Vital voices: Digi's journey living with psoriatic arthritis
Digi tells her story of being misdiagnosed, navigating the healthcare and insurance system.
Transcript
I went through a whole bunch of different treatments that didn't work because they were treatments for rheumatoid arthritis and not psoriatic arthritis.
[MUSIC PLAYING] I was misdiagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis
when I was 24. When I first started getting sick, I lived in New York. The health care system there is difficult.
All the doctors have way too many patients. Then I went through a whole bunch of different treatments that didn't work because there were
treatments for rheumatoid arthritis and not psoriatic arthritis. So I've had psoriasis since I was a small child. And to me, it didn't make sense that I
would have arthritis and psoriasis, and they're not connected. They always just dismissed what I was saying.
I definitely felt like I was treated differently. There was always this suspicion that doctors
had that I was exaggerating my symptoms, and then there was kind of the double stigma of being a woman.
And I think a lot of doctors want to just write everything off as stress. A lot of reason that things got worse, and I was misdiagnosed,
it's because of the whole insurance system. I would be in pain for months before I can get any kind of treatment.
I've had many months where I had to decide between getting more food or paying for all of my medication.
It's completely changed the trajectory of my life over and over and over again. And I've had more than one dream just ruined because of it.
psoriatic arthritis
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