Tracy: I had no idea what psoriatic arthritis was. That was the first time I’d ever heard of it, in my doctor’s office.
Jesse: I didn’t even know that there was an arthritis that was associated with psoriatic disease.
Emily: I literally looked at my doctor and I said, You’re joking, right? Like this is not real. I think I was about 21 years old, and I noticed that my body felt as if I couldn’t move. Like I felt like I was treading in deep water.
Tracy: I just started dropping coffee cups. That was my only symptom. I just had no grip strength.
Jesse: Out of the blue. I had a lot of inflammation. My hand was like swollen up and I couldn’t make a fist.
Tracy: And I said, Dr. King, all I can tell you is that I’m dropping my coffee cups all day long. He said, I need to get you to a rheumatologist right away because you have psoriasis.
Jesse: I was losing grip strength and losing mobility in my hand and in my index finger. It took years of misdiagnosis before I got a correct diagnosis. I had orthopedic surgery twice, which was completely pointless and did more harm than good.
Emily: It took me a few doctor’s visits to get a diagnosis. I thought it was just going to kind of magically disappear over time or that this was going to be a quick fix.
Jesse: Yeah, it didn’t get better. The cortisone shots didn’t help and obviously they wouldn’t help because they weren’t treating the underlying condition, which was biological. It wasn’t an acute injury.
Tracy: During the time of my diagnosis, what I felt was relief, but also a lot of fear because I was going through, what I now know to be, a flare in my condition.
Emily: He said to me that it wasn’t a joke and that it’s a real condition. I had to kind of breathe for a minute. I had to kind of take a step back and just be like, Wow, like this is real. Like, I have to actually deal with this. This is not a made up condition. This is going to be with me for the rest of my life. So at that moment, I kind of had that “aha moment”, like, wow, like this is reality. This is real life. This is really happening to me. Like, I can’t escape this.
