A few months back, I took part in the Arthritis Walk in New York City with the NYC Sick Chick Club – a group of young women living with RA and other autoimmune diseases that I met via my blog several years back. The group now consists of a handful of courageous women, but at the start, there were just three: myself, Jodi McKee (you can read an interview I did with Jodi about her Autoimmune Portrait Project here) and Katherine Zimoulis.
Like me, Katherine’s RA was diagnosed early and has responded well to medicine- in her case, methotrexate, so she was also able to participate in the walk fully. In fact, it went so well and inspired her so much that she’s now training to run the New York City marathon in November to benefit the Arthritis Foundation under the banner of the NYC Sick Chick Club!
For Katherine, running wasn’t exactly a new habit. After graduating from college, she was a regular runner and also hit the gym on a near daily basis as well as taking a few dance classes each week. Needless to say, she could aptly be described as an active individual. In fact, she had even toyed around with the idea of training for a marathon after running a few 10K’s and enjoying the challenge. She decided that before she turned 30, she would run one.
But then, as Katherine was about to turn 24, she started to feel a lot of pain in her ankles and knees every time she went running. She had recently moved into a new apartment that was two flights up, so at first, she attributed the pain she was feeling to all those stairs. Then, one morning a few months later, it became obvious that something was really wrong when she woke up with unbelievable pain in her right hand and finger joints. Katherine tried everything she could think of to help the pain: heat, cold, shaking it out, wishing it away, etc. Nothing worked. The pain spread and persisted for several more weeks; over-the-counter painkillers didn’t have any effect on it at all. When she went home for the holidays soon after, her parents urged her to see their family doctor. It was during that appointment that the words ‘rheumatoid arthritis’ were spoken for the first time. Her doctor ran tests for RA as well as a few other possibilities, including lupus and Lyme disease. None of it sounded good. To help with the pain, her doctor started her on a short-term steroid plan. A month later, the verdict was in: Katherine had rheumatoid arthritis.
Needless to say, the running had already come to an end by that point, but with the diagnosis, so too did the goal of running a marathon before she turned 30. Katherine recalled one episode when the pain was so excruciating that, while delayed at an airport on her way back home from a work trip, she found she was no longer able to stand due to the pain. When she finally managed to get back home, she went straight to her parents so they could help take care of her. Katherine had officially entered her post-RA world, where, as she put it, ‘a lot of the things that I thought were going to happen in my life had to be rewritten.’
