Sharing a piece of my secret

 

I’m writing this today because I just got to know about a patient who we all helped to find out his diagnosis found out his diagnosis. Apparently it’s stills disease , so I searched it up and just read what is was. It’s another one of those autoimmune bullshit. It’s sad.

I don’t really need to type this here tbh but then we were talking about autoimmune disorders and then obviously if I don’t talk about my back pain it would only be weird. 

TBH a lot of people make fun of me because I always complain about my back pain. Yesterday too Manav made a snide comment saying oh I don’t wanna not be careful on the stairs fall down to find out I have sacroiliac is and then an autoimmune disease. 

Not funny Manav and it’s never going to be. I just don’t wanna pick fights. Sometimes people find it hard to understand probably because they can’t really imagine somebody with basic problems like that I guess. He feels a lot of my symptoms are just dramatic or like he likes to call it munchausen.

To give people a little context on what I’m talking about we need to go back in time to 2023 when a week before our second sessional I was scrolling through y phone while on the staircase and ending up faking down the stairs hitting my butt badly. I ignored it off cuz it was exam time. Then for the flowing months I had horrible back pain. Couldn’t sleep at night. And it was very difficult to walk after waking up and to go pee. I remember crying because of the pain and how unbea4abke the whole thing was. I still did not think to ouch of it and every time I Enti one’d it people just waved it off and even my parents didn’t take me seriously. Then came day of physiology re university exam and I was revising with my friends when something twisted and I had the worst pain of my entire life. I couldn’t handle it anymore I just screamed and then started crying. My poor friends Sho had no clue were so shocked , it was Krishik who asked all of them to get out to give me some space.LS still speaks of it to this day. But yeah that was when I finally realised I am in severe pain and I need to get myself checked. It’s not like o never went before I showed it in gen med and to some Orthop pg cuz she was the only one there when I went and all they gave me were muscle relaxants and nsaids which ended up ruining my stomach and I had to take pips and h2 inhibitors to get it corrected. 

So I finally got to see an orthopaedician, asked me to take an mri and then after seeing my mri result told me I needed to get a rheumatology consult. 

By the way the mri machine is fucking scary af and it has this weird ass click noise and u have to lie down still like a corpse in it. Did I mention they lock u up too ? I had a difficult time getting out because of the back pain as my body went stiff after 45 mins of lying like that , the nurse helped me. 

Ok then went for the rheumat consult where the DM doctor scared the fucking shit out of me saying I could have an autoimmune disease so they wanna check for it. Then I had to call my parents and explain thus and they started shouting at me. Finally everyone agreed for the test. I didn’t do the test cuz I was so scared of the result. I put it past me for a while and lived by ignoring it. Then finally I understood there’s no point doing that. So I went to get that blood test and after 5 days my results came. In that span I have prayed to all the lord for it to be negative, but then in the result it was shown that I do intact have the hula b 27 gene. This gene oredisposes you to a lot of autoimmune diseases. It doesn’t explicitly mean that if u have it u have an autoimmune disease, more like if u have it your chances r very high. 

My problem was that I was already showing sacro ilitis something seen in another thing called ankylosing spondylitis where your bones fuse up after ur 55. 

Anyways then came the part where I told my parents , they were in denial I was so scared out of my shit that I cried a lot that day. My friends were really confused but then only Keerthana knew what the whole thing was. My parents were more concerned about hiding the fact that there daughter has a defect and was quite strict on telling don’t go around telling everyone. The treatment was more secondary for the,. Truth be told they sill don’t believe it. 

This is the problem with these autoimmune diseases , the person looks healthy enough from the outside that u just can’t believe that they’re in pain. But I’ll be honest it hurts a lot. A lot of things that most people do without a second thought , I do have to give a second thought for them. Even a little bit of stress in the back makes it stiff and it hurts. The pain wa sun bearable in the beginning but I guess my body has gotten used to it now. Apart from that another problem is plantar fasciitis. Oh goodness my heel pains sooo bad that I can’t walk sometimes. It sucks. The whole thing sucks. I can’t jump properly , I can’t clean my room or iron my clothes without having to take a break to fix my back. Thankfully uveitis isn’t something I have. At Keats for now cuz I’ve never done an eye exam.

Something that helped me a lot was the ayurvedic massaged. Ok being a modern medicine student it is quite contradictory to go for an ayurvedic massage instead of allopathy’s medicine but the idea of a huge injection to my king was quite terrifying for me. Anyways over the years from the stuff I’ve read up on. I have realised there’s no point crying over silt milk. You have to accept it and move on. It took me a long time to accept it and the fact that the doctors still don’t have any solution about the fusion of those bones. But then right now I console myself laying then whole stuff will on my fuse when I’m 55 , we still have a lot of years for that and who doesn’t have a spine problem at 55 !.

Then I tell myself that if things to fuck up for all we know I’m getting a cool new bionic spine and I end up being much cooler of a grandma. 

So yeah I have come to terms with it and have over the yields learnt to deal Keith the pain through hot bags and massaged nd on sever days nsaids. I do consult with my doctors for now they have just told to watch my weight. So yeah ok I gave a huge prefac to the while story. But I just wanted to tell that ok it was said in all fun and light hearted manner but then perhaps there are thing you shouldn’t cross especially when u know it’s a sensitive topic for me and also the fact that I have cried a tight because of this. The pain is real. Very very real. I wish I could also agree that I’m being dramatic and just bluffing but quite sadly for this tie I’m not. It hurts a lot on some days and I’m just trying to live by without trying to get shocked my new stuff I find out when they mention Hal b 27 in class. 

I am thankful to god that even though I have it I’m still able to do my stuff n all. From all the Reddit posts I’ve read this thing can go haywire really badly too. 

Just wanted to talk about it as I don’t really talk about it much unless with close people and nowadays even they thin it’s all fake.