Hello and welcome to this episode of the Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast. How's everybody doing yesterday here in the thumb of Michigan for spring, we were getting intermittent snow showers. So that really stinks. I'd love it. If any one of you could send some warm weather this way. I absolutely just enjoy the heck out of that.

With that said, I want to touch base and do a couple housekeeping items. I really could use everybody's help. If they could take a moment to go to the link in the show notes and go to podchaser.com and leave a review for the show. It's a very helpful way for others to find the show, and I would be completely grateful for anybody that did it. So again, it's pod chaser, calm. You can search out The Ankylosing Spondylitis Podcast, and then if you would leave a review, I would really appreciate that. Also, if you go to spondypodcast.com, which is my website for the show.

You can access all the prior episodes, some articles I have out there on different subjects, as well as a link to pod chaser and sign up for the newsletter. I call it the intermittent whenever I feel like sending it out newsletter, I don't send out a ton of them. I think I've sent two this year. So again, I don't send out a ton, but it's a great way for me to keep in touch with everybody and I have different things that come up on occasion to share with everybody. And lastly, in the show notes, you'll find a link to Teespring for the month of April. If you use at the ankylosing spondylitis podcast store in there, you can get 25% off your order by using the keyword April. So again, follow the link that's in the show notes. And I hope to see pictures of people wearing those shirts in different locations. 

Now, onto this week's show. I was on the website ankylosingspondylitis.net, which is a website I talked about in a previous episode looking around for a few things because I've noticed a lot of questions lately about I'm recently diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis. What does this mean to me? These medications scare me. My life is going to end. You know, as I know it, all these different topics came up and I happen to come across an article that was called Living with a Diagnosis of Ankylosing Spondylitis. So I really wanted to kind of run through it. It's not long and related to how my life has gone with this Ankylosing Spondylitis diagnosis. I've been dealing with this for 36 years now since I was officially diagnosed. So let's take a look. Again, it's called Living with a Diagnosis of  Ankylosing Spondylitis. We all know that having a chronic condition like Ankylosing Spondylitis, you know, can impact all of our entire existence, our entire lifestyle that we're used to, well, each of us is going to get a s differently. And you'll see from somebody like Dan Reynolds of the Imagine Dragons up on stage bouncing around look physically fit to somebody like myself who's on a cane hunched over had multiple hip replacements. We both still have Ankylosing Spondylitis. We've just dealt with the diagnosis is different mainly based upon when we were diagnosed and the medications available and what we know about it now versus what we knew about it when I was diagnosed. So there are many aspects of as that, you know, we can't control we can't control how fast the inflammation will take off. And all of us it's different. Mine came on very hard in my hips and my si joints to the point where as I've said, By the time I was 21, I'd had my first hip replacement and by 23, I had had my second hip replacement. That's Island usual there's many of you that will go your entire life with ankylosing spondylitis run, walk normal and never even consider a hip replacement. That's the huge variance. And why if you're new to ankylosing spondylitis, and you come on and ask the question, What am I in for? The only real answer is I don't know. Nobody knows. So that's what