Of course, not everything in life is sweetness and light, and there is always a price to pay for contentment. We might all think that Dante’s Inferno, or hell is a warm place where you burn forever while you scream, but hell on earth can be equally tormenting. Other lifers out there might understand when I ask who among you knows the feeling of trying to walk on feet so painful that every step is like another jolt of mutilation with broken glass?
This walk of fire, having to be endured whenever the rheumatoid arthritis is especially bad, is but one aspect of being sentenced to life in that you can never rid yourself of this baleful and malevolent illness. The best you can hope for is that it can be kept in check with medication, but there is a downside even to that, because these medications can only work by compromising the immune system.
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Walking any more than a mile or so is such a challenge, when hands and feet constantly, and painfully remind you of the limitations the condition imposes, so for someone like me, who used to walk between 5 and 10 miles daily in the course of my job, and enjoyed country walks with my wife, this aspect of my unwanted incapacity is especially hard to swallow.
It was, believe it or not, the wish for a healthier life that led to my condition, because – a 40-a-day smoker – I decided on my 58th birthday to go cold-turkey and quit the dreaded weed of tobacco. I succeeded, but within three months was racked by waves of arthritic pain that often left me weeping helplessly, so terrible was the suffering, and I was forced to stop