It's Ok to Laugh if You Have Rheumatoid Arthritis

Life with RA can still be funny.

Funny things happen every day. I can laugh at almost anything. It just takes a certain perspective.

Sometimes my son doesn’t appreciate my joking so much about the RA. If I make a funny comment about how bad it is, he might look at me pleadingly and say, “Mommmma, that’s not funny!”

“Yes it is,” I told him recently. “It depends on your point of view.” I always talk to my sons in terms of sports analogies, so I talked about how hard it is to tell whether or not someone stepped out of bounds when you are sitting at the other end of the field. Point of view is everything.

My son loves me so much. He was young when I “got sick” with Rheumatoid Arthritis. He wrote me a note about how mad he was at this “evil disease.” I will always cherish that.

He went with me to my very first rheumatologist appointment. But he stayed in the waiting room. He did not see how rudely I was treated. The man typed on a laptop without looking up at me. He never looked at me. He talked while looking down at his keys. Eventually, he and his laptop escorted me to the door.

Of course, we reported the episode to the family in the car on the way home (two of my kids had been in the room with me). Years later, we were laughing about the incident with a friend who also has arthritis (both RA and OA). She had had the exact same negative experience with Dr. Laptop! Neither of us had kept him as a doctor.

My son heard us recall the story and offered to me his reaction: “You know the world could be a lot nicer if doctors would treat people right.” I think my son was calling a penalty on Dr. L. From his view anyway, the man was out of bounds.

And then, my son laughed out loud, “You know what, Momma? I think maybe the guy was playing video games on his laptop the whole time. He just never looked up because he didn’t want to stop. And he did not want you to see what he was really doing.”

We laughed. That’s very amusing, son. See? You can find the funny side to anything. You just have to look for it.