I had a conversation with a friend recently who said “Broken people get tunnel vision that way. Whole people have the time and energy to waste on the smell of roses.” It’s so true, thinking back on life. When I was first self-diagnosing, I thought I would be dead by 50. I started doing everything I could to LIVE my life, so much so that I was missing out on the every day experience of living. Sometimes I still think part of me is in that “hurry and live!!” mode. People in my master’s program are mostly young adults, around my age, who are dabbling in career choices, working part time here and there to figure it all out. Sometimes I think that if I had the luxury to (and didn’t need the health insurance), I would dabble, as well. Who needs the stress of working full-time while going to school full-time? Oh yeah, did I also mention I’m paying for school out of my own pocket? But the fact is, I don’t want my RA to be an excuse for me to not do something.
It still shocks me, sometimes, how much I deny that I’m broken. Except, of course, when I get hit in the face with the fact that my joints are getting worse and that my specialist wants to switch me from methotrextate (affordable) to enbrel/etanercept (major bucks for a poor grad student like myself). The thought of traveling with a hypodermic needle, having to inject myself (I can’t even watch when the nurses draw my blood for my monthly bloodwork!), the cost of enbrel…it all worries me. I haven’t given my specialist an answer, but I can feel it in my gut that I NEED to switch. I want to be as capable as possible twenty years down the line, and enbrel might be the way for me to maintain that capability.
Anyway, maybe once I finish my master’s program (this is my last year! woohoo!!), I can finally slow down and enjoy my life. But we’ll see how that goes…
