Hello, and welcome to today's episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. How's everybody doing? I can't believe this year is more than halfway over. It's flying by even as, as goofy as 2020 has been. The year is just flying right by today's episode going to be a little bit different. There's a website that I like, and I sign up to get notifications when they send out new articles that are put up on the website. And the website is called ankylosingspondylitis.net. And you can go there; you can sign up to get notifications. There are some good articles, and they're almost all written by people with ankylosing spondylitis, which makes them kind of interesting to read and see what others are going through. So the notification came the other day, and I see this title it says Be True To Yourself, Even if it Hurts. I noticed it's written by Jed Finley. Jed was on an episode recently with myself and a number of other people with Ankylosing Spondylitis, Episode Number 57, which was the group discussion on our Ankylosing Spondylitis journey, and I'll have a link to that in the show notes. Jed also started the Facebook group Living with Ankylosing Spondylitisthat has 28,000+ members in it, so it's a very active group, a lot of people a lot of discussions going on, on all sorts of different items. So anyway, he wrote this article, and I started to read it and you know, I agreed with a lot of what he was saying, and I'm just kind of gonna go through it and give my feelings and two cents on it. And the article is titled, Be True To Yourself, even if it hurts. And again, it's available on ankylosingspondylitis.net. and I have a link to that in the show notes.
So Jed writes, you're walking down the street, you run into someone, you know, they stopped to talk and the first question they ask is, how are you? Well, we've all been there you see somebody, Hey, how you doing? What's it like? How are you feeling? For me, I walk and many of you can relate to this. Walk with a cane and I'm hunched over. So just seeing somebody coming is can be a challenge because I'm looking, you know, my neck is fused down. So to look up, I don't always see who's approaching. And my peripheral vision on the sides is bad. So I've had people say stuff to me and I, I've turned my whole body to look at them. And I think sometimes I might not hear them and they think I'm being rude. And that's not the case. It's that I don't see you or don't hear you. So, again, it's just one of those things that AS just keeps giving and affects us in unique ways. And it continues when you have a chronic illness. This is a loaded question. And it's loaded for T Rex, your friend or acquaintance is not ready for the blast. That is your answer. You say to them something like my back has been killing me for a month. I have four doctor's appointments this week. I'm trying a new medication, but it gives me headaches and my relationship with my spouse is strained because of my illness. He goes on. No, we don't say that. We don't even mention we are doing that great. We say the same thing every time I'm fine. Well, isn't that the truth? If you go into a big rundown of everything you're dealing with, most people are going to check out after like 30 seconds, then you're going to get the obligatory. Uh huh. They've got their own things they're dealing with, in some cases; they ask you how you're doing and they really don't care. They're just being, you know, nice, and that's fine. But you always have to temper it and that's one of the things that stinks about this diseases. Is it just somebody you talked to in passing? Or is it somebody that you might really know, and want to have a little more of a deeper discussion with it, and you have to judge whether they really want to have that deeper discussion, to understand maybe what Ankylosing Spondylitis says, I live in a very small town and recently, I was...
