I am a mother of two who is forced to live with rheumatoid arthritis at a young age. I was diagnosed in my 40s and Rheumatoid arthritis has had a profound effect on me throughout my life. There are many symptoms that come as a result of having the condition and they all have one sigular thing in common; they are quite painful. My diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis has changed my life forever, and I will never be the same again.

It all started in my small joints. The pain in my wrist was the first thing that I noticed when the symptoms started to pour on. It was a small ache when it first began, but then I started to feel the effects in other joints on the hands as well. Soon the pain moved from my wrist and finger joints and every joint in my handed started to hurt. I work in an office, and my job entailed that I type all day, which hurt my hands a great deal and left me fatigued at the end of the day. The demands of the job became too much and although I had the sympathy of my co-workers eventually I became too much of a liability. They wouldn't fire me, but asked me to start looking for a job that I could do with my condition.

Some of the most common symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis include the swelling of the joints, an inability to move your joints during the worst times, some swelling and fatigue. I am forced to deal with these every time I wake up, until I go to sleep. 

As the condition worsened, it moved from the smaller joints to those in my shoulders and elbows. With my whole arm aching, I was rendered unable to type at my job and reluctantly started looking for a new job. I wasn't able to do any physical labor and that meant that I had to leave. Eventually I started working from home, and my job did provide me with a "severence" package. I opened up my own website that sold products and used a speach recognition program to do the typing.

Today my rheumatoid arthritis completely controls my life.. Lucky for me and my family I was able to find new work fairly quickly and went on to hold down a job that pays me better and is also one that I enjoy more. I will always have it, and there is not way around it. I simply have to learn to live with it and work as hard as I can with the exercises and treatments that have been developed to manage the pain.