Hi! - 47 Y/O. Newby, my story so far.

Hi all, sorry for the long post but I feel I need to get this off my chest. My poor wife puts up with enough of my grunting and groaning as it is, when I stand up or sit down! LOL

I suspect I may be using this forum quite a bit. I'm 47 years old, I went to the doctors yesterday with my symptoms and am awaiting blood test results and xrays of my hands (don't know why it's just my hands) are booked in for Monday of next week. But here's the beginning of my story. I suspect it will continue :-(

It's the 9th March 2022 and I'm sat here at 5am, having been awake since around 1:30am. I woke up in pain and discomfort in my left knee (new symptom) and right wrist. It's not the first time I've been kept awake because of the pain and discomfort but it's becoming more often.

I don't recall anything during Christmas just gone, so this must have started around 10 weeks ago. I woke up with shoulder pain, hardly able to lift my arm, it felt like I had trapped a nerve. It lasted a couple of days before it subsided but then it happened to the opposite shoulder. After another couple of days, that subsided too, but then I had pain and limited movement in my right wrist and wasn't able to lift a half full kettle. I'm a very "tossing and turning" sleeper and often my wife tells me that I've been sleeping in some wierd positions, arms over my head, folded under my pillow, head thrown right back etc. So I put my aches and pains down to lack of exercise, smoking, and sleeping in some strange positions.

However, during the following few weeks I was getting pains which would just come on during the normal course of the day. Also, getting out of bed in the morning and struggling to get down the stairs due to pain in my ankles. Not good, and now I can say definately not due to sleeping in awkward positions. Hence my doctors appointment yesterday.

This all seems to have happened pretty quickly I would guess (I've got nothing to compare it to as, to the best of my knowledge, there's no arthritis in my family.) But what I have noticed is that throughout the course of the day, the existing pain in my ankles, wrists and knuckles that I wake up with in the morning will do one of two things....either get better to the point where it hardly seems that anything is wrong, or stay the same.

I suspect that I don't need a doctor to tell me what's wrong, the signs are all there. He'll propably just confirm my suspicions and the type of arthritis. I've had psoriasis for around 20 years, albeit quite mild in comparison to some folk. A large patch on my lower left leg and around 10 other patches around my body ranging from the size of a pea to around half the size of a mobile phone (sorry, it was the first thing I saw that I could compare it to :-) ).

So I suspect I may have psoriatic arthritis. My blood test, xrays and referral to rhuematology will confirm or disprove my thinking but that's where I am right now. Again, sorry for the long post, it's taken me half an hour to type it out and I think I need a brew now :-). I may be back soon.

All the best!