SHARP PIN. WITHOUT ANESTHESIA. WHAT THE HECK, MOM. HOW COULD YOU.

But I was told that my Lyme Disease had been caused by a much more recent tick bite, probably within the past year. My skin was pretty pasty as it was with all the Starcraft and lack of sun and all, so I really had no clue how a tick latched on, but oh well. I was still possibly doomed.

On the plus side, although there was still ample time for my illness to develop into a tumor and/or death, at least I just had aches and pains. When I was eleven, my sister was bitten by a tick and also developed Lyme Disease. She didn't have many aches and pains, but she did develop Bell's Palsy, where one side of her face was pretty much paralyzed for two months. Thankfully, my craniofacial orifices seemed to be intact.

I started a course of meds that was supposed to cure (Or put into remission. Like cancer!) my Lyme Disease. Since my doctor is notoriously flaky, the course of meds did not cure my Lyme, because the meds she flakily prescribed were the wrong meds. I got my aching behind over to a different doctor, who gave me the correct drugs, and the Lyme started clearing up. I mean, my aching knees periodically collapsed while I was walking up the stairs, but at least my pinky didn't hurt. That's an improvement, right?

Currently, nobody knows if I have Lyme Disease or not, since nobody actually knows if Lyme Disease ever really goes away. I still get random aches, but now I can identify the source of the pain, so it's probably not Lyme Disease. It's probably the gallon of milk I dropped on my toe last night.

No big deal.