Autoimmune Arthritis Made Me Dislike Baseball Fields

I was seven years old the first time I stepped onto a baseball field to play my first game. My first time up at bat, first pitch, first swing...POW... the ball soared into the outfield! I ran to first base and stopped.  The coaches were yelling, "GO!" I ran to second and stopped.  "Keep going!" they hollered.  As I ran to 3rd the coach was already screaming, "Don't stop!" and pointing me home.  Scared, I slid, but the throw never even made it to the plate.  I was home safe!

Fast forward thirty years.

At age 37 I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, but between age 7 and about 35 I was still active in sports, especially softball.  I remember playing for a company co-ed team, stepped up to bat and all the men walked forward, expecting "the girl" to ground out or pop fly.  I swung and smacked that sucker over all of their heads.  I could hear my little league coaches yelling, "GO!" and I kept on running.  This time, however, I stopped at third.  The men in the field seemed a little better at fielding the ball than the 7 year old little girls.  The next time I stepped up to bat the pitcher looked around and called out, "Step back, give her some respect!"

I am now 41 and I haven't swung a bat in 6 years.  Even if I go into remission, my softball days are over, for I have permanent damage in my wrist.  I miss softball, so much so I dream of it often. When I wake I feel saddened that at only 41 that part of my life is over.  Then there are the days when I walk past the fields, like the one down the street from my apartment (shown on the left).  I always look at it and have memories of running the bases, hitting a homerun and sliding in to home base...and I find myself hating the sight of the baseball field.

When you become affected with an Autoimmune Arthritis disease, like Rheumatoid Arthritis, unless you get diagnosed early or are able to obtain the proper treatment within 6 months after ONSET, chances are it will steal part of your life and your identity, becoming at times as much of a mental struggle as a physical one.  The "Who am I now?" phenomenon gets to many of us, but, in reality, doesn't it happen to everyone at some point in their lives?  How many 70 year olds do you see playing on that field?  We all have to give in to our demising physicality at some point, so it's really the UNEXPECTED loss of ability that many Autoimmune Arthritis patients deal with than the disability itself.  So the key, naturally, is to focus more on what we CAN do.

In saying that, I'm not going to lie, that's a lot easier said than done. I think there will always be a part of me that yearns for that last time at bat, that last run around the bases and that last slide into home base.  But the key to moving forward, for me, is to remember those coaches screaming at me as I ran my first lap around the bases... "GO!" "Keep going!" "Don't stop!"  because I know that it's not the softball player in me that needs to hit the homerun or run the bases, it's the aggressive, go-getting, team player that did that....and she's still living strong inside of me. I plan to have many, many people in my life take notice of what I CAN do, look around and say, "Step back, give this girl some respect!"  Sure, I may never like baseball fields again, but I could see them becoming a little more tolerable.