When genealogists put together their medical family tree, they tend to include information that points out which ancestors had certain kinds of cancer, or who had heart issues. You might also want to make a note of relatives who have arthritis. If it runs in your family, CNN has a quiz you can take that will help determine how likely it is that you have it.
Arthritis is something that seems to run in my family. I can remember my grandmother telling me when her arthritis was bothering her. As far as I can tell, it seems to have affected her mostly in her hands. Sometimes her joints would be visibly swollen.
Once, she told me that if she kept her hands doing something, like crocheting, that it would help prevent her fingers from becoming stiff. She crocheted a whole lot of blankets, which she would then give to relatives. She also enjoyed playing solitaire, which she did with actual cards, that required a person to physically shuffle them with their hands, instead of playing the game on a computer.
I remember being “warned” that I should expect to start feeling the symptoms of arthritis shortly after I turned thirty. In addition to my grandmother, I was told about some other relatives who also had arthritis. If I remember correctly, my father’s arthritis affects him in his legs, which can get quite stiff if he sits still for too long a time period. I’m fairly certain that he mentioned which of his siblings also had arthritis. My grandmother who had arthritis is the mother of my father, and of his siblings. Therefore, it would appear that arthritis runs in my family.
Today, I am much closer to forty than I am to thirty. I have noticed that some of the joints in my hands have started swelling from time to time, just like my grandmother’s did. I suppose that I shouldn’t really be surprised by this, and that I should count myself as lucky that I have only noticed these symptoms fairly recently, (and not for nearly a decade). Still, I wondered if what I was experiencing truly were symptoms of arthritis, and not simply a side effect of being a writer who spends hours typing every day.
CNN has a quiz that you can take that is designed to tell you how likely it is that you have arthritis, based on how you answer the questions in the quiz. The quiz told me that “the likelihood of rheumatoid arthritis causing your symptoms is high”.
My family tended to choose to treat their arthritis symptoms by either complaining about them, or by finding ways to keep their affected joints moving. Other treatments include anything from medication, to surgery, to a certain amount of exercise. Personally, my plan is to use acupuncture as a treatment. It seems to be working pretty well so far.
Image by SuperFantastic on Flickr