Earlier this year when RA claimed my hand for a few months. I got it back!

I was indulging in wishful thinking a few days ago, wishing there was a way to make the day longer than twenty-four hours. The main reason I felt this way is because RA can be so selfish and unpredictable and voracious that you never know when it’s going to eat up a big chunk of your precious hours. As Alice commented on my previous post, you have to plan activities around your RA. If you don’t give it the attention it feels it is due, it hits back, robbing you of even more time.

I set up this blog to help me cope with this disease. Maybe subconsciously I thought that if I gave it some special attention it would ease off on me. And for a year my sporadic writings pretty much focused on the disease. And then a few days ago, I had an epiphany. This blog should not be about RA and its effects on me. It should be about me and my effects on it.

What partly triggered this change of focus was my visit to www.rheumatoidarthritisguy.com. I was looking for kindred spirits and I found pictures of so many. Pictures of their hands, hands doing all sorts of things: resting, gardening, playing musical instruments, typing. Hands not deterred by their particular inflammatory process. It made a profound impression on me and as more pictures were being requested, I submitted the one above to www.showusyourhands.org. I tagged it “a quilter’s hand,” but I could easily have called it a writer’s hand.

So this is a sort of sendoff to RA. I’m pushing it into the background. It may frame my life and I know it will creep into what I write, but it’s not my life. I’m busy. Busy with my quilting, busy with my writing, busy with an intense self-study on writing fiction. I have five books to study and tonight I’m cuddling up with On Writing, a book by one of my favorite authors, Stephen King.

And kudos to RA Guy, a true super hero!