Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. I hope everybody's doing fantastic today; I apologize if the audio quality is off a little bit. I'm fighting a bit of a head cold, so I can't really tell if I'm sounding clear or not. I'm real happy to be here today and be able to record and talk with everybody about what I think is a really cool resource. 

But first, I want to do this week's Question of the Week. You know, as I was going through the Facebook forums, I happened to come across a very simple message that somebody had wrote, and it just said, “I can't go on anymore. I can't do this anymore.”

And I thought about it in, you know, my first response was, yes, you can, because we all have been there. We all have thought that, you know, it gets to a point where there's any given time where your pain is pretty severe and you just think I can't do this anymore. But as people with Ankylosing Spondylitis, we can do it, we do do it. We do it every day, we do it every hour, and we just survive. That's the way it goes. Now, that's not to take away from anybody's pain and say that it's less or that it doesn't belong or that they're thinking about it the wrong way. Because we all have that pain, we all deal with it. First, if you really do think that you're in a potential where you're going to hurt yourself, there is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. So first, if you do really think that you may hurt yourself, please reach out to them or reach out to anybody that is on the forums. There's just a bunch of great, great people that are willing to talk with you, listen, empathize, and work through any issues you're dealing with. So again, when I see these messages of saying I just can't do it anymore. I certainly understand we've all been there, but please reach out and get the support you need, if you're not getting it from a significant other, or family member, reach out to any of us on the boards. There's just a great number of people there that would be willing to talk with you, I'm sure, either through chat or through a phone call to make sure that you are in a good place. So, don't ever think that suicide is your only option. I did some research and a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that 10% of the more than hundred thousand suicide deaths included in that study occur to people with chronic pain, though the study you know, can't prove that chronic pain was a contributing factor. The lead author Emiko Petrosky, medical epidemiologist with the Center for Disease Control, did note that mental health issues were more common among those with chronic pain, and that the proportion of suicides by people with chronic pain had increased from 2003 to two Thousand 14 as the number of people with chronic pain rose. So the answer isn't that people with chronic pain aren't strong enough. They not that they just need to toughen up as so many people tell us if you have chronic pain, you know, you know what it's like to deal with some get the appropriate help, whether that be reaching out to the Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a therapist, family, or just any of us. We're here to help support you in any way we can. 

Now, onto this week's topic. A few months ago, I came across a great website called ankylosingspondylitis net. Now, many of you may be familiar with it. I actually was not at the time when I came across it. And it found it to just be a fantastic reservoir of information. There are tons of articles on the website written by people with Ankylosing Spondylitis. So it's not that it's just people telling us how they think we might feel. It's really people that are dealing with Ankylosing Spondylitis. And one of the contributors and how I found the website was through Jed Finley, who hosts one of the Facebook forums/pages called Living with Ankylosing...