On lessons learned and the importance of living in the present

Some of you may know that over ten yeas ago I was diag­nosed with Rheuma­toid Arthri­tis (RA) which is a dis­ease that causes the immune sys­tem to sud­denly go into over­drive by attack­ing the body. Peri­od­i­cally and unpre­dictably  Flare occurs not only caus­ing extreme pain ( I know com­bat vets who have been wounded and take a bul­let wound over a flare) and depend­ing of the area affected minor to extreme dis­abil­ity. This is not your grand­moth­ers arthri­tis whichit oten gets con­fused with…it is in the same cat­e­gory as Lupis and MS.

So you may ask what does this have to do with the price of beer on Sun­day? Well, when I was first diag­nosed I was work­ing as pot­ter (in addi­tion to pho­tog­ra­phy) and I quickly learned that I had to stay in the present and focus on get­ting done what I needed to get done one day at a time. I could never know if I would be phys­i­cally able to do some­thing the fol­low­ing day. I kept up with this approach to life, prac­tic­ing a num­ber of med­i­ta­tive tech­niques to keep me grounded and focused.

It took a year or so to find the right com­bi­na­tion of drugs and alter­na­tive treat­ments mostly acupunc­ture and Tai Chi and Qui Gong, once the right combo started work­ing I con­tinue for some time to fol­low my mind­full­ness strate­gies. How­ever, after a cou­ple of years Flare free or at least only minor flares I started for­get­ting about what it was like before re-mission.

Over the last year I switched to another drug reg­i­men and one of the com­po­nent drugs started to effect my liver, after months of tests the drug was elim­i­nated alto­gether. How­ever, this was the key ele­ment that had kept me Flare free. sud­denly, in months fol­low­ing the drug’s elim­i­na­tion the old Flares started to return but only with minor “tol­er­a­ble” inten­sity. That started to change over the last month with flares reach­ing or exceed­ing what I had expe­ri­enced early on. Decem­ber 28th I started notic­ing  pain in my right ankle but thought lit­tle of it, then on the 31st the pain turned into swelling and inten­sity until by mid ater­noon I couldn’t walk even with a cane. For a day I impro­vised by using a step stool as a walker until my dear wife was able to get a real one. Gen­er­ally flares lasted 3 days witht he sec­ond day being the worse. This one was dif­fer­ent five days after its onset I still need a cane to move around since the foot will not take weight.

The rea­son for this post is to share with all of you the impor­tance of liv­ing in the present, pay atten­tion to your life by not sweat­ing the small stuff. Focus on what is impor­tant to you the kinds o things that make a dif­fer­ence that would if passed up be a source of regret. Take a chance move out of your com­fort zone, live as if there would be no tomor­row. It took this recent dis­abling flare to make remem­ber how impor­tant it is to live in the present and stop think­ing about tomorrow.

Often our ANTs get in the way of us liv­ing in present, if this is the case go back to the arti­cles on get­ting rid of ANTs and re-examine your habits.

Good luck and thanks for read­ing this.

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Tagged as: Acupuncture, Flare, Immune system, Musculoskeletal Disorders, Rheumatoid Arthritis