Being single and sick has its challenges- there isn’t always someone around who can help you open bottles, zip up zippers or carry your groceries up a flight of stairs.  On the other hand, dealing with being sick on your own allows you to put off worrying about some of RA’s future implications until some undetermined date in the faraway future, particularly when it comes to one subject: how will having rheumatoid arthritis impact my ability to have and care for a baby?

Since I was as single as you get when I found out I had RA, I went ahead and dealt with the more immediate issues at hand, after all, having a baby wasn’t on my short list of things to do. It still isn’t . . . exactly, but now that I’m on the other side of 30, the baby question seems to be popping up more and more.  Several of my friends have become mothers in the years since my diagnosis, and for the first time, I am about to become an aunt! Having all of these babies around makes the prospect of motherhood feel less far away, but whenever I think about starting a family of my own one day, I find myself thinking about doctors and flares instead of baby names and nurseries.  It doesn’t exactly feel rosy.

While rheumatoid arthritis doesn’t impact fertility outright, for someone like me who is successfully managing the disease partly through medications, the road to getting pregnant could be a painful one.  And like everything else with RA, making it happen will require a lot of planning and coordination. Just thinking about all my questions makes my head start to spin, and I’m not even ready to have a baby.  I’m not the only one in this boat.  Many young women I’ve spoken with feel similarly overwhelmed about this topic, and yet, I know there are many women out there with rheumatoid arthritis who have had kids, so clearly, it’s possible.  The question is, how did they do it (not literally) and moreover, how did it go?

For many of us managing our RA with heavy meds, the first question that comes to mind is, do I have to go off all of my medications in order to get pregnant? Though I may have a love/hate relationship with my drugs at times, I am generally rather fond of them, seeing as how they keep my immune system from eating up my bones and have allowed me (thus far) to keep up an active and busy lifestyle.  They have also kept the mind-altering pain I felt during the first six months of my journey with RA at a tolerable limit.  If I go cold turkey while I’m trying to get pregnant, is my RA going to go nuts while my meds are on vacation?  I can’t imagine that severe pain would bolster one’s libido or fertility.

Obviously, this question is one to discuss with my rheumatologist when the time is right, but in conversations I’ve had with other folks with RA, there do seem to be differing medical opinions out there on whether or not and when to go cold turkey on different medications. And, like most choices you face about having a baby, it’s a very personal one.  Even if your doctor approves of staying on certain drugs while pregnant, some women may not feel comfortable with this.  So then what do you do?