Doc: “Well, your labs look normal’

Doc: “You shouldn’t be hurting”

Me: (blank stare)

That’s about how my follow up with my rheumatologist went last Friday. He told me I shouldn’t be hurting. Not in a validating, ‘this is an awful symptom, you shouldn’t have to feel this way’, kinda way. He told me I shouldn’t be hurting in a ‘the numbers don’t add’ up kinda way. A ‘you must be crazy’ kinda way. He went on to say that “MS can cause muscle pain and joint pain” which induced another blank stare from me and this is about the time I tuned him out for a quick sec. If you remember, I was sitting in his office because my neurologist said my pain “didn’t sound like MS, more like a rheumatoid issue” and now my rheumatologist was saying it’s an MS issue. My head almost exploded. I like the game of pinball, but when it’s on my phone, not in real life. He went on to say it could also be caused by the crazy amount of stress that I am currently under, which I understand, and can appreciate, but by this time, I felt so invalidated, the ‘stress answer’ felt like something he just threw out there. I know stress can do crazy things, which I’ll investigate in a later post, but I just didn’t want to hear it at that moment.

So off I went with a prescription for a low dose of prednisone, which I may or may not take, and orders to come back in three weeks, which I may or may not do.