Imagine this - your life is busy. You work, you play on a recreational sports team, you are passionate about your hobbies, and you are a social butterfly, going from one event with friends to the next.
One week, you are especially busy and hit the sack after an hour or so at the gym, trying to keep fit. You go to bed like any other night, but you don't realize that that was your last night feeling the way you're feeling.
When you wake up, you wake up with this awful pain in your lower back. Chalking it up to a regular injury, you go about your day in horrible pain. You take a few pills, rest a few days, and figure it will subside. But it doesn't.
It stays there.
Every day you wake up assuming it will improve. You decide to go to a chiropractor or a physio therapist to assess the injury. You don't remember how or when you may have tweaked it, you simply woke up with this pain.
And now it's getting worse. You are having trouble walking normally and, subsequently, walk with a bit of a limp. You go several weeks like this - did your back seize overnight? Did you tear a muscle? Sprain something? Are your joints out of place?
You decide to take a major hiatus from athletics and you start to go to regular physio appointments before and after work. Your gym routine turns into a general low key cardio session. But even that seems to make things worse. You keep trying but nothing helps and the pain just seems to worsen.
Then, after months of no improvement, you (being the stubborn person you are) finally bring it up with your family doctor. Before you know it, you are being sent for a battery of tests and referred to a rheumatologist - who then diagnoses you with Arthritis.
Seriously? You are the only person in the waiting room under 50 years old, and all you see are individuals hunched over walking aids finding it difficult to even sit down. You start freaking yourself out.
You had no idea that THAT day had been the last without this pain. The last time you played your sport was the last time you would do so with ease. So you wish you had known so that you could have prepared yourself. You wish you had been warned so you could focus more on your hobbies.
But you weren't warned. You went to bed and woke up with this pain that will haunt you every day. You wake up with your life completely flipped around. And within a year, you are on heavy pain medications, you own and use a cane and sometimes a walker, you can no longer walk with ease, let alone run. You can no longer climb or descend stairs without tremors and shockwaves of intense pain. You can no longer play sports. You can no longer work. You don't feel like yourself and you can't seem to wrap your head around the idea that this is permanent. And this all happens before your 30th birthday.
This is what it was like for me to develop arthritis in my hips and my shoulder blades. I had no warning. I wasn't ready. I had no idea how much arthritis could affect every single part of my day.
Consider donating to the Power of Movement fundraiser for Arthritis research. There are thousands upon thousands of Canadians with some type of arthritis, and it can completely overhaul your life in the blink of an eye. Let's help to raise money to get these people treatments that work and help us find treatments that can help us move.