Living Pain-free with Rheumatoid Arthritis
#2 Journey of Healing with Auto-immune Disease
It’s been 9 years since the first symptoms of RA showed up. It has been a long painful journey to the place where I am today. I have been in so much pain that I started believing that this is my death row. This is how I am dying…There is no hope, my body is breaking one tissue at a time…. Slowly it’s going to leave me in fragments, and I’ll just degenerate as the mutants do in Hollywood sci-fi movies…. The graphics are to paint a picture of how painful RA can be.
As I am typing this, some of my fingers are not running through the keyboard, my wrist is tired n my middle is giving me the middle finger! This is my best condition so far; I am a bit stiff but not in pain. For people who don’t know, RA affects the joints and disintegrates to the point that they can’t function in a normal way and get deformed.
One thing with chronic pain is you need to take one minute at a time, one hour at a time, one day at a time…. The more you cuss your pain the more painful it gets. I feel my time with pain was my jail time with my body. I was made to stay with my body and listen to it, the more I resisted the more it forced me by elevating the pain.
I didn’t want to go the allopathic route, I didn’t want to be on painkillers or immune suppressors, Hence the struggle became tougher. I was forced to reduce my movements and let go of things that mattered…. I started looking for alternative treatments, as I am an Indian and we have other schools of medicine still alive. I started exploring…
In India, we have Ayurveda, Siddha Vaidya, Homeopathy, and a small section of Acupuncture and there are other energy healing techniques like Reekie, Zero frequency healing etc. All these practices are good at relieving long-standing illnesses…But may not give instant relief from pain…Some have mild painkillers that will work if you are not on any strong dose of nervous suppressors.
I have explored all of the above. Most of them didn’t give me much relief from pain. Acupuncture backfired, and Energy healing made it worse, Sidha Vaidya’s Doctor just gave up n said there is no medication, and I will slowly become disabled. I still went on looking for solutions, it was a long haul…. I ended up taking ayurvedic massages, but it didn’t help with flare-ups…. I was in a lot of pain n movements were severely restricted. I changed my doctor, and the new doctor wasn't promising in the beginning. She gave me some supplements that restored some nutritional deficiency in my body…. I wasn’t very hopeful, but I had no other choice.
The thing with alternative medicine is that the involvement of the patient is more than the Doctor in other words the patient takes responsibility for his/her own path of healing. The doctor is a person who is just giving his/her expert advice whenever necessary, the determination, patience, strength, the discipline has to come from the patient. One has to be able to fail and try again till the right thing happens.
In my case, I had surrendered to higher forces, you call it God, grace, universe, or nature…. It is also called Manifestation, whenever I got some painless moments, I constantly kept imagining myself healthy on my feet, dancing, laughing having a good time. Some support groups in social media helped. I already have a routine with meditation and yoga, I couldn’t do any of the asanas, but I could sit for meditation with some assistance. I have placed my daily meditation practice above all my life, which helped. Even in very painful situations I yearned and looked forward to my meditation session.
Today I am pain-free and still have some anxiety around pain n fatigue attacks, but my physical and emotional strength is improving one day at a time, one workout session at a time, and one meditation session at a time.
That’s me sitting at the shore after a long walk and enjoying the cool sea breeze. Thank you for reading and I Hope there is some takeaway from my journey.
