The first time my grip failed, I was canning tomatoes. August 2008. A quart jar slipped out of my right hand and shattered on the kitchen floor, and I stood there looking at the glass and the seeds and the juice running under the stove, and I thought: that was strange.
It wasn't strange. It was the beginning.
Within six months, I couldn't open a new jar of peanut butter. By the following spring, mornings meant twenty minutes of running my hands under warm water before I could hold a coffee cup. My knuckles swelled. My wrists ached in a way that felt deep, like the pain was in the bones themselves. My doctor in Aberdeen sent me to a rheumatologist in Sioux Falls, and she confirmed what I already knew. Rheumatoid arthritis. I was fifty-two.
They put me on methotrexate first. It's a medication that suppresses the immune system — your body is attacking your own joints, and this drug tells it to stop. It also told my stomach to stop. The nausea came on Tuesday afternoons like clockwork, because I took my dose on Tuesday mornings, and it lasted until Thursday. Every week. I lost eleven pounds in four months, and I am not a woman who had eleven pounds to spare.
They added hydroxychloroquine. That helped the joints some, but it added a kind of fatigue I had never felt before. Not tired the way you get after harvest, where your body is heavy but your mind is clear. This was a fog. I would stand at the kitchen counter and forget what I was making. I would read a paragraph of my devotional three times and not remember a word.
Gerald noticed. The kids noticed. My grandson, who was nine at the time, asked Gerald if Grandma was sick. Gerald told me that later, and I went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub and cried, because I was sick, and the medicine was making me sicker in a different way, and I didn't know what else to do.
I tried everything else first. Let me be clear about that. Paraffin wax treatments. Compression gloves. An anti-inflammatory diet that meant no bread, no sugar, no tomatoes — which felt like a personal insult to a woman who has canned tomatoes since 1982. Turmeric capsules. Fish oil until I could taste it in my sleep. Physical therapy in Sioux Falls, ninety minutes each way. Some of these helped a little. None of them helped enough.
What helped was a topical salve and a low-dose capsule, and my daughter had to tell me three times before I listened.
Lisa is a pediatric nurse practitioner in Minneapolis. She sees patients every day. When she told me at Thanksgiving 2021 that cannabis could help with both the joint pain and the insomnia that had been stealing my nights for years, I changed the subject. When she brought it up again in December, I said I'd think about it. When she called in January and said, “Mom, I'm not asking anymore, I'm telling you to try,” I drove to Brookings and got my card.
The capsules helped me sleep. I've written about that. But what surprised me was the salve.
It's a topical — you rub it on like any cream. I put it on my knuckles and wrists before bed, and again in the morning if they're bad. It doesn't make the arthritis go away. I want to be honest about that. My joints are still damaged. I still take a lower dose of methotrexate, and I still see my rheumatologist twice a year.
But the salve takes the edge off in a way that nothing else has. On a good day, I can button my coat without thinking about it. I can open jars. I crocheted a blanket for my youngest granddaughter last winter — the first project I'd finished in four years. That blanket isn't just yarn. It's proof that my hands still work.
I'm not going to tell you this will fix your arthritis. I don't believe in miracle cures, and I don't trust people who sell them. What I will tell you is that after fifteen years of trying everything my doctors suggested and a fair number of things the internet suggested, a simple capsule and a jar of salve gave me back more of my daily life than anything else I tried.
I still can tomatoes every August. I use smaller jars now, and I hold them with both hands, and I haven't dropped one since.
What would it mean to you to get back one thing your pain has taken?