I’ve had severe pain for four years, joint pain and stiffness, muscle tightness, and I’ve always had very over extending joints.
Despite many, many visits to my GP I’ve always been dismissed and have often left in tears, of frustration and the dread of more pain without any help.
This changed in October, after having a raised RA factor in my last blood test my GP put me on prednisolone which stopped the symptoms within 18 hrs. I felt like me again.
I developed clicking in all of my previously painful joints though, a new symptom but one I could live with as I didn’t hurt anymore.
She also referred me to a Rheumatologist who I finally saw today.
I explained all of my symptoms and that I had a total knee replacement 2 years ago which is healing badly. (age 43)
The outcome today was that she thinks it’s Fibromyalgia, she checked pressure points, they were all tender and I ticked many of the boxes for the other Fibro symptoms.
I need to wait for the blood results but from the pain I had in my hands I assumed there would be damage to the joints on the x-rays but there was none visible.
The first step is to stop the prednisolone so the Rheumatologist can see active disease however I’m so worried that my symptoms are going to come back with a vengeance with the total tailoring off of the prednisolone as when I tailored off before Christmas and got from 30 to 15mg daily the symptoms came back immediately and then I’ll be no better off than I was previously so at the advice of my GP increased to 20mg daily. The thought of zero pred is horrible.
I really can’t bear the thought of hurting so much again and it’s making me feel really tearful.