Flare

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.