Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. It's really hard to believe this is episode number 50 and I really never thought that I would get this far. Well, it's not a huge number of episodes, it's still kind of a milestone and that I didn't know what would happen when I started this, if anybody would even listen. So it is kind of cool to reach that 50-episode mark. So I'm really happy about that. I also want to say that there's been a new addition to the family here for me, and that is my six-month-old Labradoodle named Bandit. He's in training to be my service dog, and I will be doing the training. He was started off by in a group called freedom fighters. I did an episode with a gentleman named Matt Burgess (https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/27300c98-d40c-4e62-a9ed-85956c4a7f2e/as-ep-027-matt-burgess-freedom-fidos.mp3) a while back where I talked about Freedom Fidos (www.freedomfidos.org) and then got him, he’s now he's six months old. We're starting to do the training and he's picking up on a lot of stuff. We're already at good spots where we're going in and out of doors. With no hassle he sits down, waits for me to tell them it's okay to come to the door. I can tell you what, I've never had a dog that's done that before. So just that training is cool alone. I introduced him to me walking on crutches the other day to see how he would respond and he's done real well with everything. So listen, there'll be updates coming occasionally on how that's going and follow on Instagram, it's @as_podcast, where you'll see pictures of them and different things like that. So that's pretty cool, as we roll into this 50th episode, I also wanted to mention that we've climbed up and we're been now in a total of 89 countries. We've had other folks with Ankylosing Spondylitis listened to the show. So again, that's all wrapped up together. That's just amazing to me. So make sure you head over to spondypodcast.com and sign up for the occasionally when I feel like sending it out newsletter and make sure if you really could do me a huge favor. Go to the show notes of this episode, there's going to be a link to podchaser.com. I would love it, absolutely be grateful to anybody that would leave a review of the show. I'd love to ramp up the number of reviews out there on the show. I've received a ton of great feedback from so many of you. I'd like to see that reflected in reviews as well on podchaser. 

So that kind of covers those and let's get into today's episode. In today's episode, I want to talk about Axial Spondyloarthritis. Man, that's a mouthful to even just say, let alone think about. So what is Axial spondyloarthritis? Well, it is a type of inflammatory arthritis that causes lower back pain among other symptoms, you know, affecting not only your lower back but your si joints, hip joints, knees, spine. So there are two main types. There's Non-Radiographic Axial Spondylitis and then there's Ankylosing Spondylitis. Most people are going to be familiar with the term Ankylosing Spondylitis and hearing these other terms, put in there can be new for a lot of people. So we do know that Axial Spondyloarthritis can be debilitating and progressive, you know, so you always want to make sure you're seeing a rheumatologist as soon as you think that there's any type of issue you might be dealing with. Talk with your family doctor, if they can get you a referral to a rheumatologist to make sure that you're progressing on the right treatment path. 

Just in America, around five and a half million Americans have Axial Spondyloarthritis. You know, again, it's an inflammatory form of arthritis and it's associated with chronic back pain. In my case when I got it, it was really chronic hip pain. It was the si joints. When it came at me...