I daresay we are all here (or still here) because of these very things, Tulip!
Some are more needy on any given day, and some are just grateful for their needs being met in the past and are here to give back if they are having a better time of it!
The other BIG thing that this site does (I believe) is to give validation to the myriad of inconsistent symptoms that we experience!
If you read a textbook or 2 about the 'classic' manifestations of AS, then that would rule a heap of us out of *qualifying* for the exclusive club that we have found ourselves members of: some are HLA B27 -ve, some have normal blood work, some are female, some have more peripheral joint involvement than spinal, some have no gut or eye problems, some have other conditions that cloud the waters, like fibromyalgia, MS etc and some don't even have a definitive AS diagnosis...!
But yet we are all here, comparing what is happening to us, and if nothing else, we realise that for every *textbook* case of AS there seems to be just as many where it is less clear-cut - or only becomes clear-cut when the damage is all but done...
If you told the average person that *today* your ankle was so painful that you couldn't put ANY weight on it for an hour, then it miraculously went away, but yesterday it was your shoulder blade spasms that were messing with you they would definitely think to themselves that you were in need of a good shrink! Yet here we sit, reading this very same thing and nodding our heads, because it is all to familiar!
For those who have been told by pain management docs that they "aren't in that much pain", or by other specialist medicos that "it is just backache - everybody gets backache, you know" - take the strength from the masses here and keep trying to find what works for you - we are not machines, so are not necessarily all that easy to figure out, sometimes.
As my straight-thinking rheumy (bless his soul!!!) admits - the more we find out about how the immune system functions, the more we realise how much we *don't know* about how it works - there is no black and white when it comes to our cellular collective, it seems...
I get such a kick outta your posts too!
