January 2009

During the holidays, I read about musician named Jason Crigler who suffered a brain hemorrhage that left him temporarily unable to speak or walk. He also had to teach himself how to play guitar again.

Don’t worry, I’m definitely not trying to compare arthritis to a brain hemorrhage, but there is something about this quote from Crigler that I think rings true for a lot of us arthritis warriors.

“I knew what to do; I just couldn’t physically do it,” he says. “It was painful, because my hands were so tensed up, like claws almost. I’m still working to get that open all the way. But I knew mentally what to do, and I could hear what to do. Physically doing it was the issue.”

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to do something as simple as say, open a can of soup, only to discover that either you simply can’t do it, or you can do it, but with great difficulty. If you haven’t had arthritis all your life, you can remember when opening a can of soup was not hard. But now it is, along with a lot of other things. We adapt and we get through it, but it still sucks. For me, the momentary frustration of not being able to do something that I believe I should be able to do with ease, does not go away. It’s always there. Sometimes I get teary. Sometimes I’m angry. Sometimes I just roll my eyes, as if to say to my arthritis, “I know what you are up to, but can you cut me some slack today?”

But I keep moving forward, and I remind myself that there are good days and bad days. Here’s to a year where we all strive to “keep moving forward.”

Read More on Jason Crigler [via NPR.com]

There was a documentary made about about Crigler’s miraculous recovery, which looks to be very inspiring. Check it out here.