I wanted to let you know what this new episode up front I screwed up a little bit and I used the wrong microphone to record it. So when you hear this it's going to sound a little distant because I was using a microphone a little bit farther from me than my normal microphone. So I do apologize about the sound quality of this particular episode. Enjoy. 

Hello, Happy New Year and welcome to this episode of The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. In this latest podcast, I want to do something a little bit different today and I was searching around on the internet and I came across from a website called healthline.com and article by Elaine Rushnell. 

No, not really an article but 29 things only someone with Ankylosing Spondylitis would understand. So I thought I would kind of review this and go through it and apply it to myself hoping that when you hear listen to it, you can take these 29 items and apply them to yourself if they've affected you, or somebody that you know, one.

Number 1 First of all; learn how to pronounce it is kind of important. I've had AS for 35 plus years, and I've said it wrong for most of that time, it is Ankylosing Spondylitis. I've said it many years for Ankylosing Spondylitis, which is wrong. It's Ankylosing Spondylitis. So I've had some feedback on that to the folks that have listened to it and heard me say it wrong. I apologize. I am trying better. It's an old habit that I'm trying to break. But it is, you know, one of the main things is first learning how to pronounce it so you can better educate anybody that's you're talking to.

Number two, and I kind of liked this one. It made me laugh, “Is learn to spell it will make you feel very smart. ‘That's the truth. Nobody could spell this correctly. I shouldn't say that, it's challenging when people that don't have it or have never heard of it see it written out. They all kind of just take a look at it, like it's a dinosaur. Something that you're writing like, you know, some major Latin sentence. What it is that and even if you go to try to put something on Instagram, you'll notice that there are two hash tags for Ankylosing Spondylitis, one of them with the L and the Y reversed. So both come up. You can use both. I do, but it is Ankylosing, and then Spondylitis, as I'm sure most of you are familiar with.

Number three; you can make 1 and 2 a whole lot easier by calling it AS. Most of us do, It's a lot easier and people don't necessarily know what AS is. But that's where you can go in and explain what 1 and 2 a whole lot easier by calling it AS. 

Number four. If you have as you could try to blame your Uncle Joe or your Aunt Mary or anybody, if they have it, it's sometimes genetic. For me. I'm like, really the second-generation family member here in the United States. My family hasn't been here that long, since the early 1900s. So we don't know anybody going back or we don't know very much about it. But from talking to folks, that doesn't appear to be anybody in the past that has it. So was I just a lucky one? Who knows? I'd rather be lucky and get a Powerball ticket. But hey, I guess got this. So you just take it and do what you can do with it. So if you have family history, diagnosis, if you had an aunt or an uncle that always had a sore back, maybe they had it if they walked hunched over, or had a sore hip all the time or got confined to a wheelchair and the family, never do Maybe it was Ankylosing Spondylitis and you can better look back at what they dealt with lack of meds or any issues they might have encountered. So for your family, if you do have it, keep track of it going forward so that anybody at the future might know what's going on.

Really also be interested has anybody done any of these genetic testing’s,...