Juvenile Arthritis: The Mom's Story

This is a story about how I dealt with my son's diagnosis of juvenile arthritis. I spent so much time blaming myself for not doing enough fix the disease that never seemed to go away. But with the help of doctors, nurses and luck, my son's disease has not won. I can see that as my son has gotten older, he deals with the disease better, accepting his limits and acknowledging his strengths. He can probably go anywhere or do anything he wants. This future is quite different than the one that use to haunt me as a young mother. I feared that he would regret all the things he missed. I imagined him living in my basement, depressed, playing video games and blaming me for his problems. Being a child with juvenile arthritis is the only thing that Dan knows. If it changed him in anyway it was to make him stronger. He has a great attitude. He is smart and compassionate especially for people who deal with chronic disease. He is my one child who always remembers to take his medicine without any reminders. My favorite nurse told me that the reason that Dan was able to do so many things --from playing the violin, to having a job and doing so well at school was because he had a mother who worked so hard to take care of him. And maybe for the first time I believed it because she had seen a lot of patients with his condition and always remarked that he was doing so well. I teared up because being the mother of a child with a chronic disease it one of the hardest, thankless jobs around.

• | Author: Diane Kirkpatrick, Susanna Kirkpatrick
• | Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• | Publication Date: May 10, 2018
• | Number of Pages: 96 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1535144629
• | ISBN-13: 9781535144629