Do you have somewhat random swelling? My ankles and feet like to swell, especially when I am on them a long time or when it’s super hot and humid out. My ankles become cankles and my feet look like softballs with little round appendages. Summer in Kentuckiana while I am hard at work? It’s a perfect storm and a relatively painless way to flare.

I am not here to complain about it. It doesn’t necessarily hurt. Once they are fully swollen it’s a little tender to walk on but it’s only really uncomfortable when I try to put on shoes, which with the whole working thing, is unavoidable. What’s interesting is how it feels when it’s happening. It doesn’t matter if it’s when I take my shoes off after a long day or if it happens overnight it’s such a strange sensation.

I woke up around 2 this morning. I started rousing because I was swelling and my ankles were getting stiff but once I moved Fen took a flying leap on top of me because, of course, when Mommy moves it must be time to get up! I let the puppers in and out and then plopped back down to try to go back to sleep. It’s at rest that I am most aware of what’s happening to my appendages. So how do I explain this? As the sub dermal tissue begins to grow inflamed, you can actually FEEL the skin over top stretch bit by bit. It’s that part that kind of weirds me out. Slowly, slowly, over several hours, the skin makes room for the tissue beneath as it grows inflamed. Stretching like a small latex glove over large hands, before eventually easing into quasi-normal. I say quasi normal because since I was diagnosed with RA my feet have grown a full size and a half, two and into a wide when I am swollen.

It makes me wonder- because random tendrils of thought are the way my brain goes- I wonder if this is the way our skin stretches when we gain weight- only much, much, much more slowly. Having gained more weight in the last half dozen years than I would ever publicly admit and with little success in shedding it, I wonder- if that stretching of the skin were to happen as quickly as my random swelling- would it serve as a “warning” to watch what we put into our bodies? Or would we perhaps learning to ignore it like we do the proverbial “burrito baby”? I am sure that’s a question that will never be answered but in the meantime, perhaps it can roll around in the back of my head when I crave dessert.

Today’s moment of gratitude is for the awareness that we learn when we are diagnosed with a chronic illness. Before this I took aches and pains as a sign of the need to slow down but never took them seriously and rarely saw them coming. Now, I find that I can anticipate when a flare will start. More importantly I can feel when I am pushing too hard early enough to make a decision as to whether to push through or to back down. It’s a gift that I would never have been given had I not had to learn to slow down and take care of myself. I have to be thankful for that.