I'm wondering about something, but it's not bad enough yet, to go 80 miles to see a physician (usually available closer than that, but not for the next three weeks), especially not in this weather, on these roads, this time of the year.
What are the early signs of incipient arthritis?
I've been getting progressively sorer the past month.
There are external factors here--that I'm over pneumonia that I had a month ago, and that the weather here in the Sandhills of Nebraska until yesterday--for three weeks--was sub-zero temperatures, high winds, and much snow to dig.
I'm hoping that's all it is, this soreness.
But I'm wondering if it might be something else, given my age and genetics.
During Christmas, I think often about those who came before me and who are no longer here; the parents, the brothers and sisters, the nieces, and further back, the grandparents, the ancients, and other ancestors.
It suddenly strikes me that 100% of those known to me, were afflicted with arthritis.
In the case of the parents and the brothers and sisters, I always credited it to that they were afflicted with other ailments of the too-affluent, too-easy, too-secure, too-undisciplined, life, which led to early development of arthritis, and their early demises.
At my age, middle age, I am circa twenty years past that point where they developed such things; they were developing them in their early 20s, and passed on in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, far short of the usual threescore-and-ten.
That's the parents and siblings; in the case of the grandparents and those before, they appear to have waited until at least attaining 60 years of age, but usually longer, before getting arthritis.
But every single one of them known to me, developed it.
It's a pain in the neck, this relentless soreness and stiffness that's suddenly come on.
I take no prescription drugs. The last time I took a prescription drug was in January 1993, when while still under anesthesia, I was administered a pain-killer (after I came out of it, I refused any more; this was when my right elbow was shattered and had to be substantially replaced by metal).
I have to add a slight correction, here; the past ten years, I've taken penicillin--about five years ago, if I remember correctly--for two weeks (the real stuff, not any chemical substitute), for a women's problem, and then for two weeks in late November, early December, this year, when it was determined the source of the pneumonia was bacterial in nature.
But I don't consider penicillin a "drug" in the same sense as one considers prescription pain-killers, mood-alterers, blood-pressure-lowerers, cholesterol-preventers, diabetes-ameliorators, heart pills, and somesuch. You know, the stuff the primitives munch on like handfuls of popcorn, paid for by the taxpayers.
Since 1998, there have been some drugs given to deal with melanoma, one-shot things, and given only sporadically in a physician's office; and since I've become an expert at noticing something before it starts, it's been less and less, almost nothing now, because things are burned off before they evolve.
I've taken 2-4 aspirin every day of my life--including when I was wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants with free medical care for all, and aspirin was worth its weight in gold--ever since I was 19 years old.
The only other thing that might possibly maybe be relevant is that of the 206 bones in the skeletal structure, I've broken 203 of them at least once since I was 3 years old, and lost three of them (a minor one in the left foot, a rib, and a minor one between the shoulder and neck). This is due wholly to deafness, not being aware of a certain situation, and thus an accident.
Ten years ago, I was taking 380-pound, 20-foot, steel poles and bending them into posts for basketball backboards, as easily and freely as one dines on strawberries and cream.
Nowadays, it's to where even the most minor of joints in the hands are sore, and getting stiff, not to mention all the other joints.....and this is so sudden, so very sudden, that I even wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about it, developing arthritis.
Should I worry, or might this just be the weather, or might I simply be hypochondrial?
