When did you know?

jooms

I did physical work and walked up hills. I had no previous problems but on a 2 day hike 2.5 years ago one of my knees started to become painful and I struggled on my return and painful to walk ever since.. 2 weeks later GP diagnosed osteoarthritis. Now in both knees and right hip. How many people present symptoms of osteoarthritis in 1 day?

felicityh

There is always going to be one day where pain first starts, but things were likely already going on before you realised. It might seem like it happened very quickly but probably the walking you did on the hike just made things a bit worse and therefore noticeable. I'm not a dr or anything but that's my thoughts!

stellabean

I too was very active riding hiking help build a stone barn and doing a physically demanding job until I was assaulted and it was found that I had spinal degeneration ( spine was as bad as an eighty yr olds) I had no idea and no symptoms. So my life was completely changed over night, neurosurgeon's only advise was be very careful how you sneeze and if you fall do not put your hands out.So it is possible for the "wear and tear" to go unnoticed until the point when you do something in your case that hike that pushes in into the noticeable range. I now have it in most of my joints and it is a case of keeping as fit and active as I can without doing anything to make it worse. So low impact gentle exercise is the order of the day along with distraction to deal with the pain and to feel I have done something constructive each day. I hope this helps

stickywicket

It sounds from this, and your other threads, that you don't quite believe that you have OA.

It can come on suddenly. The human body does have a natural tendency to 'care and repair' but it also has built-in obsolesence and, eventually, bits wear out. Your active lifestyle has probably kept your muscles strong so that they were supporting and protecting joints which were starting to wear.

With OA (as opposed to RA) 'flares' come as a result of us overdoing things. Your two-day hike was clearly too much for your joints at that point in time even though they'd coped previously.

Stay active but listen to yóur body and don't push it too far.