**fair warning \u2013 I cuss at the end of this post. You would too if you were me. No whining about it.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s back. I don\u2019t know how else to say it. After seven months of being in remission, she is once again in flare.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s been doing, or that she had sprained it somehow.<\/p>\n I was lying to myself, and I knew that I was lying\u2026but I tried to believe it anyway.<\/p>\n This morning she has what looks like three joints involved \u2013 the naughty toe, her left knee, and her left ankle. \u00a0The 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\u2019t bend and the pain will make her weep. I don\u2019t know when that will happen, or how many joints it will be at that point.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been really fast this time. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s back.<\/p>\n All of it.<\/p>\n Fuck.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" **fair warning \u2013 I cuss at the end of this post. You would too if you were me. No whining about it. It\u2019s back. I don\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n