The Seated View

This is what it feels like to have croup: Croup is terrifying. Every breath is an effort. It starts by feeling vaguely short of breath, progresses to being aware of every breath, and then you start feeling the muscles and tendons in your neck as you take each breath and you begin to hear a noise called stridor as you breathe in. Oddly enough, breathing out is not an effort, but things get worse when you lie down. With each stage, the panic rises, your body instinctively kicking into hyper survival mode. It is not right to feel the effort that goes into breathing. You can’t talk without coughing and your cough sounds like the bark of a seal. As the swelling intensifies, you have to take a long deep breath in to have sufficient air in which to cough. You can’t physically do the sniff it takes to smell something or get rid of a bit of moisture in your nose the structures in your body have changed. You can’t cry because that requires breath and a movement of your throa...

“Relax,” he said. “Hi!” I replied. “Have you met me? I am not a relaxed person.” I have lived with anxiety since I was a child. My first memory of being really anxious was the first day of Grade 1. I remember the red dress I was wearing. I remember being one of only two students who could read the sign with their name on it on one of the small desks. And I remember being on the verge of throwing up all morning. Because anxiety always hits my stomach. Part of the problem is that I have a vivid imagination and it occasionally veers towards catastrophizing. Another reason is having lived with an unpredictably capricious disease for fifty years. Never knowing how you’re going to feel tomorrow, or if you’re going into the hospital, or if the damned RA is about to do a clog dance on your joints makes for a great deal of uncertainty in life. And it could be argued that we all have a great deal of uncertainty in our lives, but my rebuttal is this: when you are a genera...

Something had to change.  When I went to the ER in an ambulance for a suspected heart attack for the second time in eight months, it was clear that something wasn’t right. When I, for the second time in eight months, was diagnosed with nasty GERD mimicking the symptoms of heart attack, it was time to figure out what was going on. I very quickly realized one of the major factors. Which was that these events had a lot to do with how I was dealing — or in this case, not dealing — with stress. I know enough about that to realize that all the stress hormones that were percolating around my system could, if unchecked, lead to uncomfortable and even very serious consequences. Stress hormones, such as cortisol, are implicated in anything from RA flares, to cancer, and heart attacks. Exactly how was anything but clear. I was on the cusp of May’s Arthritis Awareness Month and several of my other projects were hitting high activity at the same time. I barely had time to...