Contact Tracing Has Me Thinking!

 

The latest buzz phrase in this COVID-19 world is contact tracing.  According to Time.com “Contact tracing is a little like detective work: Trained staff interview people who have been diagnosed with a contagious disease to figure out who they may have recently been in contact with. Then, they go tell those people they may have been exposed, sometimes encouraging them to quarantine themselves to prevent spreading the disease any further.”  (https://time.com/5825140/what-is-contact-tracing-coronavirus/ 

My father was ahead of his time.  He was the ultimate contact tracer.  If he were alive today, he would have applied for the job.  Whenever my father got sick with a cold or some sort of virus, he would meticulously trace back to where he picked up his dreadful viral infection, not resting until he could find the cause of his misery.  When this whole pandemic came about, my brothers, sister, and I all had a good laugh about how my dad would want to trace this current contagion.

Contact tracing has me thinking: How did I get ankylosing spondylitis in the first place?  Where did this come from?  Why do I have it and no one else in my family has it?  Like father; like daughter.

I was taking a walk at my local park one day listening to the podcast “No End in Sight”.  In this podcast, Brianne Benness was interviewing Tema Smith, a woman with ankylosing spondylitis.  Brianne was asking her questions about if she was sick when she was a young girl.  Tema shared many strange medical issues as she was growing up but nothing so severe that it led to any investigation as a young girl. I was so engrossed with this interview because I connected to so much of what Tema was talking about. 

As a little girl, I was always sick with some sort of infection or virus.  I remember getting an infection, with a high fever, multiple doctor’s office visits, multiple lab tests, and rounds of antibiotics.  It would take me a good 10 days or more to start feeling better from whatever was making me sick.  If I recall, it also seemed to happen around the same time each year…maybe mid-winter.

I remember a consistent lack of energy.  Sometimes I was called lazy. It was just how I felt.  I didn’t have a lot of energy to do things.  I remember taking some disgusting liquid supplement that was supposed to boost my energy.  It was probably an iron supplement of some kind.  Also, I had aches in my joints at times.  My family shrugged it off as “growing pains.”  I have read and heard others with inflammatory arthritis say there is no such thing as growing pains.  Even the Mayo Clinic indicates “there is no evidence that growth hurts.” (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/growing-pains/symptoms-causes/syc-20354349)

I just read a wonderful quote from Joyce Meyer that sums things up for me.  “We live life forward, but we understand it backward.”  This speaks to me in all areas of my life.  In terms of my chronic illness, it is interesting to reflect on my childhood illnesses and discover if there is a link to my present condition today.  But, it’s just a momentary thought.  I have a chronic inflammatory illness and I manage it the best way I can.  But still, the daughter of a doctor who was ahead of his time in terms of contact tracing, can’t help but look back and notice there must be some connection to being ill as a child and having ankylosing spondylitis as an adult.