Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. My name is Jayson Sacco and I want to welcome you to another episode where we're going to talk about something that affects all of us to various degrees, fatigue.

What is fatigue and how to potentially fight it? So how do you know if you're dealing with fatigue or if you just plain tired? Well, as I was searching around, I saw this great article from a website called creakyjoints.com and as I read through it, it made me think of some things that I've seen posted on the various Facebook forums. Everybody talked about this fatigue kind of had to stop and think was that person maybe tired or is it fatigue? What brings about fatigue? And one person even said, you know, “Fatigue is just like it's taking all of my energy” and so I thought that was kind of interesting. 

In reading this article, it talked about what is fatigue versus being tired. Fatigue is a symptom you need to pay attention to because there's a red flag for so many underlying diseases. It's often the driving symptom that leads patients to come in and eventually get diagnosed, says Ellie Cohen rheumatologist in New Jersey. Medically speaking. You know, fatigue is characterized by feeling of weakness and chronic lack of energy. I can certainly relate to this. A number of years ago, I had moved and I had boxes to unpack in my new home and just the thought of, you know, when I got home from work, sit on the couch for a minute to collect my thoughts and just the thought of trying to unpack a box, exhausted me before I even lifted a hand to do anything. I'd fall asleep right there sitting on the couch. Yeah, I had worked eight, nine hours that day. But my job wasn't that taxing. So I was a little concerned. I couldn't figure it out. Talked to my doctor. For me. It became an issue with testosterone. Mine was extremely low. And when you top that low testosterone off with taking about 3600 milligrams of gabapentin a day. I just couldn't function properly. So we adjusted and I went on an injectable testosterone, I switched up some of my medications and how I took them and that helped immensely. But for all of us it's going to be different is either going to be medication, disease, or some combination of the two. So there's really like five questions you can think about when you're looking at is it tiredness or fatigue and those are :

1.    Do you wake up tired even after a full night's sleep? 

2.    Do you find it difficult to muster energy for activities you enjoy or you know are normally excited about? 

3.    Do you skip important daily activities? You know, like showering or do you take a day off work because you're just too exhausted to even think about them 

4.    Do you sleep, you know more than seven, eight hours at a night and still wake up tired. 

5.    has the exhausted lasted you more than a week. 

If those are how your feeling and any given day, you know what you really want to talk to your doctor about that because it's probably fatigue and not just simply, you know, you need a couple extra hours of sleep, because even extra sleep isn't going to help you pull out of that fatigue. So, when we look at this, we say, well, what can cause fatigue and chronic illness? 

Number one is pain. You know, if I'm in pain, and my body has to continuously process how to deal with that pain, then there really isn't a lot of energy for other things. So having to then take energy off to think about cooking or communicating with other people or any of that just is something that can't even mentally comprehend, or even want to deal with and what can cause the pain is inflammation. If you're having a lot of inflammation, even a flare that can really, like I said,...