About 20 years back I began having stiffness and pain in my joints. As time wore on, I began to have horrible muscle spasms and cramps. I began to ache all over, it was intermittent most of the time. Near continuous in Fall and Winter.

It began in my left wrist; it swelled up into a hard knot. I couldn't move my hand and lost all of the strength over a period of several months. The lump on my wrist kept getting larger and more painful. The painful agony that I suffered while not being able to any sort of definitive diagnosis is material for another article. But, a few years later, my right ankle began having severe pain, then a toe, my left knee, my neck, my left shoulder, then my left hip, the other wrist and so on.

Over a period of about 20 years I saw three chiropractors, an acupuncturist, three family physicians, two orthopedists, and a neurologist to which I kept being referred by my regular doctors.

The pain and agony kept getting worse over my entire body. I knew that I had bone spurs on my feet and assumed that some of my back and leg problems were related to that. I had also had some neck injuries and assumed that my neck and shoulder pain was linked to that area. I was given a number of medications for swelling and inflammation. Some caused me dizziness, lots of drowsiness and other unpleasant side effects. A number of arthritis drugs, of which either gave me severe diarrhea or made me anemic. The Doctors kept telling me that it was either Arthritis, Myositis, Fibrositis Rheumatism or Fibromyalgia. They never seemed to narrow the thing down.

I was sent for an arthritis test by a hand surgeon, but I couldn't get the test done because he was "Currently being sued." All the while the pain and stiffness kept on getting worse. So, I decided to see if I could find out for myself what I might have and I managed to narrow it to either Arthritis or Fybromyalgia.

My then, family physician and my chiropractor both agreed that it was Fibromyalgia. (Keep in mind that at this point no one had given me an arthritis test even through it was on both sides of my family tree.) I had repeatedly mentioned the possibility of arthritis to every doctor I had been to, but still, no test was ever done.

In 2003, I was in a car accident and I was finally given an arthritis test after a suspicious mass of something was discovered in my lower back. it was discovered that I had degenerative arthritis and a number of bone spurs on

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