It’s Back

**fair warning – I cuss at the end of this post. You would too if you were me. No whining about it.

It’s back. I don’t know how else to say it. After seven months of being in remission, she is once again in flare.

I was rubbing her feet last night when I noticed puffiness above her toe. (Yes, the toe where her arthritis began. I hate that toe.) I played mental games with myself and tried to pretend that it was swollen from all the dancing that she’s been doing, or that she had sprained it somehow.

I was lying to myself, and I knew that I was lying…but I tried to believe it anyway.

This morning she has what looks like three joints involved – the naughty toe, her left knee, and her left ankle.  The knee is aching, but she can still kind of walk. The swelling is still new and ongoing. The next stage is the tightening when the joints won’t bend and the pain will make her weep. I don’t know when that will happen, or how many joints it will be at that point.

It’s been really fast this time. I don’t know if it’s normal for a reoccurrence to proceed so rapidly or not, I just know that last time there were days, and sometimes weeks, between new joint involvement. This feels like dominoes falling in rapid succession.

I don’t know what it means for prognosis long term, but it know that the mere fact that it has returned is bad, and that it came back in less than a year is not good either.

We go to the rheumatologist on Friday and she will most likely be back on chemotherapy this weekend. The happy healthy girl we have gotten used to seeing will be replaced by one who battles constant nausea and fatigue and whose legs ache. Our nightmare of shots is returning, where she gets them, I give them, and my husband holds her down. I had hoped to never again hear the screaming sobs from the burn of methotrexate.

But it’s back.

All of it.

Fuck.