Ratnapriya

Dear Ratna,

Boy o boy  i know wht u mean there!. been there, done that.

i stuck to a company for 6 yrs even though i ws dragging myself everyday...

everyone told me i shd quit, except my family !. they never gave me any extra leverage or made me feel "special" haha!

i was saddened tht in ur case it ws drug induced RA. that shd nevr happen 2 anyone..

i hve a sister who ended up with polio when she got vaccinated.

anyway, i m reckoning u r frm india? ooh, am i not glad if u r.

its tough 2 find support groups in india. I am originally frm Kerala, but married to a punjabi and settled in Bangalore (national integration yay!). Now i am in canada( i quit my job only becz of tht). Keep posting.! i am so tempted to say namaste ;-).

Roshni.

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respect. That's the way to go. Like you, I hate pity, nothing drives me more mental than pity. Congratulations on having taken your life back!

Keep up all the hard work! Your motivation and strong will to battle this disease is encouraging! Thank you! 

I should define what I mean by drug induced RA. I had sprained my ankle in 2001. I did not break any bones, but  bad badly damaged a ligament. I was about to take a trip to MP India where we had planned some trekking too. My doctor prescribed 50mg of Vioxx (at that time quite new in the market) (chemical name Rofecoxib which is a COX-2 inhibitor) for a month to take off that nagging pain in my ankle. Vioxx has now been taken off the market for its side effects. During that month I was taking Vioxx I lost 14kg, my appetite was completely gone and I lost all muscles in the body being reduced to just skin and bones. None of the 17 specialists I consulted in different areas would believe me that the effect was after I took Vioxx, nor can they figure out the reason for this drastic decline, since none of the clinical tests showed up anything in the initial phase. So I was told everything was in my mind. It was so frustrating. Lucky for me a retired doctor of a Govt hospital in my city believed me and pumped me with all kinds of antioxidant vitamins and minerals etc. After six months I could slowly get up from my bed and start walking with a cratch. It was only in 2003 that a doctor in CMC Vellore in India took my case as a challenge and I was diagnosed as a strange case of drug induced autoimmune disorder which happens to be RA. This post is just a warning to all RA patients to be careful of new pain medications and is better to stick to old ones that have been in the market for long and whose side effects are well known.

Ratnapriya