How My Perspective Towards PsA Has Evolved Over the Years

When I was diagnosed with PsA, worst-case scenarios ran wild through my head. Here’s how I found the path to hope and acceptance.

Being diagnosed with a chronic illness is life changing — and not in a good way. I was diagnosed with psoriasis when I was about 25 years old. I had just started a new office job at a glossy magazine, and brushing dandruff off my shoulders constantly was a nightmare. Finding out I’d have to deal with psoriasis flare-ups for the rest of my life felt like the end of the world.

I eventually managed to get my psoriasis mostly under control with a healthy diet, mindfulness, and weird pseudo-science woo-woo things like CBD oil, celery juice, and breath work (I’m still not sure if these were placebo, but I digress).

But it felt like as soon as I cleared my scaly body for good, I started noticing my joints aching and swelling. It eventually got to the point where I couldn’t ignore it or try to treat it with silly lotions and potions like I did with psoriasis. I couldn’t walk. It hurt to sit and to sleep.

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Getting diagnosed

My path to a PSA diagnosis was pure agony, especially considering I wasn’t even 30 years old. I’ll never forget the fear as I felt my body age 50 years overnight.

Getting officially diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis from a rheumatologist (I had admittedly self-diagnosed months before) and starting treatment felt like a relief in a way my psoriasis diagnosis never did. I would finally be followed by a doctor who could monitor my process. I would get a prescription that would start to heal me. I was so relieved to have someone in my corner that it took some time before the long-term implications of this disease set in.

Did this mean I couldn’t have kids? Methotrexate is used for inducing abortions, after all. What if the medication stops working — will I run out of biologics that work for me and end up basically crippled again? Is my mortality going to be shorter with this disease? If I have psoriasis and now psoriatic arthritis as well, am I at a greater risk of other autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s or lupus? Is this my fault for taking so long to seek professional medical care?

From fear to hope

Worst-case scenarios and regret ran rampant in my head for the first few weeks after my diagnosis. But as I reached out to friends with different autoimmune diseases and, even more impactful, as I saw my body begin to loosen up and become less painful, I started feeling more hopeful than scared.

“You just have to take it one day at a time,” an old friend told me. She has been living with a similar autoimmune disease for years and takes an injectable biologic that I recognized from conversations with my doctor.

“Sometimes, I worry about my medication becoming less effective — but then I remind myself that science and medicine are advancing every day. Surely there will be something that will get us through our lifetimes, you know?”

I took comfort in this, and I still think about it often. I don’t dream of a cure for my autoimmune disease now that I have it managed with lifestyle and medications, but theoretically speaking, it is possible.

Healthy lifestyle shifts and a path to acceptance

Accepting my psoriatic arthritis diagnosis became easier with time. I think one of the biggest factors that helped me was hiring a personal trainer the minute I noticed my methotrexate starting to work. I wanted to lose the weight I had gained when I was bedridden from this disease, but I also wanted to strengthen my muscles and gain back mobility in my once-inflamed joints.

This commitment to fitness stuck and eventually snowballed into a healthy lifestyle that was better than anything I had before I got sick.

These days, I still get the occasional flare-up — mostly in my finger joints — but I look and feel healthier as a 31-year-old with a chronic illness than I did as a healthy-on-paper 20-something-year-old.

I can’t say for sure that receiving a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis is why I shifted my lifestyle so heavily. But I can say for certain that losing the ability to walk due to sheer pain changes you on a fundamental level. My diagnosis and treatment means I get to be healthy and active now. I get to move my body and see the results I put in at the gym. I get to live in a walkable city and put in 20,000 pain-free steps if I want to.

The stakes are too high to slip into carelessness or apathy over my illness or health. It’s somewhere I never want to go back to. And while I still sometimes allow my mind to wander into the future what-ifs, I know that staying positive and doing the things I can control is more beneficial than worrying about flare-ups or diagnoses that haven’t happened yet.