Yes, I’m the person that is challenged the most. I have difficulty doing small tasks and just very annoying that I have to deal with this situation. Opening up a jar or climbing stairs and just doing regular stuff that normal people can do, and I have a very hard time doing. Even standing, standing in line, kills my legs. I’d rather be walking than standing, it’s really hard. So, that’s what this is.

Having this condition affects every day because I don’t know how I’m going to wake up one day. I can be fine today and be able to go on a long walk, and tomorrow I could be in bed the whole day. Sometimes even when I’m eating with families, if I stay sitting down for too long, trying to get up from the table becomes literally a pain. I’m not able to make a longterm plans like for vacations and stuff like that, I have to make plans on a daily basis on what I’m going to do. Because if I make plans for this weekend to go to the beach and have fun, I may not wake up good this weekend, I may have to stay in bed or I may have to be on sloth mode. And so it’s very difficult because it’s like this illness controls my every day.

Currently for myself, there’s just many things I cannot do. My joints hurt so I can’t bend over. I’m unable to take a bath in a tub, so I take a shower. Errands are difficult for me to run, so I have to do them maybe one in a day, rather than a whole list of them. Going to the grocery store, I need assistance. I’m tired. I find that it’s very difficult to make it through an entire day without taking a nap or being exhausted, maybe a couple of naps. It’s hard to determine when I’ll have a good day when I’ll have a bad day. If I take advantage of a good day and do too much, then I pay for it perhaps the next day. So just a lot of stiffness and pain, slowness; my hands, particularly. Cooking is difficult, standing for long periods of time or walking. I can’t really go up and down steps. If I walk long distances, I need a walker. If I walk very long distances, I need to do it in a scooter. It affects my daughter who lives with me, because she has to pull her end of things more. She has more on her plate she has to do. There are things she has to do to take care of me as well, that I cannot do. If I drop something in the floor, she’s got to pick it up. Or if I’m having a very bad day, I can’t do anything, and she has to do everything in the household.

I have a lot of joint pain, so some days I have trouble walking. I have trouble opening doors, just doing daily, everyday things. I get tired easily, and I’ve learned now to just lay down and rest or sit down and rest. When I get like that, that’s the best thing, plus take my medicines.

Rheumatoid arthritis has impacted my day-to-day life because I have consistent chronic fatigue. I haven’t found anything to help with that except resting when I need to rest. That is how I’ve adjusted to that challenge. Also, I have pain, and I’m unable to do anything when I have a flare up and I’m having pain. I’m often unmotivated to do anything when I have bad days like that. This also affects my spouse, and we have to live around the rheumatoid arthritis.

Well, I’m the one with the arthritis. I describe I’m in a lot of pain every day from my shoulders down to my arms, to my fingers. I drop things a lot. It impacts me with even turning a door knob or trying to cook. It disrupts my sleep. I’m achy all the time. It affects my mood. I have mood changes. It’s just very hard to know what to eat right and what affects it. It’s just a challenge, a painful challenge.

Hi. I am no longer able to work my regular job. I do have injections I do on a weekly basis, as well as medication on a daily basis. It has given me lots of side effects, as far as fatigue and memory loss, so I’m unable to work. I do need one that we … at least one, if not two naps per day. I can’t do much other than just stay home and relax most of the time, and I do need assistance with most day-to-day activities.

My day to day life is okay. I have stiffness and I’m pretty much used to it by now. Basically, I just power through it. I know that I get up, get out of bed and just go. That in a little while it will feel better.

I think the hardest thing with arthritis, is that you don’t know on a daily basis, how you’re going to feel. Some days you might feel great and other days you might be flaring. So the unknown is always a challenge. I find the hardest difficulties with things like opening up jars, because I can’t grip them enough, or opening up my toothpaste cap, or I’m pulling up my pants, or tying my shoes, especially if my hands are hurting. So I think a lot of those are the typical things on a day to day basis that are really a struggle. And luckily, I’ve found other ways that I can open up jars that will help, or I just wait and I try to ask for help. Asking for help is something that I’ve had to learn how to do a lot with this.

Day-to-day challenges include, I have a hard time doing certain things, doing different activities with joint pain and stiffness. Waking up in the mornings and being stiff and sore makes it hard to get out of bed and get active. But I know at this point, because I’ve had RA since I was a little kid, I’m 25 now, that I need to just push through it, get up and get moving and it starts to feel better after I get up and get moving. It’s very frustrating, but yeah, I’ve lived with it long enough that it’s just it’s part of life. Yeah. It’s just it’s part of life. I’ve learned that being active helps a lot more than if I’m just sitting around. Because if I’m just sitting around, it gets worse. I deal with more pain. I deal with more stiffness. So I have to maintain an active lifestyle to keep my RA from flaring up.

The challenges I face are the days that it flares up worse than other days so I have to ask for help. Like the heat will make it worse but my joints will swell more when it’s hot outside, if it’s too cold. So I try to dress as cool as possible or as warm as possible, ice packs. But it’s just very frustrating, going up and down steps, trying to walk.

This condition impacts my life every day. Every day I wake up in pain and I have to wait until my medication kicks in before I can do anything productive. There’s lots of things I’m unable to do anymore and that is very frustrating. Some of the challenges are really everything from brushing my teeth to getting up and down. I can’t get on the floor and play with my puppy. A big one is it’s hard to work, and I guess what I’ve done to adjust to these challenges is just learn to accept it and make modifications to my daily life.

I think the biggest way that my condition affects my life is that I just don’t know what I’m going to be able to do from day to day. So planning is a big issue, and I’ve had to get used to not planning for the most part, or if I have to plan to do something, then I have to prepare for that for a couple of days. It just seems like I wish I could commit to more, but I can’t because I just don’t know how I’m going to feel from day to day.

Well, my illness has significantly affected my day-to-day life. I have good days and bad days. And we’ll talk about that a little bit more in some of the other questions, how that impacts me. The frustration and the biggest challenge for me is, until I get up in the morning, I do not know what kind of day I’m going to have. So even though I planned things for today, I may get up and feel like I just can’t do it. And the adjustments to that, we hold our schedules very loosely. So, we certainly make plans and we want to do things, but if I am unable to do it, we do part or we do a little piece or we do none, but I no longer feel guilty about that.

I work at a hospital as a nuclear medicine technologist and I find that my biggest challenge is extreme fatigue. Waking up every morning to go to work is very much an effort. Also, I have a lot of trouble with my hands. My hands hurt and ache all day long, sometimes to the point of distraction.

Well all day, “morning stiffness”. And I’m not sure from day-to-day if my hands are going to work, or my knees, or anything, or if I’m going to be in so much pain that I won’t get anything done. Also fatigue plays a huge role in just not being able to function at anywhere near a level I need to be able to function to do daily tasks.